The Sky is Torn Down

How the “end of history” ended the liberation of Soviet women by Evan Reif

Valentina Tereshkova, Hero of the Soviet Union

On the 16^th of June 1963, a Vostok 8K72K rocket is launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome in the Kazakh SSR. Its payload is a Vostok 3KA orbital module, the same type which had carried Yuri Gagarin into space 2 years earlier.

Inside the cramped and almost unbearably hot capsule, Vostok had a crew of just one cosmo…