Kamanin couldn’t have said it any more plainly. The impetus was nationalistic—any egalitarian impulse was in service of that primary motivation. Soviet women would fly to space for one of the same reasons that the rockets carrying them did: to beat their Cold War enemy. The historic flight would demonstrate the superiority of the Soviet space program and, by extension, its socialist government over the capitalist United States.

Valentina Tereshkova, a 26-year-old textile worker with a love for skydiving, was launched into orbit in the summer of 1963 after months of training. If there was one moment that might have verged on equality in this propaganda exercise, it was when Tereshkova, dubbed by Soviet officials as “Gagarin in a skirt,” was allowed to pee on the tire of the bus that delivered her to the launchpad, a tradition set by the first man in space. She spent three days circling Earth in a small, spherical capsule. When she returned, Tereshkova had racked up more hours in space than all the American astronauts combined.

Tereshkova was celebrated as a national hero and a role model for young girls in the Soviet Union. “News items and feature stories openly encouraged girls to strive for the highest levels of achievement in science and technology, loudly affirming that in the USSR there were no limits on female aspiration,” Roshanna Sylvester, a scholar in residence at the University of Colorado at Boulder who studies Russian history, wrote in Into the Cosmos: Space Exploration and Soviet Culture in 2011. Tereshkova made dozens of trips abroad in the years after her flights, representing the Soviet government at international conferences on women’s issues, before being elected to the Russian State Duma, where she still serves today.

But as Soviet leaders publicly touted her accomplishments, they continued to debate in private whether women should be astronauts. The masquerade didn’t last. Tereshkova never flew to space again. Neither did the other women who had trained with her. Tereshkova revealed decades later that the head of the space program decided against flying another woman because she “already had a family.” It was clear where the Soviets felt women belonged. A female cosmonaut would not fly again for another 19 years.

The Soviets’ other firsts in space were similarly short-lived efforts. The Soviet Union sent foreign astronauts, including Phạm Tuân, a Vietnamese military pilot, and Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez, a Cuban military pilot of African descent, to the country’s Salyut space station in 1980. By then, the U.S. and the Soviet Union had little to compete over in outer space and had actually begun to collaborate. The first-time travelers, accompanied by cosmonauts, were part of a Soviet program that was intended to bolster connections with other socialist nations in eastern Europe and Asia, and ended in 1988.