Apple TV will launch Star City on Friday 29 May, sending viewers back to a Soviet space programme that never lost the race to the moon. The eight-part drama is a prequel to For All Mankind, but this time the story moves to the other side of history: a 1970s military town where cosmonauts, engineers and intelligence officers are all risking everything to push farther into the stars.
At the centre is Colonel Lyudmilla Raskova, played by Anna Maxwell Martin, the ruthless head of KGB intelligence, and the shadowy Chief Designer, played by Rhys Ifans, the brain behind the programme. Their world is one of alternative history and political intrigue, with Star City promising a darker, grittier tone than its predecessor and leaning hard into the machinery of power that keeps the mission moving.
That premise gives the series its weight. Star City is not just revisiting the moon; it is asking what Soviet victory in the Space Race would have meant if the state had never stopped reaching beyond it. The writers blend fact and fiction across the run, drawing on details such as a system that arranged marriages for cosmonauts and missions that could land off-course in Siberia’s wilderness. The result is a world that feels both familiar and unsettlingly plausible, right down to the idea that even private lives could be managed by the state.
The cast pushes the story beyond the command room. Agnes O’Casey plays a younger version of KGB handler Irina Morozova, while Josef Davies appears as a younger Sergei Nikulov. The series also delves into Anastasia Belikova’s experience as the first woman on the moon, widening the lens from the men in charge to the people sent to carry out their ambitions. A separate report from a London screening said Maxwell Martin described Raskova as no villain, suggesting Star City is likely to complicate its own power players rather than flatten them into familiar enemies.
That tension matters because Star City arrives with built-in momentum from For All Mankind, whose season 5 finale also airs on Friday 29 May. Yet the new series is being pitched as accessible on its own, with no prior knowledge required. For Apple TV, the launch is a chance to expand a familiar universe into harsher territory; for viewers, it is a reminder that the Space Race on television can still find fresh drama when it looks at who controls the dream and who pays for it.
