Apple TV’s new sci-fi series Star City is turning the spotlight toward the part of the space race that most viewers know least: the Soviet side. The For All Mankind spin-off opens with Alexei Leonov planting the flag of the USSR on the lunar surface, then pulls back to the mission control run by the man called the Chief Designer, played by Rhys Ifans.
That focus is drawing attention now because Star City goes back to the years before the parent series stretched its alternate history into the 21st century, when For All Mankind had already carried its imagined timeline to a world with thousands of people living on Mars. The new show is set to revisit the Soviet program at the point where history still looks familiar enough to recognize, but different enough to re-open old questions about who really got there first and why.
The Chief Designer is Sergei Korolev, the Ukraine-born engineer who oversaw the R-7 rocket, Sputnik and Vostok programs. During his lifetime, most people in the Soviet Union did not know his name; he was referred to simply as the Chief Designer. That secrecy is part of the hook here. Apollo is one of the best-documented human endeavors in history, and Armstrong’s first small step onto the lunar surface unfolded before the eyes of the western world. The Soviet story, by contrast, was often hidden even from Korolev’s own colleagues.
For All Mankind has already made that contrast into a kind of alternate-history engine. Its creators identified Korolev’s death during surgery in 1966 as the moment their fictional universe split from real history, with the theory that his survival would have let the USSR keep its edge and beat Apollo 11 to the Moon in 1969. Star City does not need to prove that claim to work as drama, but it does inherit the question at the center of it: what did the Soviet program really look like before it became a footnote in a more familiar American story?
The opening episode, titled The Eyes, suggests the answer will begin on the lunar surface and move inward, toward the people and machinery that kept the Soviet program running behind closed doors. Whether the series stops at the Moon or goes deeper into the program’s hidden history will decide how far it can widen the space race beyond the version most viewers already know.
