How Star City Reimagined the Space Race With Soviets as the Stars
How do you capture the mood of the 1960s space race in a fictional universe where the Soviets beat the Americans to the moon? It is a question that demands not only creative vision but also a deep respect for the genuine historical drama that unfolded during one of humanity's most consequential technological competitions. The answer, it turns out, lies in embracing imperfection — both aesthetic and historical — and allowing the grittier truths of the Soviet space program to breathe life into an alternate timeline.
The American side of that imagined story was told in For All Mankind, an Apple TV+ series that concluded its fifth season in May 2025. Now a spinoff series called Star City, which tells the Soviet side of the story, is set to wrap up its critically acclaimed first season. Together, the two series form one of the most ambitious alternate-history science fiction projects ever committed to screen.
Reimagining the Soviet Space Effort
Reimagining the Soviet space program — and the Star City cosmonaut training center that served, and still serves, as its epicenter — was a challenge worthy of the Chief Designer himself. The real Star City, known officially as Zvyozdny Gorodok and located roughly 25 kilometers northeast of Moscow, was for decades one of the most secretive installations in the Soviet Union. It was the place where legends like Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space, and Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, were forged into cosmonauts. To dramatize that world with authenticity required both artistic courage and rigorous historical research.
Cinematographer Brendan Uegama and the rest of the production team were demonstrably up to the task.
"We set up a really high bar for our standard of what our world was. That was not a perfectly beautiful world of photography like you would typically see or experience in a lot of movies. We didn't go to the beauty just for the sake of making a pretty picture. We stuck with our gut and said, no, it's better if it's a little uglier, because it feels a little more truthful to what this would be." — Brendan Uegama, Director of Photography, Star City
That philosophy of deliberate imperfection reflects a broader truth about Cold War–era Soviet infrastructure. Even at the height of the space race, the facilities that supported the Soviet space program were characterized by a utilitarian aesthetic — function over form, ideology over comfort. The gleaming modernism often associated with NASA's facilities in Houston and Cape Canaveral had no real Soviet counterpart.
The Visual Language of a Closed Society
The production team had to balance several competing factors as they constructed the Star City that appears on screen. The visual look and feel had to authentically reflect the closed society of the Soviet Union during the 1960s and 1970s, while simultaneously accommodating the fictional divergences in the timeline — including Soviet moon landings and a crewed mission to Venus. Getting both dimensions right simultaneously required a remarkably disciplined visual strategy.
None of the filming took place in Russia. Instead, most of the scenes were shot in the former Soviet republic of Lithuania, where enough of the era's brutalist architecture remains intact to provide the structural and atmospheric foundation for a suitably gray Cold War narrative. Brutalist architecture — characterized by its raw concrete surfaces, monolithic forms, and rejection of ornamental decoration — was the dominant aesthetic language of Soviet public and institutional construction from the 1950s onward. It translates powerfully on screen as an expression of state power and individual subordination.
Uegama studied old photographs and newsreels extensively to sharpen his sense of Soviet-era settings. His primary visual inspiration came from a remarkable set of photographs taken in the early 1950s by Martin Manhoff, an American diplomat and suspected intelligence operative.
"He took just unbelievably fantastic photos of Moscow and everything around that time, and that informed me a lot personally. It inspired me a lot … to at least start to go down the road of what I thought this world could look like." — Brendan Uegama
The Manhoff Archive: A Hidden Window Into the Soviet World
The story behind Manhoff's photographs and film footage could merit its own television drama, independent of anything related to the space race. Manhoff is perhaps best known for capturing extraordinary footage of Josef Stalin's funeral from a vantage point within the U.S. Embassy in 1953 — images that provided one of the few Western-eye views of the event that shook the Soviet empire to its foundations. He was never able to visit Star City, which was, of course, entirely off-limits to foreign nationals during the 1950s, but he was able to travel widely across the Soviet Union, documenting everyday life in cities and the countryside with a candid and humanizing lens.
When Manhoff and several other military attachés were accused of espionage, he returned to the United States, taking his slides and reels of film with him. Those visual records eventually ended up in cardboard boxes stored in a former auto body shop in the Seattle area, overlooked and forgotten until after Manhoff's death in 2005. Historian Douglas Smith played a key role in rediscovering and systematically organizing this remarkable visual treasure trove, ensuring that its historical value was not lost entirely to time.
The cinematography of Star City deliberately reflects the grainy, imperfect quality of 1960s-era photographic film. Uegama has described leaning into a world that "felt imperfect and felt a little more handmade and a little more 'found.'" In a notable Instagram post, he revealed that he employed nearly 30 lenses made by 11 different manufacturers — tools selected to embody what he called "a deliberately imperfect aesthetic from the lens up." This approach recalls the visual vocabulary of cinéma vérité, the documentary filmmaking tradition that sought authenticity through apparent spontaneity and technical imperfection.
The Real Soviet Space Program: Triumph, Tragedy, and Secrecy
To fully appreciate what Star City reimagines, it is essential to understand the genuine history it departs from. The real Soviet space program achieved a breathtaking series of firsts during the late 1950s and 1960s, driven in large part by the towering genius and relentless determination of Sergei Korolev, the program's legendary Chief Designer. His identity was kept secret from the Western world — and from most Soviet citizens — for much of his career, a necessary precaution given that he was the single most indispensable figure in the entire enterprise.
- 1957: The Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the world's first artificial satellite, sending shockwaves through the Western world and effectively beginning the space race.
- 1961: Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to travel to space aboard Vostok 1, completing a single orbit of Earth in 108 minutes.
- 1963: Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space, orbiting Earth 48 times over nearly three days aboard Vostok 6.
- 1965: Alexei Leonov conducted the first spacewalk in human history, exiting his Voskhod 2 spacecraft for 12 minutes during a mission that nearly ended in disaster.
- 1966: Korolev died unexpectedly during a surgical procedure, leaving the Soviet lunar program without its driving force at the most critical juncture of the space race.
The death of Sergei Korolev in January 1966 was arguably the single most consequential event in the history of the space race — and one of the great tragedies of twentieth-century science. His contributions to rocketry and astronautics were immense, and his successors struggled to maintain the momentum he had built. Under his leadership, the Soviet program had consistently outpaced the Americans; without him, the cracks began to widen.
The N1 Rocket: A Dream That Became a Disaster
The centerpiece of the Soviet effort to land cosmonauts on the moon was the N1 rocket, a colossal vehicle designed to rival NASA's Saturn V. Where the Saturn V used five powerful F-1 engines in its first stage, the N1 relied on an extraordinary cluster of 30 NK-15 engines — a configuration that introduced staggering complexity and, ultimately, fatal unreliability. The challenge of synchronizing three dozen rocket engines firing simultaneously proved insurmountable with the computational and engineering tools available at the time.
The N1's failures were catastrophic. All four of its uncrewed test flights ended in disaster. The most spectacular occurred on July 3, 1969 — just two weeks before Apollo 11 lifted off from Kennedy Space Center — when an N1 exploded on the launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, triggering one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history and destroying the launch facility along with the rocket. The Soviet lunar program never recovered. The N1 program was quietly cancelled in 1976, and its existence was not officially acknowledged by the Soviet government until 1989.
In Star City's alternate timeline, the unnamed Chief Designer — clearly modeled on Korolev — survives his health crisis in 1966, and a fully operational N1 rocket successfully sends a crew to the moon less than a month before Apollo 11. That single deviation from history cascades into a transformed geopolitical and technological landscape, energizing the Soviet Union and its space effort in ways that the real program never achieved.
Luna 16 and the First Woman on the Moon
In the series, a follow-up Soviet mission designated Luna 16 places the first woman on the moon, one of the most dramatically charged moments of the alternate timeline. The choice is both historically resonant and scientifically evocative. In reality, Luna 16, which launched in September 1970, was the first robotic spacecraft to successfully perform an automated lunar sample return mission, bringing back approximately 101 grams of lunar regolith to Earth. It was a genuine triumph of Soviet robotic exploration — though one largely overshadowed in the Western imagination by the human drama of the Apollo missions.
The fictional Luna 16's female cosmonaut takes the global spotlight and plays one of the leading roles in the first season of Star City. Her character implicitly honors the real tradition of Soviet women in space, a tradition that began with Tereshkova in 1963 and continued with Svetlana Savitskaya, who became the first woman to perform a spacewalk in 1984. The series highlights several other characters and plot threads as well, including a spy-hunting storyline described as gripping as anything in the annals of Cold War intelligence history.
Venera 7 and the Dream of Venus
One of the most audacious fictional elements of the first season is a crewed mission to Venus, organized in secret by the Chief Designer and designated as Venera 7. The premise is entirely imagined — no human being has ever traveled beyond the Moon — but it is built upon a foundation of genuine Soviet scientific achievement that deserves far wider recognition.
The real Venera 7 mission, launched by the Soviet Union in August 1970, made history as the first spacecraft to successfully achieve a soft landing on another planet and transmit data back to Earth. Venus, with its crushing atmospheric pressure (approximately 90 times that of Earth's surface), searing temperatures (averaging around 465°C or 869°F), and clouds of sulfuric acid, is one of the most hostile environments in the solar system. That the Soviets managed to land a functioning probe there at all was an extraordinary engineering achievement, and for many years the Venera program represented the most significant body of knowledge humanity possessed about Venus's surface conditions.
The Venera program's subsequent achievements were equally remarkable:
- Venera 9 and 10 (1975): The first spacecraft to return photographs from the surface of another planet, revealing a landscape of angular, plate-like rocks — far younger and more geologically active than scientists had anticipated.
- Venera 13 and 14 (1982): Returned the first color photographs of the Venerian surface, along with acoustic recordings of Venusian winds — the first sounds ever captured on another planet.
- Vega 1 and 2 (1985): Combined Venus flybys with the deployment of atmospheric balloons that drifted in the Venusian cloud layer for nearly two Earth days, a pioneering feat of planetary exploration.
Today, Venus is experiencing a renaissance of scientific interest. NASA's DAVINCI mission and ESA's EnVision mission are both in development, building in part on the legacy of the Venera program. In this context, Star City's fictional crewed Venera mission feels less like pure fantasy and more like a provocative question: What might humanity have achieved at Venus, had the political will matched the scientific ambition?
An Eyewitness to the Real Star City
For those who have visited the real Zvyozdny Gorodok, the visual sensibility that Uegama has brought to the series rings with authenticity. The actual Star City, visited by the article's author a quarter-century ago during a reporting trip tied to the final days of Russia's Mir space station, was notable precisely for its combination of historical grandeur and mundane decay. The broken toilets, the half-disassembled plumbing fixtures, the faded mosaics celebrating Soviet cosmonautic glory — all of it spoke to a program that had changed the world and then, somehow, been left behind by it.
That texture of greatness and neglect is precisely what Star City the series captures in its alternate timeline — a world where the Soviets never lost the moon race, and the question of what they might have achieved with that momentum is allowed to unfold across multiple seasons of television.
The Future of Star City
Based on what five seasons of For All Mankind have established about the shared alternate universe, the Soviet space program will continue to develop in parallel with its American counterpart, deviating from the real-world timeline in
