Space Race (TV series)

• 1. Introduction

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  Space Race is a BBC docudrama series that first aired in Britain on BBC2 between the 14th of September and the 5th of October 2005. Its subject is one of the defining contests of the twentieth century: the American and Soviet struggle to reach the Moon first. But this series made a distinctive choice about where to place its camera. Rather than centering the story on astronauts and presidents, it built its drama around two engineers whose names most viewers had never heard. On one side, Wernher von Braun, the German-born rocket designer who surrendered to American forces at the end of the Second World War. On the other, Sergei Korolev, the Soviet chief rocket designer who had survived the Gulag before being handed the task of beating the West into space. The series was a joint production involving British, German, American, and Russian teams, and it was filmed not in the United States or Russia but in Sibiu, Transylvania, in Romania. What drew so many partners together, and what compromises and errors came with that ambition, is a story worth tracing carefully.

• 2. Two Engineers, One Race

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  Wernher von Braun's wartime work at Mittelwerk and Peenemunde forms the opening of the series. His V-2 rockets were the most advanced in the world, and as the Third Reich collapsed, both American and Soviet forces scrambled to seize that technology. The Americans captured von Braun himself, along with most of his senior staff, their technical documents, and substantial materiel. Sergei Korolev, by contrast, began from a far more precarious position. He was released from the Gulag specifically to serve as the Soviet rocketry expert, working alongside his former colleague Valentin Glushko on whatever personnel and equipment the Americans had left behind. The series traces how Korolev rebuilt Soviet rocketry almost from scratch, shadowing von Braun's achievements while laboring under the weight of state secrecy and institutional distrust. The personal and professional rivalry between these two men gives the series its emotional engine, and the casting of Richard Dillane as von Braun and Steve Nicolson as Korolev anchors that tension across all four episodes.

• 3. Satellites and the Cold War Sky

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  Korolev's most spectacular early achievement in the series is the R-7 Semyorka, designed to carry a five-ton warhead to the United States. The R-7 was the first intercontinental ballistic missile, and Korolev won permission to use it for a different purpose: launching Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite. A rushed follow-up, Sputnik 2, came shortly after. Von Braun, watching from the American side, faced a different obstacle. He spent years trying to persuade the US government to let him launch a satellite of his own. After Sputnik's success and the public failure of the US Navy's Vanguard rocket, the door finally opened, and von Braun launched Explorer 1, the first American satellite. The series depicts Korolev responding to that American success with a pointed remark: the Americans had evened the score, and now there was a race, one the Soviets intended to win. At the close of this episode, two figures walk down a corridor, one of them in a spacesuit, pointing toward what comes next.

• 4. Cosmonauts and Astronauts

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  Yuri Gagarin's name is the one that history remembers from the third episode, covering the years 1959 to 1961. Both superpowers were racing to put a human being into space, and the series shows the Soviet Vostok programme and America's Project Mercury developing in parallel. The cosmonaut selection and training process receives more attention than the American equivalent. Setbacks appear on both sides, including a catastrophic early failure of a Soviet ballistic missile. Gagarin flew first, with Alan Shepard following not long after. One error embedded in the series drew particular scrutiny: the narrator twice described the Mercury-Redstone rocket as capable of putting an astronaut into orbit. In reality, the best the Redstone could achieve was a fifteen-minute suborbital arc, reaching roughly 120 miles up. The first American orbital flight did not happen until the 20th of February 1962, when an Atlas rocket carried a Mercury capsule around the Earth. Vitalie Ursu played Gagarin, and Todd Boyce took the role of Alan Shepard.

• 5. Toward the Moon

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  Project Gemini gave the Americans a lead by the time the fourth episode begins, covering 1964 to 1969. The Soviet programme countered with Alexei Leonov's first spacewalk, depicted in the series with Oleg Stefan in the role. But the internal politics of Soviet rocketry began to pull the programme apart. Korolev and Glushko fell out permanently over a dispute about fuel. Korolev turned instead to Nikolai Kuznetsov, whose NK-33 engine was efficient but far less powerful than the American F-1. The Soviet programme then absorbed a series of disasters: Korolev died during surgery, Gagarin died in a jet crash, Soyuz 1 crashed and killed Vladimir Komarov, and the N-1 moon rocket, the Soviet Union's prototype booster for a lunar mission, never achieved a successful launch. Von Braun's Saturn V had its own problems, particularly combustion instability in the F-1 engine, but these were solved at great expense, and the rocket ultimately launched Apollo 8, the first crewed lunar mission, and then Apollo 11, the first crewed landing on the Moon. The final episode closes with brief text summaries of what became of the various people involved.

• 6. Romania and the Camera

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  Sibiu, in Transylvania, became the unlikely setting for this retelling of Cold War history. Romania's signature of the EU co-production treaty made it eligible as a filming location, and the BBC was drawn by its undisturbed landscapes, experienced local crews, and production costs that fell below those of comparable alternatives. The series was shot on the Panasonic SDX 900 DVCPro50 professional camcorder, a choice that served the compressed shooting schedule and gave the footage a gritty, textured appearance suited to the period. Filmed in widescreen at 25 frames per second in progressive mode, the result was a visual quality the production described as comparable to high definition. The logistics of filming in Romania, however, left traces that critics of the series would later point to. A locomotive visible in one station scene carries the letters CFR, standing for Caile Ferate Romane, the Romanian national railway. Vehicles appearing in a 1948 launch sequence include the ZIL-157, which was not manufactured until 1958, and the UAZ-469, which came even later, in 1971.

• 7. Errors and Omissions

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  The series was candid about its approach: it offered a general impression of the space race rather than a rigorous factual account. Critics and historians documented the gaps. An early scene shows a Soviet officer executing Polish resistance fighters who had discovered a V-2; this event did not happen. The actual retrieval of a fallen V-2 near the Blizna launch site was carried out by a joint British and Polish team of soldiers and scientists. Footage used to depict early rocket club activity associated with von Braun actually shows the rockets of Reinhold Tiling, a rival to the VfR club that von Braun belonged to. Several figures central to Soviet rocketry do not appear at all: Andrei Tupolev, Vladimir Chelomei, and Mikhail Yangel are all absent, even in the sequence depicting the explosion of Yangel's prototype R-16 ICBM. Glushko is given responsibility for rocket projects where his actual role was more limited. One narrative claim repeated by the series, that Glushko denounced Korolev multiple times, lacks documentary support; Glushko himself had been imprisoned before Korolev's arrest, and documents show it was Glushko who later arranged for Korolev's transfer to his own design bureau in 1942. Despite winning the Sir Arthur Clarke Award for Best Presentation in the TV and Radio category at the 2006 ceremony, the series drew a nomination rather than a win at the Royal Television Society awards for Best Production Design.