Space Race (TV series)

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Space Race is a BBC docu-drama series first shown in Britain on BBC2 between September & October 2005, chronicling the major events and characters in the American/Soviet space race up to the first landing of a man on the moon. It focusses on Sergei Korolev, the Soviets' chief rocket designer, and Wernher von Braun, his American counterpart. The series was a joint effort between British, German, American and Russian production teams.

Episode 1, Race For Rockets, spans 1944-1949. We see the results of Wernher von Braun's work on the V-2 for the Nazis at Mittelwerk and Peenemunde, and his final activities within Germany during the last years of the Second World War, as both American and Soviet forces race to capture German rocket technology. When the Americans gain the upper hand by recovering von Braun and most of his senior staff, along with all their technical documents and much other materiel, we see Sergei Korolev's release from the Gulag to act as the Soviets' rocketry expert alongside former colleague Valentin Glushko, and how he is set to work bringing Russian rocket technology up to date with that of von Braun, working with what material and personnel are left after von Braun's escape to the US.

Episode 2, Race For Satellites, spans 1953-1958. As the Cold War intensifies, Korolev is asked to build a rocket capable of carrying a five-ton warhead to America - he designs and constructs the R-7 Semyorka, the first ICBM, and is later allowed to use it to launch the first satellite, Sputnik 1, quickly following up with the rushed Sputnik 2. Meanwhile, von Braun struggles to persuade the US government to allow him to launch his own satellite - after Sputnik's launch and the failure of the US Navy to launch a Vanguard satellite, he is finally allowed to launch the first American satellite, Explorer 1.

Episode 3, Race For Survival, spans 1959-1961. Both the Americans and Soviets are planning manned space flight, and we see both sides preparing to do so with the development of the Vostok programme (USSR) and Project Mercury (USA). As well as basic details about the capsules and their delivery vehicles, we also see some of the selection and training of the Russian cosmonauts, and rather less of that of their counterparts in the US. After difficulties and failures on both sides, the Soviets succeed in putting Yuri Gagarin into space first, with the Americans putting Alan Shepard up shortly afterwards.

Episode 4, Race For The Moon, spans 1964-1969. Both sides now plan to put a man on the Moon - the Americans pull ahead in the space race with Project Gemini, but then suffer a disaster with the Apollo 1 fire. Meanwhile, despite a few notable successes such as the first space walk by Alexei Leonov, the Soviet space programme struggles to keep up amid internal strife. Glushko and Korolev permanently fall out in an argument about fuel; Korolev turns to Nikolai Kuznetsov to develop engines instead. Kuznetsov delivers the NK-33, very efficient but much less powerful than the Americans' F-1. The Soviet program suffers further blows when Korolev dies during surgery, Gagarin dies in a jet crash, Soyuz 1 crashes and kills Vladimir Komarov, and the prototype booster for the moon shot, the N-1 rocket, fails to successfully launch. In America, von Braun has continuing difficulties with the Saturn V, especially combustion instability in the large F-1 engine, but these are ultimately overcome almost by brute force at great expense, and the rocket successfully launches the first manned lunar mission, Apollo 8, and the first manned lunar landing, Apollo 11. The final episode finishes with brief textual summaries of the remaining careers of the various people involved.

A book on the series by Deborah Cadbury is available.

The National Geographic Channel broadcast this show as a 2 part mini-series in 2006.

[edit] Cast

[edit] Inaccuracies and Errors

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Most of the historical and technological data presented in the series is very heavily simplified, and sometimes contains outright untruths or errors. The series would best be described and interpreted as giving a general impression of the subject matter, rather than rigorous factual account.

  • Korolev's last name is mispronounced badly and inconsistently, despite Russian participation in the series. It should be pronounced kor-ol-yoff, but is often mispronounced kor-yel-off.
  • The series stresses out multiple times that Korolev was denounced by Glushko, but there is no factual evidence of this claim. Glushko had been imprisoned himself before Korolev was arrested. Both Glushko and Korolev were denounced by their former comrades and managers.
  • Korolev did not spend the war in Gulag. He was there a short time and then was transferred back to Moscow, then to a guarded research facility in Moscow suburbs, then to Kazan.
  • Tupolev, the aircraft designer, rescued Korolev from the prison. When the "German team" was being created, both Glushko and Korolev became its members as peers.
  • It is not explained why Glushko and Korolev worn military uniform during their stay in Germany. They never served in the military, but were issued military uniform and assigned fake military ranks when they arrived to Berlin. In 1945 Berlin was run by military, this way civil engineers were able to blend in.
  • Key figures are entirely missing from the presented history - in addition to Tupolev, Chelomei and Yangel are also conspicuously absent, for example, even in the sequence depicting the disastrous explosion of one of Yangel's prototype R-16 ICBMs - in the series, Glushko is generally identified with all rocket projects competing with Korolev within the USSR, even those for which he had only partial responsibility or was a subcontractor.
  • Vasily Mishin is depicted as an unsuccessful drunkard and merely as Korolev's friend and sidekick. In fact Mishin was a gifted engineer, but he did not possess management talent that Korolev had.
  • The whole atmosphere of Korolev being threatened and disrespected by the generals is cliché and inaccurate. People were highly impressed by him and his management and engineering skills. After the Second World War Korolev became a creator and a manager of a new industry; he became a powerful figure and was respected among Party leaders and military generals.
  • The reason for using staged boosters is extremely vaguely explained in one sentence by Korolev, as reducing weight and hence increasing range and speed. In reality, the reasons are numerous and more complex, one of the dominant ones being that conventional rocket engines only operate at maximum efficiency at a particular atmospheric pressure, and lose net efficiency when lifting a payload over a large altitude range.
  • The depicted final configuration of Sputnik 1 is oversimplified - it contained two radio transmitters, not one, and the famous beeping signal did in fact carry encoded data from sensors on board, though this is not mentioned.
  • The depiction of the Soviet side of the moon race in episode 4 is extremely simplistic - despite numerous competing programmes within the USSR, only Korolev's N-1 is even mentioned, its developmental history is mostly skipped (along with that of Von Braun's Saturn V), only one of its four prototype launches is mentioned, and many other underlying causes for the outcome of the moon race are ignored - only the rift between Korolev and Glushko, and the latter's refusal to develop large cryogenic engines for the N-1, is mentioned in any detail, along with Korolev's death. Only the launch vehicles for the moon shots (and the Soyuz capsule) are mentioned in detail; the development of other mission hardware such as the lunar landers themselves is not covered.
  • Usage of period footage is inconsistent, in particular with regard to the R-7 and its variants - most often, footage of the R-7 in its modern Soyuz configuration is used to depict its use in earlier programmes with different hardware.
  • Soldiers from the United States Army shown in action in Germany at the end of the war are carrying a mixture of German WWII weapons, and Soviet post WWII weapons, namely the SKS Carbine.
  • The scene in the first episode depicts a German V-2 being transported to a firing position. Later the start of the missile is shown. Instead of a V-2 a different missile was used for filming, most likely R-11, being transported with a Soviet ZiL-157 truck. This truck went into production in 1958, and its look is very un-German. R-11 did not use liquid oxygen like V-2, so pre-start fillup, which was required for V-2, is not shown. Therefore the launch sequence is not true to historical facts. The same ZIL-157 transport vehicle is used in the scene of Peenemunde evacuation.
  • The scene in Kapustin Yar launch pad dated by 1948 includes vehicles that were not produced at that time, in particular the ZiL-157 (1958) and the Zil-131 (1967).
  • The scene in 1945 Texas shows the team of German engineers driving into the restaurant parking lot. The car they are being driven in seems to be either a Russian GAZ M-20 Pobeda or Polish Warszawa, which was the same car made under license, or British Standard Vanguard. Neither car was imported to United States. The same car is used in Episode 3 as Korolev's personal car.
  • The space race is not unanimously considered to have ended with the first moon landing; US-Soviet competition continued with programmes such as the development of space stations and space shuttles. The race could be said to have finally ended with a transition from competition to cooperation in the Apollo-Soyuz joint project, or perhaps with the collapse of the USSR and thus the de facto end of the Soviet space programme, but neither stations, shuttles, Apollo-Soyuz nor Soviet collapse are mentioned in the series.