Space Race (TV series)
Space Race is a BBC docudrama series first shown in Britain on BBC2 between September and 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 focuses on Sergei Korolev, the Soviet chief rocket designer, and Wernher von Braun, his American counterpart. The series was a joint effort between British, German, American and Russian production teams.
Reception
Awards
Episodes
Episode one: Race For Rockets (1944–1949)
We see the results of Wernher von Braun's work on the V-2 for the Nazis at Mittelwerk and Peenemünde, 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 Soviet 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 two: Race For Satellites (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. Korolev announces that the Americans have evened the score and that they are in a space race which they intend to win. At the end of the episode we see the silhouettes of two men walking down a corridor, one appears to be in a space-suit. This could be Yuri Gagarin.
Episode three: Race For Survival (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 four: Race For The Moon (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.
Production details
BBC filmed the Space Race in and around the town of Sibiu, Transylvania (a region of Romania). Romania has signed the EU co-production treaty which allows for EU co-productions.[1] Compared to other locations, Romania attracted BBC with unspoiled natural locations, experienced crews and moderately priced production facilities.
The series was filmed with the Panasonic SDX 900 DVCPro 50 professional camcorder.[2] This allowed keeping to the speedy shooting schedule and provided the ‘gritty’ look appropriate to the time period. Shot in widescreen 25fps progressive mode, the series deliver rich, filmic feel, which compares favourably with high definition.[3]
Cast
Inaccuracies and errors
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.
Factual errors
- Key figures are entirely missing from the presented history. Andrei Tupolev, Vladimir Chelomei and Mikhail Yangel are also conspicuously absent, for example, even in the sequence depicting the disastrous explosion of Yangel's prototype R-16 ICBM. 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.
- The narrator said twice that the Mercury-Redstone could put an astronaut into orbit. In reality, the best the Redstone rocket could do was putting an astronaut into a 15-minute "suborbital" ballistic trajectory, which peaked out around 120 miles up. The first orbital flight of an American astronaut did not occur until February 20, 1962, when the Mercury capsule was put into orbit with a more powerful Atlas rocket. Indeed, NASA report TMX-53107 called Mercury-Redstone "a prelude to an orbital flight program" (pg 1-2).
- The narrator states that Gagarin flies "over a sleeping America" even though Vostok's flightpath did not take the craft anywhere near North America, except the Aleutian Islands. Gagarin did say "I'm over America", though. America, of course, includes South America and Vostok 1's flight path did just touch America in that sense. Gagarin spoke at night, while still over the Pacific, but only three minutes from the Straits of Magellan; a little earlier he was near Hawaii, which had become one of the United States of America less than two years earlier.
- Episode One features a map of Europe with wrongly indicated countries. Switzerland is labeled Austria, Austria is labeled Yugoslavia and the Czech Republic is labeled Hungary.
- In the Episode Two the narrator states twice that the R-7 rocket has 32 engines. This is not entirely correct. The R-7 and its successors have four side boosters and a core booster. Each side booster has a single rocket engine with four combustion chambers, two vernier combustion chambers, and one set of turbopumps. The central core has a similar engine but with four vernier combustion chambers instead of two. This makes total of 32 chambers, not engines. In the scene where Glushko is supposedly testing the clustering scheme, only one engine is shown.
- One of the cosmonauts, after seeing the Vostok's cockpit for the first time (Episode Three), asks where the controls are. Also the Gagarin flight scene indicates that there were no controls inside. In fact controls were present on board the Vostoks, but they were blocked to prevent the cosmonauts from manipulating them. A set of codes was placed aboard, so that the cosmonaut could unlock the controls if necessary.
- When the Mission Control is shown for the first time in episode 3 it shows that all the flight controllers have a TV screen showing the launch pad. In reality only the flight director had a TV screen. The other consoles had only meters to measure the various systems.
Unconfirmed statements
The series stresses out multiple times that Korolev was denounced by Glushko. There are no known documents that prove this statement besides rumors and hearsay. Glushko had been imprisoned himself before Korolev was arrested and had been sentenced to eight years in a prison camp “for participating in sabotage organization.” He was retained to work for the NKVD to develop aircraft jet boosters. In 1942, at Glushko’s request, NKVD transferred Korolev from another prison to Glushko’s OKB.[4]
Filming inaccuracies
- 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.
- It is not explained why Glushko and Korolev wore military uniform during their stay in Germany. They never served in the military, but were issued military uniform and assigned fake military ranks after they arrived to Berlin. In 1945 Berlin was run by military, this way civilian engineers were able to blend in.
- 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 by Communist Party leaders and by military command.
- 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 carried encoded information about temperature and pressure from sensors on board.
- 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.
- During the de-orbit burn of Vostok 1, interior footage looking outward is shown as the de-orbit burn of the unmanned Gemini 2 mission.
- Soldiers from the United States Army shown in action in Germany at the end of the war are carrying a mixture of German World War II weapons, and Soviet post World War II 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, possibly the R-11, being transported with a Soviet ZiL-157 truck. This truck went into production in 1958, its styling was influenced by Studebaker and GMC models, and its look is very un-German. Unlike the V-2, the R-11 did not use liquid oxygen, thus it did not require a time-consuming pre-start fillup. Therefore the launch sequence is not true to historical facts. The same ZIL-157 vehicle is used in the scene of Peenemünde evacuation.
- Some of the inconsistencies appeared in the movie probably because the movie was filmed in Romania. For example, in the sequence with the steam train leaving the German station with scientists, one can read "CFR" on the locomotive, which stands for Căile Ferate Române (Romanian Railways).
- The scene depicting a launch from Kapustin Yar, which is dated by 1948, includes vehicles that were not produced at that time, in particular the ZiL-157 (1958), the ZiL-131 (1967) and the UAZ-469 (1973).
- 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.
Companion book
A companion book to the series was written by Deborah Cadbury.
Selected editions
- Cadbury, Deborah (5 September 2005). Space Race. Fourth Estate (hardcover). ISBN 978-0007209958.
- Cadbury, Deborah (7 August 2006). The Space Race: The Battle to Rule the Heavens. HarperPerennial (paperback). ISBN 978-0007209941.
Notes
- The National Geographic Channel broadcast the series as a 2 part mini-series in 2006.
References
- ^ Romanian film promotion: why choose Romania
- ^ DVC Pro 50 Camcorder SDX-900
- ^ Rome wasn't shot in a day, it was shot in HDX!
- ^ Chertok, Boris (2005). Asif A. Siddiqi. ed (PDF). Raketi i lyudi (trans. "Rockets and People"). NASA History Series. p. 328. http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20050010181_2005010059.pdf. Retrieved 2006-07-03.
See also
External links
