The Real Story Behind Apple TV’s ‘Star City,’ New ‘For All Mankind’ Spinoff

What might have happened if the Soviets had been the first to walk on the moon? That’s the question posed by “For All Mankind,” a hit television show that imagines a scenario in which the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States never came to an end. With something to prove in this fictional timeline, America doesn’t retreat from its space ambitions the way it did in real life. Instead, the country goes all in on venturing to the moon—and beyond.

The series’ fifth season, now airing on Apple TV, is set in the 2010s. By then, multiple Earth-based countries, including America and Russia, operate and cohabit, albeit tensely, in a colony on Mars.

Season 1 of “For All Mankind” opened in 1969, at the end of this alternate universe’s race to the moon. American astronauts in Houston watch mournfully as the Soviets plant their flag on the lunar surface. The series is told from these NASA employees’ point of view, as they aggressively move forward with different projects, including a lunar base, an all-woman astronaut crew and even a hotel that orbits Earth. All of this work is merely a preamble, though, to NASA’s desire to colonize Mars, which ignites another race between the aspiring galactic superpowers of America, Russia and new contender North Korea. Until now, however, the series had never shown the Soviet side of the story.

For All Mankind – Season 5 Official Trailer | Apple TV

In the new spinoff show “Star City,” “For All Mankind” co-creators Ben Nedivi, Matt Wolpert and Ronald D. Moore pull back the Iron Curtain to share a tale ripped straight from 1970s Cold War-inspired spy thrillers. Set in a fictionalized version of the titular real-life training center outside Moscow, the series follows the cosmonauts, engineers and KGB agents who contribute to the Soviet campaign for space advancement.

The series, which tells its own contained story, will appeal to both “For All Mankind” fans and viewers new to the franchise. Although events in “For All Mankind” are referenced (just as the Soviet Union’s achievements were in that series), the new show is focused solely on the people living and working in Star City to maintain their nation’s place in the space race—an ambition that is relatively true to reality.

“A lot of people forget their program was so successful,” Wolpert says. “People look back and they’re like, ‘Oh, the Americans beat the Soviets to the moon.’ But the Soviets beat the Americans at so much else. They were just knocking it out of the park.”

Ahead of the premiere of “Star City,” on May 29, here’s what you need to know about the events that unfolded as the U.S. and the USSR raced to the moon.

Star City – Official Trailer | Apple TV

Astronauts or cosmonauts?

Both “For All Mankind” and “Star City” begin at the end of the franchise’s revisionist race to the moon, as the Americans stew over their loss and the Soviets celebrate their giant leap into history books. But how did these programs differ in real life? It all begins with language. In America, individuals trained to travel to the stars were called astronauts. In the Soviet Union, they were known as cosmonauts.

The term “astronaut” is derived from the Greek words for “star” and “sailor.” In the 1920s and ’30s, however, “when the Soviets were coming up with their program, they used the root word ‘cosmos’ rather than ‘astro,’” says Asif Siddiqi, a historian at Fordham University and the author of the NASA-published Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945-1974. “So it became cosmonautics, which is their term for space travel. Regardless of where it comes from, it does create a kind of inherent difference between them.”

The Soviets’ legacy of firsts

In real life, the Soviets beat the Americans to multiple major milestones. On April 12, 1961, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, orbiting Earth for 108 minutes before returning to its atmosphere and ejecting from his capsule to land by parachute.

Female astronauts and cosmonauts are paramount to the reworked history in both “For All Mankind” and “Star City,” but to this day, no woman has walked on the moon. Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova was the first woman in space, orbiting Earth 48 times over 71 hours in 1963. The first American woman to follow Tereshkova into space, Sally Ride, didn’t do so until 1983.

Early in “For All Mankind,” the U.S. commits to establishing its first all-woman space crew, known as “Nixon’s Women,” after the Soviets follow up their moon victory by sending fictional cosmonaut Anastasia Belikova to leave her footprints in lunar soil. The first episodes of “Star City” will detail her complicated, nonconforming path to that achievement.

In the space race era, the Soviet Union was “a highly educated society because of communism,” Siddiqi says. “The literacy rate among women was very high. Women worked everywhere, in all levels, but there was a glass ceiling.”

Although the Soviets formed a team of five women cosmonauts in 1962, they disbanded the unit a few months after Apollo 11’s moon landing. The initiative was chiefly a propaganda campaign, Siddiqi says, and the women “just props.”

The “For All Mankind” universe is free to dream up whatever it wants about the Soviet program’s viability as a real contender in the 1960s push toward space. But Siddiqi argues that the race between the USSR and the U.S. ultimately wasn’t that close.

The Soviets were “very close to being the first to orbit the moon. That was a neck-and-neck race,” he says, referencing the U.S.’s successful Apollo 8 mission, in December 1968.

“But the step from orbiting to landing is a huge one, as we’re going to find out in the next few years in our own space program,” Siddiqi adds. “In terms of landing—best-case scenario—the Soviets were two or three years behind us.”

The Soviet’s chief designer

The central premise of the “For All Mankind” franchise is based on a single rewrite of Soviet history. In 1966, Sergei Korolev, the Soviet program’s chief designer, who was responsible for most of its early successes, died during surgery. In the television series, in what Wolpert calls “the fundamental point of divergence,” Korolev survives well beyond that event.

In “Star City,” the Soviets are desperate to maintain their lead, and paranoia about sabotage persists. The so-called chief designer, played by Rhys Ifans, must train the next generation of cosmonauts to go to space while navigating unnerving KGB involvement in his program and advocating for a lunar base. The show’s version of the chief designer silences a room when he enters it, commanding a great deal of respect from those who know him. In the series, he is referred to by his job title rather than his name, which Siddiqi notes is somewhat true to real life.

“His identity was extremely secret, so nobody in Soviet Russia knew who he was during his lifetime,” the historian says. “If you were employed in his workplace, you were allowed to know who he was. But it’s true that if you picked up a newspaper in the early ’60s, it would say, ‘We have an interview with the chief designer.’”

This sense of mystery surrounding Korolev hooked both Wolpert and Nedivi. “The fact that the chief designer was anonymous was not just an accident,” Nedivi says. “They wanted him anonymous, afraid that if he was known, it would put his life in danger and the Soviet space program in danger.”

How did Korolev’s death affect the Soviets’ plans to dominate space?

In Siddiqi’s view, it “had a very negative effect on the Soviet space program as a whole, including their lunar program.” He adds, “That said, I doubt the Soviets would’ve made the moon landing even if he had lived. There were already so many structural and organizational programs, even when he was alive.”

The real Star City

The new series is set behind the walls of Star City, a community where cosmonauts, their families, and everyone with a hand in getting them to space and back live and work together. While the spinoff suggests that this base was the center of the historical Soviet space program, Siddiqi notes that the real Star City was merely one piece of the USSR’s expansive and ambitious investment in space travel.

“The crewed space program, the one that was sending cosmonauts to space and doing all sorts of spectacular things, was an important part of the program, but that’s not all of it,” he says. “Star City was one of the satellite points, but the hub was in a different suburb of Moscow entirely, called Kaliningrad, and it was outside of Moscow.”

High-level political decisions about the program were made, unsurprisingly, from the Kremlin, in Moscow. Twenty-first-century audiences will likely go into “Star City” with an opinion of Soviet culture influenced by movies and novels that depict it as bleak, both morally and visually. “Star City” hues closely to that grayscale perception, but Siddiqi argues that the reality was more complicated.

“We have this impression that life in the Soviet Union was really bad—and it was, under Stalin, back in the ’30s and ’40s,” Siddiqi says. “There was a lot of paranoia and shadows and people disappearing. But that stuff really stops around the ’50s and ’60s. By the ’60s and ’70s, it’s actually a moment of optimism for a lot of people because the economy was doing better and they’re going to space.”

Siddiqi has visited the real Star City, which is still in operation. The base is nestled in the middle of a forest and requires a clearance to enter. It remains an ecosystem for people nurturing Russia’s space aspirations, which Siddiqi says have evolved from moon-based missions to the present-day focus on contributing to the International Space Station, where a few cosmonauts are based at all times. Right at the heart of Star City is a statue of Gagarin, surrounded by buildings such as offices and schools. The facility is “very brightly colored, it’s festive, and it has that Soviet ’60s and ’70s architecture, which has lots of hammer-and-sickle imagery,” Siddiqi says.

Nedivi says that the secrecy still surrounding Star City factored into the showrunners’ portrayal of the era. To flesh out their depiction of the Soviet space program, the writers drew on sources ranging from John Strausbaugh’s history of the Soviet space program to Svetlana Alexievich’s Nobel Prize-winning oral history of the demise of the Soviet Union.

“It’s this strange contradiction that a program about lifting people into the cosmos, to celebrate what is possible and the best of humanity, is hiding the very people responsible for doing that away in a city in the middle of the woods, anonymous for the most part,” Nedivi says.

Risking life and limb

Beyond the show’s darker impressions of Soviet life during the space race, “Star City” also interrogates the perils that cosmonauts faced.

“One of our mottos with this show is that as dangerous as it is in space, it’s more dangerous on the ground,” Nedivi says. “Because even in success, they’re a target. They can never be bigger than the state.”

Siddiqi notes, however, that cosmonauts­—especially those who had traveled to space—still had power and name recognition. “They were so public that kids knew their names,” he says. “It wasn’t like the KGB had absolute authority, because if you were a big enough cosmonaut, you could push back.”

Danger in the show’s version of the Soviet space program comes in many forms. As viewers will see, “Star City” doesn’t shy away from the possibility that giant leaps come with giant consequences.

“The American program—and we explore this in the first few episodes of ‘For All Mankind’—was obsessed with risk aversion,” Nedivi says, “whereas the Soviet program was taking insane risks with the lives of cosmonauts. There were many stories of cosmonauts who were killed or died because of taking these chances. But that also required an incredible amount of courage and bravery on the part of their cosmonauts.”