Star City

     I finished the first season of Apple TV's Star City a few weeks ago.  It's the Russian-side companion to their alternate history series For All Mankind, in which the Soviet Union barely beats the U.S. to the Moon and the Space Race never stops.

     The latter series shows events from the U.S. side, and the hardware is mostly familiar to anyone who grew up with NASA-inspired articles in the Sunday supplement and national magazines.  It provides about as much view into details of the USSR's space program as we ever got in real life: clunky, overbuilt equipment and cosmonauts who got the job done through grit and fatalistic determination -- or died trying.  Where America succeeded or failed in plain sight, the Russians announced results after the fact, or swept them under the rug when things went wrong.

      And that's what Star City is about: exploring space under paranoid totalitarianism and sometimes despite it, using improvised hardware, taking chances the West never would.  The hardware is...well, it's very Russian.

     Watching the series, I thought the clunkiness and improvisation was a little overplayed.  Surely the real-life Russians had better stuff, despite the awful politics?  Tamara's been reading The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned, by John Strausbaugh.  He certainly looks to have done his homework, and the real Soviet space program was, if anything, even iffier than the TV series makes it out to be.  Oh, the Russians had (and still have) plenty of fine engineers, and Sergei Korolev was, if anything, even more determined an organizer, manager and overall rocket designer than Werner von Braun.  But circumstances far outside his control resulted in an effort that had to brute-force everything and accept huge risks.  One reason the R-7 launch system, direct ancestor to today's Soyuz, has been able to become ever more capable though incremental improvement is that it was a crude (but workable) mechanism to begin with; better alloys, better machining, better construction techniques and better electronics have kept it usable, and increased the payload carried on the large amounts of thrust originally needed just to get the stack of stages off the ground and headed for space.

     The Wrong Stuff makes an excellent companion volume to Star City, for all that it slightly undermines the big "what if..." of the series: what if Russia got there first?  But the real "what if..." is a different question: what if Korolev had not been so terribly abused under Stalin's purges that his time in the gulags left him physically damaged and headed for an early death?  If anyone could have led the way to getting the N-1 launcher working and pulled off a Moon landing with Russia's equipment, he would have been the guy; but as things went, he was gone long before the deadline.

     In For All Mankind's timeline, the USSR is still together by the early 2010s -- but it's not quite the same place it was, having loosened up just a little under the pressure to compete (and sometimes cooperate), largely peacefully, in space and at home.  But after one season of Star City, it's clear that even making that small amount of progress will be a long, hard road.