Apple TV's Star City — the first spinoff of For All Mankind and the first franchise extension in Apple TV's history — premiered Friday, May 29 with a two-episode drop that earned a perfect 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes, immediately positioning it among the most acclaimed entries in the streamer's science-fiction slate. The show does something rare for prestige television: it earns its alternate history by getting the real engineering exactly right.
Star City takes the central premise of For All Mankind — what if Soviet rocket pioneer Sergei Korolev had survived a 1966 surgery that killed him in our timeline — and dramatizes the world immediately after that survival pays off. It is 1969 in the show's universe. Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov has just become the first human to walk on the Moon. The Soviet Union has won the space race. And the paranoid apparatus that made that victory possible is now consuming its own people.
That tension — the KGB surveillance state turning its instruments against the cosmonauts and engineers who built the victory — is where Star City differs most sharply from its parent series. Variety called it "a flawless alt-history thriller." The Hollywood Reporter described it as "breathlessly tense." The AV Club noted the show has "a lot of potential to this setting and story." At launch, the series held a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score based on early reviews — a figure that may shift as additional critics weigh in.
What Is N1 Rocket History, and Why Does Star City Get It Right?
The show's credibility rests on a specific piece of real rocket engineering: the Soviet N1, the USSR's answer to the Saturn V. Where NASA used five enormous F-1 engines for the Saturn V's first stage, the Soviets clustered 30 smaller NK-15 engines — a decision made not from preference but from constraint.
Korolev needed powerful engines for the N1's first stage. The USSR's premier engine designer, Valentin Glushko, refused to work with him over a feud about propellants: Glushko wanted hypergolic fuels, Korolev insisted on liquid oxygen and kerosene. Forced to find an alternative, Korolev commissioned smaller engines from the less-experienced Kuznetsov bureau, then clustered 30 of them. To manage those 30 engines simultaneously, Soviet engineers designed the KORD system — a real-time diagnostic controller that could shut down failing engines before they destroyed the rest. The concept was sound. The execution wasn't. Electromagnetic interference between adjacent engines triggered false positives in KORD, causing cascade shutdowns that turned recoverable single-engine failures into catastrophic flight terminations. All four N1 launches — between February 1969 and November 1972 — failed.
The show's most technically grounded sequence captures this institutional trap precisely. When cosmonaut Anastasia Belikova faces a carbon dioxide scrubber failure in her lunar EVA suit during Episode 1, the solution a junior engineer improvises — a controlled suit breach that creates an outflow of CO₂ while the oxygen supply simultaneously repressurizes the loop — is physically coherent. The same underlying failure mode, a CO₂ scrubber overwhelmed by demand, nearly killed the Apollo 13 crew. The window to reach the airlock safely would be measured in single-digit minutes. What the sequence dramatizes is the Soviet engineering culture that made such improvisation necessary: aggressive weight-reduction targets created single-point failure modes that NASA's more conservative redundancy margins were built to prevent.
Rhys Ifans, Anna Maxwell Martin, and the Cast Behind the Iron Curtain
Rhys Ifans plays the Chief Designer — a thinly veiled Korolev, referred to throughout the show by his title rather than his name. The practice was real. Fordham University historian Asif Siddiqi, the author of the NASA-published Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945–1974, confirmed in Smithsonian Magazine that Korolev's identity was so closely guarded that a Soviet newspaper reader in the early 1960s would have encountered only his title — never his name. The show's use of "the Chief Designer" throughout is historically grounded, not a dramatic invention.
Co-creator Ben Nedivi explained the secrecy doctrine in a post-premiere interview with SYFY Wire: "They wanted him anonymous, afraid that if he was known, it would put his life in danger and the Soviet space program in danger."
Anna Maxwell Martin plays Col. Lyudmilla Raskova, the intelligence officer whose KGB apparatus tightens over Star City after a cosmonaut deviates from script during a live broadcast. Agnes O'Casey plays junior surveillance officer Irina Morozova. Alice Englert plays Anastasia Belikova. The ensemble earned notice in reviews for its commitment to the show's Cold War paranoia, even if the decision to cast British actors using their native accents generated some critical puzzlement.
For All Mankind Spinoff: Does the Alt-History Hold Up to Historical Scrutiny?
Siddiqi, one of the foremost scholars of the Soviet space program, offered a measured verdict on the show's central premise. Korolev's death "had a very negative effect on the Soviet space program as a whole, including their lunar program," he told Smithsonian. But he added a critical qualification: "I doubt the Soviets would've made the moon landing even if he had lived. There were already so many structural and organizational problems, even when he was alive."
That caveat is worth sitting with. The show's alt-history is not that Korolev's survival alone was sufficient — it is that his survival was the necessary condition under which those structural and organizational problems could be addressed. Whether they could have been resolved in the three years between 1966 and 1969 is a question the show wisely leaves dramatized rather than argued.
What the show does argue — and what holds up as historical analysis — is that the secrecy doctrine itself became a liability once the program achieved dominance. The same information-suppression apparatus that protected the space program from Western intelligence is the apparatus that falsely implicates cosmonaut Yana Akhmatova as a mole in the opening episode and nearly destroys the mission it was designed to protect. It is the show's most sophisticated structural insight: that institutional paranoia cannot be calibrated to suppress only the information it wants to suppress.
Soviet Engineering vs. NASA: Cluster Redundancy vs. Proven Reliability
The N1-versus-Saturn-V comparison that Star City dramatizes was, in hindsight, a debate about engineering philosophy rather than a contest between superior and inferior programs. Saturn V used five F-1 engines producing 33,360 kN of first-stage thrust through a gas-generator cycle — lower efficiency than staged combustion but thoroughly proven through full-duration static fire tests of each stage before flight. The N1 clustered 30 NK-15 engines for 44,000 kN of total thrust through staged combustion — higher theoretical efficiency but without the possibility of a full-stage ground test, because the NK-15's pyrotechnic valves could not be closed after firing.
The NK-33 — the improved successor engine intended for the upgraded N1F — was later proven to be among the highest-performance liquid oxygen/kerosene engines ever built. American engineers who visited Russia in the 1990s were reportedly astonished by its performance figures. Aerojet eventually purchased dozens of the engines, redesignated them the AJ26, and used them in Orbital Sciences' Antares rocket.
The deeper lesson — one that Star City never states directly but dramatizes through every engineering crisis — is that redundancy requires independence. Thirty engines sharing a vibration environment and electromagnetic field are not thirty independent systems. SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Starship first stage have since validated the multi-engine cluster philosophy, but with individual engine reliability and computational fault-isolation capabilities that the 1960s Soviet program could not achieve. The N1 was not a fundamentally flawed design. It was a technically ambitious design that ran out of time, money, and institutional stability.
What Is Star City About, and Do You Need to Watch For All Mankind First?
Star City is set in the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center outside Moscow in 1969 and the years immediately following the alternate-history Soviet moon landing. Unlike For All Mankind, which jumps forward by approximately a decade between each season, Star City stays anchored in the early Cold War era. Co-showrunner Matt Wolpert told Gizmodo that the series "lives in the 1970s. Cold War, spy thriller behind the Iron Curtain. And it's just that era."
The series was designed to work without prior viewing of the parent show. Nedivi said the creators' aim was for Star City to stand completely on its own — and that a viewer who starts here might then go back and watch For All Mankind to see the same alternate-history events from the American perspective.
Season 1 consists of 8 episodes. New episodes drop every Friday on Apple TV through the season finale on July 10, 2026. Apple TV is available for $12.99 per month.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Star City a good show?
Critics gave Star City a perfect 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes based on early reviews, with Variety calling it "a flawless alt-history thriller" and the Hollywood Reporter describing it as "breathlessly tense." The show is a darker, more espionage-driven companion to For All Mankind, built around Cold War paranoia rather than the optimism that characterized the original series. Reviewers noted that it functions equally well as a standalone for viewers unfamiliar with the parent show.
Do you need to watch For All Mankind before Star City?
No. The showrunners designed Star City specifically to work as a standalone series, with For All Mankind references treated as Easter eggs rather than required viewing. Co-creator Ben Nedivi said the team's hope is that new viewers who start with Star City will then go back and watch For All Mankind to see the same alternate-history events from the American perspective.
What is the N1 rocket, and why does it matter to Star City's story?
The N1 was the Soviet Union's answer to the Saturn V — a 30-engine, liquid-oxygen-fueled moon rocket that failed all four of its launch attempts between 1969 and 1972 in real history. Star City is set in the alternate timeline where Sergei Korolev, the Soviet chief designer who died before the N1 flew in reality, survived and resolved the cascade failure problems that doomed the rocket. The N1's 30-engine architecture, its KORD fault-management system, and its rivalry with Glushko's preferred propellant approach are all drawn directly from documented history.
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