Cosmonauts: How Russia Won the Space Race
MovieTitle | Cosmonauts: How Russia Won the Space Race |
User score | 7.3 |
Release date | Oct 13, 2014 |
Genre | Documentary |
Director | Michael Lachmann |
Production country | United Kingdom |
Production companies | BBC |
Run time | 90 min. |
When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon in 1969, America went down in popular history as the winner of the space race. But that history is bunk. The real pioneers of space exploration were the Soviet cosmonauts. This remarkable feature-length documentary combines rare and unseen archive footage with interviews with the surviving cosmonauts to tell the fascinating and at times terrifying story of how the Russians led us into the space age. A particular highlight is Alexei Leonov, the man who performed the first spacewalk, explaining how he found himself trapped outside his spacecraft 500 miles above the Earth. Scary stuff.