Rhys Ifans Leads Star City as Apple Tv New Sci-fi Series Revisits 1969
Rhys Ifans leads apple tv new sci-fi series Star City as the For All Mankind spin-off opens with Alexei Leonov planting the USSR flag on the lunar surface. The series shifts the alternate-history space race back to the Soviet side, putting the mission-control chain of command at the center of the story instead of the usual Apollo mythology.
Ifans plays the Chief Designer, the title used for Sergei Korolev during his lifetime, and the show places that office inside the machinery that drove the Soviet program. That setup gives the new series a cleaner industrial focus than a simple nostalgia play: who made decisions, who carried them out, and how the Soviet effort reached the Moon in this version of events.
Korolev’s 1966 split
Sergei Korolev died during surgery in 1966, and the creators of For All Mankind marked that moment as the point where their fictional universe diverged from history. In their theory, if Korolev had lived, the USSR would have kept its advantage in the Space Race and beaten Apollo 11 to the Moon in 1969. Star City uses that break in history as its operating premise.
Korolev was a Ukraine-born engineer who oversaw the development of the R-7 rocket, Sputnik, and Vostok programs. Those credentials explain why his absence becomes the series’ structural fault line: remove him, and the entire alternate timeline depends on whether Soviet momentum can survive without its central architect.
Leonov on the lunar surface
Star City opens with Alexei Leonov planting the flag of the USSR on the lunar surface, putting the Soviet side of the landing at the front of the frame. The choice matters because the stories of NASA and Apollo have long passed into folklore, while the Soviet side has often been shrouded in secrecy.
For viewers of the five-season For All Mankind universe, that shift is the point. The franchise has already carried its alternate-history space race into the 21st century, but Star City rewinds to the earlier Soviet chapter and lets the audience watch the mission from the room where the decisions were made.
Star City and the space race
The Chief Designer is the story’s pressure point, not the astronauts alone, because the series treats mission control as the place where Soviet ambition either holds together or slips. That makes Star City less about retelling a known landing than about showing how a hidden bureaucratic center shaped the history that viewers think they know.
With Leonov on the Moon and Ifans in mission control, the spin-off is betting that the Soviet side of the space race can carry the same narrative weight the American side has had for decades. If it does, the larger For All Mankind universe gains its sharpest correction yet: the Moon landing story is no longer only Apollo’s to own.
