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Cosmonauts: How Russia Won the Space Race

Michael Lachmann

Jonathan Renouf

Documentaries

Factual: Science & Nature: Science & Technology

13/10/2014

BBC Four - Cosmonauts: How Russia Won the Space Race

Documentary telling the story of how the Russians led us into the space age.

Documentary which maintains that the real pioneers of space exploration were the Soviet cosmonauts, telling the story of how the Russians led us into the space age.

When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon in 1969, America went down in popular history as the winner of the space race. However, 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.

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