Explore the true story behind Star City and humanity’s obsession with Venus: from the 1960s Soviet TMK project to the modern feasibility of crewed deep-space flybys.
Star City, landing on Apple TV+ with its first season in 2026, gives us another chance to look back at history through the alternate reality of For All Mankind. Once again, it’s hard not to wonder just how realistic these space missions actually are: even though we all know it’s fiction, the story feels so believable that it immediately makes us want to dig deeper and see how much of it is rooted in real-life history.
We know perfectly well that, historically, a Soviet cosmonaut wasn’t the first person to step onto the Moon. That is the huge premise behind the entire universe of For All Mankind and Star City: an alternate world where the 1960s Space Race was won by the Soviet Union instead of the United States, completely changing the course of history. Star City shows us that universe from the other side—the Soviet perspective—where the thrill of winning gives them the perfect momentum to push even further into the cosmos.
Throughout the first season, we watch the Soviet leadership pressure Chief Engineer Sergei Korolev (who was a key figure in real history) to map out the next steps for exploring the Moon after their historic landing. But instead, we see a Korolev obsessed with an even bigger dream: putting a human being on Venus. As viewers, it’s only natural to wonder how much truth lies behind these Cold War missions to Venus, and just how close to reality this incredible Soviet obsession really was.
From the Moon to Venus: The True Story Behind Star City
In 1969, humanity set foot on the Moon for the very first time, and that part is true history. The only difference is who got there first: in the real world, it was American astronaut Neil Armstrong, while in Star City, it is the Russian cosmonaut Alexei Leonov.
In both real history and the universe of For All Mankind and Star City, this moment represents a massive milestone in human evolution. The 1960s Space Race was the ultimate symbol of the power and potential that the United States and the Soviet Union were competing over. Two societies built on completely opposite ways of life, locking horns ideologically and technologically across multiple fronts, each trying to score a symbolic victory over the other. And nothing mattered more than achievements in space, as the ultimate proof of a superpower’s capability to push humanity into the future.
Both superpowers poured staggering amounts of money into the race, desperate to hit a major milestone before the other. Landing a man on the Moon was technically possible with the technology of the era, but it required rushing the timeline because the ultimate prize was on the line: going down in history as the most advanced nation on Earth. Johnson on one side and Brezhnev on the other injected a massive percentage of their country’s GDP into their respective space programs, all to get a definitive result before 1970. And that’s exactly what happened when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface on July 21, 1969.
Hitting that symbolic finish line completely changed the nature of the competition. The sprint was officially over, a winner had been crowned, and from that point forward, human space exploration slowed down, becoming far less obsessed with political propaganda. For both superpowers, this meant mapping out new goals and shifting their focus toward entirely different frontiers.
This is exactly what we see in the second episode of Star City. In the show, the Soviet Union sets its next sight on building a human base on the Moon—once again trying to beat the Americans to the punch. But the ultimate goal of Chief Engineer Sergei Korolev is something else entirely: he wants to put a human being on Venus. This is a whole different level of ambition, opening the door to a fascinating historical question: how much truth is there to the stories of Venus space missions during the 1960s Space Race?
Mankind and Venus: An Enduring Fascination
Humanity’s obsession with Venus is indeed a true story, beginning in the early 1960s. As the planet immediately closer to the Sun than Earth, the average distance between us made Venus the seemingly most feasible target for the next frontier of space missions: conquering our very first planet. In the 1960s, man knew very little about Venus: a planet permanently shrouded in a thick layer of clouds that prevented telescopes from seeing the surface, leaving immense room for imagination. In fact, in the early 1960s, many scientists believed it plausible that the surface of Venus was hospitable, with a mild environment compatible with a “space walk.”
When space missions to Venus began to become a reality, the truth hit humanity like a punch to the gut. The first nation to approach Venus was actually the Soviet Union in 1961, eight years before the moon landing, with the twin Venera 1 missions. Specifically, the Sputnik 8 spacecraft was the first man-made object to come within 100,000 kilometers of Venus, though it failed to send any readings back to Earth. At the time, the reason for that failure was blamed on overheating from the sun’s rays.
The first signs of a truth of a completely different nature arrived in 1962, with NASA’s Mariner 2 mission. Officially the first space mission to Venus to be considered a success: a probe managed to take temperature measurements of the Venusian atmosphere, bringing back a shocking data point: the upper layers of the atmosphere registered a temperature of around 500°C (932°F). Being closer to the Sun than Earth, it was already assumed that Venus would be a hotter planet with higher atmospheric pressure, but Mariner 2’s measurements went far beyond any hypothesis.
The challenge remained open, and the space missions continued. In 1967, the Soviet Venera 4 mission marked the first entry into the atmosphere of Venus. The probe deployed its parachute at an altitude of 52 kilometers from the Venusian surface, eventually closing in to a height of 26 kilometers, reaching a temperature of 262°C (504°F) and a pressure of 22 Earth atmospheres. At that point, transmissions cut off abruptly, but important information about the composition of the atmosphere near the surface still reached Earth.
In the following years, it became increasingly clear that the surface of Venus was completely inaccessible to man. Venus turned into a challenge of who could make their presence and measurements near the planet last the longest. Since the temperatures and atmospheric pressure were already capable of destroying most heavy metals on Earth, space missions focused on making the probes last as long as possible in the vicinity of Venus.
As the years passed, human achievements grew more significant. In 1970, the Soviet Venera 7 mission recorded the first soft landing on the surface of Venus and managed to transmit information to Earth for twenty minutes. In 1975, Venera 9 (again, a Soviet mission) managed for the first time to transmit images of the surface of Venus to Earth, and in 1981 Venera 13 recorded for the first time the sounds on the surface of the planet.
And the story continues: Russia is working on a future Venera 17 mission (also known as Venera-D, from the Russian word meaning “long-lasting”), with plans to operate on the surface of Venus for more than three hours.
Sergei Korolev’s Obsession in Star City: The True Story of the Human Mission to Venus
At this point, a question arises naturally: if it was already clear by the early 1960s that the temperatures and atmospheric pressure on Venus were lethal, isn’t it unrealistic for a visionary like Korolev to propose a human mission to Venus in 1969? In real history, Korolev died in 1966, but even in the timeline of Star City where he survives—how could he possibly imagine sending humans to Venus, given the data available to science at the time?
The answer lies in an ambitious space program the Soviet Union envisioned in the 1960s. It was called the TMK project. The ultimate goal: send a crew into orbit around Earth’s closest neighbors, Mars and Venus, and then bring them back to Earth.
The history of this fascinating project is detailed in this article on The National Interest. While the Americans were focusing most of their efforts on the Moon, the Soviet Union had already begun theorizing a crewed mission to Mars back in the 1950s. And soon, the project expanded, tracking the possibility of an actual surface landing.
What Korolev speaks of in the parallel reality of Star City is presumably a brilliant nod to the TMK-MAVR variant, which planned for a pass through Venus’s orbit after the crew had completed their journey around Mars. We are talking about blueprints that, at the time, were highly premature, and in fact never saw the light of day: the Soviet Union halted its studies in the second half of the 1960s, after realizing that the most advanced rockets of the era lacked the power to launch a structure heavy enough to manage a voyage to Mars.
In a clever and fascinating reimagining of history, Star City shows us how the ambition to get humans close to Venus (and Mars) was still very much alive within the Soviet Union’s goals during the Cold War: in the true story of space exploration, Korolev had truly been the driving force behind those projects, up until just a few months before his death.
Modern Feasibility and Future Horizons
Compared to the 1960s, the technology at our disposal today is far more advanced. Propulsion problems have been solved—proven by the success of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS), which just a few months ago, in April 2026, sent a crew of four astronauts into orbit around the Moon.
And alongside the technical challenge of launching multi-ton vehicles into deep space, science has also proven our ability to sustain human life out there for long periods, with instances of astronauts staying aboard the International Space Station for well over a year.
In fact, feasibility studies for sending a crewed mission around Mars have recently resurfaced: this concept published in 2023 even includes a swing past Venus’s orbit to ease the return journey by leveraging the planet’s gravity. In other words, the 1960s vision of the Soviet Union and the TMK project is still alive. And who knows—perhaps in the next decade we will see a real space mission successfully send a team of astronauts close to Mars.
In the meantime, for us mere mortals daydreaming in front of our TV screens, all we can do is let ourselves be captivated by the ambitions shown in Star City by those 1960s scientists: a way to bring a piece of a true story into our present day, reminding us that sixty years ago, humanity was already imagining a space mission that we are still actively studying today.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes, the core premise is rooted in real history. While landing a human on the surface of Venus was entirely impossible due to extreme heat and crushing atmospheric pressure, the show’s dialogue directly references the real, top-secret Soviet TMK-MAVR program of the 1960s. This project aimed to send cosmonauts on a deep-space flyby past Mars and Venus without ever touching the surface.
In real life, Sergei Korolev’s design bureau (OKB-1) actively spearheaded the TMK interplanetary spacecraft designs during the height of the Space Race. However, Korolev passed away in 1966 before these plans could progress past the drawing board. Star City presents an alternate history timeline where Korolev survives into 1969 to continue fighting for his deep-space vision.
The ultimate undoing of the TMK program was the failure of the N1 heavy-lift rocket. The massive interplanetary spacecraft required immense lifting power to be launched and assembled in Low Earth Orbit. Because the N1 rocket failed multiple test flights, the Soviet Union could never get the necessary hardware into space, leading to the quiet cancellation of the project in the late 1960s.
The surface of Venus is a literal furnace, averaging temperatures around 500°C (932°F) with an atmospheric pressure 92 times greater than Earth’s—enough to instantly crush and melt most metals. Historically, Soviet probes like Venera 7 (1970) and Venera 9 (1975) only managed to survive on the surface for a few short minutes to an hour before being destroyed by the hostile environment.
Absolutely. Modern aerospace engineering has finally caught up to the 1960s Soviet blueprints. With super-heavy launch vehicles like NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS)—which recently sent a crewed mission around the Moon—and decades of life-support data from the International Space Station, the technology exists. Current 21st-century deep-space proposals actively mirror the TMK-MAVR concept, utilizing a Venus gravity slingshot to safely hurl a crewed habitat around Mars and back to Earth.
