The most exciting thing in Star City 1.4 -- at least, to me -- is Chief Designer Sergei Korolev moving ahead with his plans for a ship with cosmonauts to go to Venus. This, of course, never happened in our reality, because the real Korolev had died by this time (the early 1970s), and the Soviets pretty much had lost interest in bigtime expeditions into the solar system.
In Star City the series, the Soviets are still gung ho about space, and Venus is a nice counterpoint to Mars as a focus in For All Mankind, after everyone got to the Moon. But Korolev has to contend with not only the exquisitely difficult engineering, but the excruciatingly intrusive Soviet KGB, which are breathing down his neck, and everyone else in the successful space program, every minute of the night and day.
In the Soviet Union, everyone's under observation, anyone could be spying for the Americans, and anyone could be working for the KGB. On the one hand, the Soviets are justified in their concern about the Americans stealing some of the ingredients that got the Soviets so far thus far, and could to lead to far greater accomplishments -- like Soviets on Venus -- in the very near future. On the other hand, the KGB are always on the verge of doing serious damage to the Soviet space program, and as we just saw last week, their meddling -- which it turns out was justified -- already got one cosmonaut killed.
Star City has done a good job at portraying this volatile pressure cooker, and at this point, it's every bit as much as a good espionage thriller, as it is a significant piece and counterpoint to the alternate history space travel saga being done so well by For All Mankind.
See also Star City 1.1-1.2: Fascism and Space ... 1.3 Sadness and Joy
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