Wernher von Braun and Sergei Korolev never meet, but for two decades their rocket designs fight the Cold War by proxy. Von Braun is the ex-Nazi engineer recruited by the Americans after the war, his past scrubbed for a NASA career; Korolev is the Soviet chief designer kept so secret that even his own country only knew him as 'The Chief Designer,' having survived a Gulag sentence before being handed the USSR's rocket program. This four-part BBC dramatized documentary, directed by Christopher Spencer and Mark Everest, follows both men from V-2 rockets and Sputnik through the launch of the first satellites and the buildup toward the Moon landing, with Richard Dillane and Ravil Isyanov leading the cast as the rival engineers. It plays the two national programs against each other beat by beat: funding fights, political pressure from Moscow and Washington, and the personal cost to scientists whose success is measured entirely in who gets to space first. The series treats the space race as a story of individuals absorbed by governments for a Cold War contest neither of them fully controls.