TV REVIEW : ‘Russian Right Stuff’: How the Soviets Met the Space Challenge

A thousand years from now, when historians look back on this century, one series of events will stand out as marking a major turning point in the evolution of the human species. For it was in the third quarter of the 20th Century that humans began to break the bonds that hold them to this planet and take their first, albeit very tentative, steps into space.

As the years roll on, it may well be that the context in which those events unfolded will fade in the face of the enormous challenges that had to be met and the great adventures that followed. That would be a pity, because above all else the conquest of space has been a human drama, acted out against a backdrop of international intrigue, conflicting ideologies and personal losses.

In the United States, a young President’s bold challenge to put a man on the moon and bring him back safely led to a decade of exploration that is without parallel in human history. And it was staged in a public arena where all could watch the foibles as well as the triumphs.

But that was only half the story. The U.S. space program grew out of a direct response to achievements on the other side of the world by a nation that seemed to be passing the United States in technological prowess. When the Soviet Union launched the first man-made satellite, Sputnik’s haunting beep-beep-beep thrilled and chilled Americans and made them question their own technological competence.

The result was the space race, but Americans knew only what the Soviets wanted them to know, about half of the story. There were occasional glimpses behind the scenes of the Soviet space program, but most of the story remained hidden until the late 1980s, when changes swept across the Soviet Union.

Today, Western correspondents are permitted to prowl through once-secret installations scattered across the Soviet Union and ask probing questions of the men who gave that nation a dynamic space program that stands as a monument to Soviet science and technology.

One result of that openness is a penetrating three-part “Nova” series that examines in great detail the origins and the heartbreaks of the Soviet space program. “Russian Right Stuff” airs tonight, Wednesday and Thursday at 8 p.m. on Channels 28 and 15. Although the program stresses the exclusivity angle a little too much, considering the access to Soviet officials available to journalists in recent years, it does fill in many gaps in our understanding of what was happening in the early years of the Soviet space program.

The series provides a valuable historical perspective on the space race, and it is rich with interviews of the personable engineers and scientists who made that program what it became. It is always startling to see how much these mysterious figures are like us.

Tonight’s program on “The Invisible Spaceman” tells the story of Sergei Korolev, a dynamic engineer who came out of a prison camp to lead his nation into the forefront of space exploration. For many years the Soviet program was the personification of the vision of this man.

In the days when the U.S. Apollo program was reaching for the moon, few seriously doubted that the Soviets were on a similar course. But only recently have we begun to learn how close they were, or how troubled their program had become. “Nova” details that story in Wednesday’s installment, “The Dark Side of the Moon.”

The final installment, to air Thursday, tells the story of the space race that the Soviets won. The Soviet Union is the only nation with a permanently manned orbiting space station. U.S. space officials have struggled for years to build their own station, but it is now deeply mired in controversy and probably will not be operational this century.

“The Mission” tells the story of the Soviet space station as seen through the eyes of two cosmonauts who spent a recent tour aboard the facility, and for a while were threatened by problems that forced them to go outside of their vehicle and make repairs that permitted them to return safely to Earth.

The “Nova” series is a little chopped up and hard to follow at times, and it sidesteps such issues as the sexism that has left the Soviet program almost devoid of women, but it is a valuable glimpse into a program that for so long remained so hidden.