Red Moon Rising - The Soviet Union's Secret Lunar Plan

The Soviet Union was deemed to be just ahead in the space race, but the Americans got to the moon first. Fifty years after the moon landing: A film about the space race, Moscow's secret lunar program and its spectacular failure.

After catching the world by surprise with its launch of the first-ever artificial Earth satellite, everyone assumed the Russians would also be the first to put a human on the moon. But the Russians ended up losing the 20th Century's most prestigious race. And it was to be decades before the world even found out about the top secret Soviet lunar program, because, according to Politburo logic, you can't lose a race if you haven't officially joined it. There were no official communiqués in the media, and the Soviet leadership was keeping quiet. Years passed before NASA's satellites detected any signs of a Soviet lunar program. In fact, there was actually nothing to discover until 1964, three years after John F. Kennedy had announced the Apollo program, when suspicious construction sites started to spring up around Baikonur in southern Kazakhstan. The Soviet secret lunar program: A tale of monumental miscalculations, quarrels, and even death in this the Soviet Union's defeat in its struggle with the USA to master space.