Exclusive: Star City Reinvents Apple’s Near-Perfect Sci-Fi Hit After Five Seasons — Inside the Bold New Vision

For All Mankind is expanding its sandbox, and this time the camera pivots to the other side of the Cold War. The spinoff Star City drops us behind the Iron Curtain, where winning the moon race did not make life simpler for the Soviets - it made everything scarier. Think rockets, secrets, and a lot of people who have to measure every word or pay for it.

What this show actually is

Created by Ben Nedivi, Matt Wolpert, and Ronald Moore, Star City is a political thriller set in an alternate history where the Soviet Union beat the United States to the moon. Instead of hanging out at NASA, the show embeds with cosmonauts, engineers, and intelligence officers living inside a system built on surveillance and silence. At the center is the Chief Designer, the brilliant architect of the Soviet space program, played by Rhys Ifans - a loyal son of the U.S.S.R. who is also very much playing his own game.

Different by design

Wolpert says the team didn’t want to just do For All Mankind with different flags. Their research pushed them into a totally different kind of story because the Soviet space program was, in practice, a secret city-state.

• Star City - the place where rockets were designed - literally didn’t appear on maps.
• The launch site in Kazakhstan was chosen because it was way out there. If something went wrong, it went wrong far from prying eyes.
• And things did go wrong: some rockets exploded on the pad, killing dozens. The public didn’t learn about those disasters for decades because of the intense secrecy.
• Workers couldn’t even admit where they worked when they were in Moscow. They never knew who might be listening, and inside Star City, watchers were everywhere.

All of that makes the place perfect for tense, messy human stories inside an authoritarian machine. Paranoia isn’t just a vibe here - it’s policy.

Meet the Chief Designer

Ifans is playing a walking contradiction in the best way: a man loyal to the state but driven by something more personal than propaganda. He describes the Chief Designer as a visionary with bottomless curiosity, trying to steer a program that serves itself first and science second. The space race, on both sides, was about being first, not about understanding the universe. That’s not what fuels this guy. He’s chasing the wonder he had as a kid staring at the moon and thinking, What’s up there?

Building the character

Ifans dug into the real history, reading extensively about Sergei Korolev - the real-world inspiration for the Chief Designer - and about life in the U.S.S.R., culturally and politically. Star City, he points out, cranked the surveillance up even higher than the rest of the country. Imagine living in a factory town so secret most people don’t know it exists, while every move you make is scrutinized.

But here’s the human wrinkle he likes: people adapt, bend rules, and find mischief, even in oppressive systems. One vivid detail he came across: alcohol was banned in Star City, but alcohol is also a key component in certain rocket fuels. You can guess where some of that ended up. It’s darkly funny and a little alarming - which is kind of the tone of the whole endeavor.

The fuse is already lit

Co-creator Ben Nedivi says the season is basically a slow, nerve-racking march toward an explosion. The second the Chief Designer starts pursuing a secret mission, the risk spikes for everyone around him. From episode one, the stakes are high and only climb as the mission inches closer to reality - which, let’s be honest, feels like an invitation for catastrophe.

That push-pull is the Soviet program in miniature: breathtaking achievements, matched by brutal costs both in orbit and on the ground. In fact, Nedivi argues the danger may be worse on Earth than in space. The show leans into that - not just the missions themselves, but the fallout when people come home. Expect that pressure to peak by the end of the season.

'Without them, we’d still be sitting in fields eating berries.'

So yes, the show has spies, conspiracies, and back-channel deals, but the real hook is watching brilliant, flawed people try to do the impossible while a system built on fear watches their every move. It’s a powder keg. The fun - and the anxiety - is waiting to see what lights it.