We all think we know the story of space...
NEIL ARMSTRONG: OK, I'm going to step off the LEM now.
..that it was conquered by the Americans.
But that's not the real story.
The actual conquerors of space were a dedicated group of men, and women,
from the other side of the Iron Curtain.
MUFFLED RADIO COMMUNICATION
After decades of secrecy,
they are now free to tell the extraordinary stories
of how they risked everything to take the first steps into space.
TRANSLATION:
A treasure trove of unseen footage from the Russian archives
reveals how, time and again, the Soviets beat
the more sophisticated American programme into second place.
But along with the triumphs, there have also been tragedies
and disasters that have carried on to the present day.
BEEPING
This is the remarkable, and at times terrifying,
story of the Cosmonauts.
TRANSLATION:
On April 12th, 1961,
Yuri Gagarin ushered the human race into the Space Age.
Gagarin's flight was one of the great moments in human history.
For the first time, we had left our home planet
and entered the cosmos.
We saw our world in a completely new light.
Gagarin became the first man to see the Earth from space -
and to marvel at the thin blue line of its atmosphere.
Their Cold War rivals, the Americans, looked on, amazed.
Their own space programme had been developing
under the guidance of the German rocket engineer Wernher von Braun.
They assumed that the first man in space would be an American -
and certainly not Russian.
The ordinary American couldn't understand
how this country which had always been presented as being backward,
you know, a nation of potato-farmers,
um, could do something so astoundingly perfect
in a technological and scientific sense.
CHANTING
But how had they done it?
How had this nation of potato farmers
beaten the Americans into space?
The origins of the Soviet Space programme
can be found in the wreckage of the Second World War.
By 1945, the Soviets had lost 25 million men.
Hundreds of cities had been destroyed.
The country was in ruins.
But they had great hopes that, after the war,
their sacrifices would earn them a position of global influence.
That they would be the equal of their great rivals, the Americans.
But those illusions were shattered by a single devastating event.
EXPLOSION
Hiroshima showed that, in the new world order,
power and influence would not be measured in terms of manpower,
but in terms of technology.
And the deployment of the atomic bomb
showed how far ahead the Americans were.
If they were going to compete on the world stage,
the Russians had to catch up.
And they did so, with remarkable speed.
Within just four years,
they had produced an atomic bomb of their own.
But at over five tonnes, the Russian bomb
was more than twice as heavy as the American devices.
It was this massive bomb that would kick-start the space race.
Because the Americans developed
much smaller nuclear weapons
at an earlier stage,
they built smaller rockets.
But because the Soviets' nuclear weapons are so heavy,
they have to develop very powerful rockets
to make them into effective missiles.
And that has an impact on, eventually, their space programme.
To launch their massive bomb all the way to America...
EXPLOSION
..the Soviets would need the most powerful missile ever built.
The man charged with building that rocket
was Sergei Pavlovich Korolev.
He was so important to the Soviets
that to protect him from the threat of assassination,
his identity was kept secret.
He was known simply as the Chief Designer.
Sergei Korolev was known as the founding father
of the Soviet space programme.
I wouldn't call him necessarily a scientist -
he was really a genius manager. That's what he really was.
He was manager, engineer, inspirational figure,
politician. He knew how to get the job done,
he knew how to work the levers of power.
He was all these things moulded into one.
In many ways, Korolev was an odd choice.
In 1939, Stalin had declared him an enemy of the state...
..and sent him to the infamous Gulag prison camps,
where he was expected to die.
But as World War II got going, the Soviets realised
that they needed all their engineers,
and he was summoned back to Moscow.
Within just six years, he was in charge
of their entire missile programme.
For a decade after the war, he experimented.
Starting by reconstructing V2 rockets captured from the Germans,
he gradually developed bigger and bigger missiles.
Until, by 1957, he had created his masterpiece -
the R7 Semyorka.
34 metres tall, weighing 280 tonnes,
and powered by a mixture of liquid oxygen and kerosene,
it was nine times more powerful than anything that had been built before.
One of the launch team
was a 26-year-old engineer called Georgi Grechko.
It looked like the R7 would be an expensive failure.
But on August 21st, 1957, a final test was planned.
It was a complete success.
Producing nearly 400 tons of thrust,
the engines lifted the missile from the launch pad,
powering it towards its target,
3,500 miles away in Kamchatka.
It was the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile.
With it, Korolev, at a stroke,
had transformed the Russians into a global superpower.
Though the R7's ultimate destiny would not be as a weapon.
GRECHKO:
Korolev had always had other plans for the R7.
Ever since he'd started building rockets in the 1930s,
he'd dreamt of using them to go into space.
Now he had his rocket, he wasted no time.
His engineers were already working on a simple satellite -
nothing more than a radio transmitter
encased in a metal sphere.
Korolev called it Sputnik, or "fellow traveller".
If he could launch it into orbit,
he would be the first to prove that space travel was possible.
Less than six weeks after the R7s first successful test,
he had another rocket on the launch pad,
ready to send Sputnik into orbit.
Calculating the trajectory of an orbital launch was more complicated
than the simple up and down of a ballistic missile launch.
To launch a satellite,
rather than going straight up,
the rocket's trajectory
had to flatten off so that
instead of falling back to Earth
it would fall into orbit.
It seemed that the launch had gone perfectly.
But the only way to know that Sputnik had made it
safely into orbit was to wait for the radio signals
beamed from the tiny satellite.
BEEPING
CHEERFUL MUSIC PLAYS
Around the world, people went Sputnik-crazy.
They queued up to try to catch sight of the Earth's second moon
crossing the sky.
But not everyone was looking up with admiration.
In the United States, the appearance of Sputnik
only fuelled their Cold War paranoia.
America was already consumed by the threat of Communism.
It's a conspiracy to take over our government by force.
If I had my way about it, they'd all be sent back to Russia,
or some other unpleasant place.
Many were convinced that the country had been
infiltrated by Communist spies planning a revolution.
RUSSIAN ACCENT: Americans. They have too many freedoms.
That is another thing you must remember, comrade.
For one day it will be your mission
to destroy those bourgeois capitalist freedoms.
And this new Soviet star flying over their heads
was surely part of that plot.
We should have been the first ones to have it.
Somebody's falling down on the job. Badly.
We fear this. We fear that they have something out there
the majority of people don't know about.
The Americans assumed that the Russians were sinister people.
So they put an enormous amount of effort into trying to decode
this "beep-beep", assuming that it was sending signals
for other missile strikes, or surveillance, or whatever.
They couldn't accept what it was the Sputnik was saying,
which was, simply, "Beep-beep. Beep-beep."
SPUTNIK BEEPS
But for all its simplicity, Sputnik was a brilliant propaganda coup.
And the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev
was desperate for more.
It seemed an impossible task.
Khrushchev had given Korolev just five weeks
to launch another mission.
In his secret headquarters,
Korolev leapt at the chance to demonstrate his plans
for the domination of space.
Within the month, he would launch another satellite -
but this one would carry a passenger.
The first cosmonaut would be a dog called Laika.
She was a stray who'd been found on the streets of Moscow
and chosen for the mission
because of her unmatched ability to sit still.
Now she was loaded into a specially built capsule,
complete with food and water trays.
And for two days she waited patiently
at the top of the rocket
as it was fuelled and readied for lift-off.
Live pictures of Laika sitting comfortably in her canister
were broadcast back to Earth.
It was a massive leap for animalkind.
But for Laika, it would be a one-way trip.
For many years, the Russians claimed
she survived in orbit for several days.
But in 2002, they finally admitted
that the climate controls had failed
and she died of overheating after only six hours.
But Laika's sacrifice provided the Russians
with a second precious propaganda victory.
For the Americans, it was another kick in the teeth.
They're still reeling from what Sputnik says,
but suddenly the programme has been taken in a completely different
and unexpected direction.
It's not about satellites any more, it's about space travel.
Because...if the Russians are able to put a living being,
a dog, into a space capsule, and launch them into orbit,
that also suggests that they'll be able shortly to do so
with a human being. So this again underlines to the Americans
just how far behind the Russians they are.
It was now the Americans' turn to play catch-up.
At the beginning of December 1957,
they were ready to launch their first satellite.
Millions tuned in to live pictures of the Vanguard rocket lifting off.
It was a total humiliation.
It underlined just how comprehensively the Soviets
had won the first stage of the Space Race.
The next stage of the contest
would be to see who could put the first man into orbit.
By the early 1960s, 20 potential cosmonauts
were training in total secrecy in the Russian countryside.
Among them was a young airman called Alexei Leonov.
LEONOV, TRANSLATION:
But as well as extreme fitness,
the cosmonauts also had to train for the rigours of space.
No-one knew what to expect, so they prepared for everything.
They had to be able to withstand the high G-forces
expected on take-off and landing.
They were locked in soundproof rooms for days at a time
to train them for the psychological isolation of space.
And, worst of all, they had to prepare for the possibility
of being trapped inside a wildly spinning capsule.
On the other side of the Iron Curtain,
the Americans were also feverishly working to send a man into space.
And they'd been rapidly catching up with the Soviets.
So much so that astronaut Alan Shepard
was scheduled to become the first man in space on March 6th, 1961.
Alan B Shepard, from East Derry, New Hampshire.
I don't think there's any question
that we are on the threshold of space travel.
But before they launched a human,
they planned one final test flight carrying a chimp called Ham.
But the mission did not go as well as expected.
A mistake in the navigation system
sent the rocket on to the wrong trajectory -
and the capsule splashed down in the ocean, 100 miles off-target.
By the time the retrieval vessel reached the capsule,
Ham had almost drowned.
In response, Shepard's flight was postponed.
And that delay gave the Russians a crucial opportunity.
Within weeks, Korolev went to meet the cosmonauts for the first time.
Most people thought the competition to be the first Soviet in space
had come down to two candidates -
Yuri Gagarin...
..and Gherman Titov.
And now Korolev would make his choice.
Korolev knew that if he succeeded,
Gagarin's face would be on the front of every newspaper in the world.
But they had no time to lose if they were going to beat the Americans.
Just four days after that first meeting, Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin
was suited up and taken to the launch pad
to be strapped into the Vostok capsule.
Of the seven unmanned test flights of Vostok,
only two had returned to Earth safely.
Some feared they were rushing to launch before they were ready.
They were taking an incredible risk
launching Yuri Gagarin into space in 1961.
It was an extremely risky mission.
Rockets were constantly exploding -
there was a fair-to-good chance that he might not survive that launch.
MUFFLED RADIO COMMUNICATION IN RUSSIAN
On that morning in 1961,
Yuri Gagarin went where no man had gone before.
To everyone's relief, the rocket delivered him safely into orbit.
MUFFLED RADIO COMMUNICATION
It would take him an hour and a quarter to circle the planet.
Cocooned within Vostok, this was in many ways
the easiest part of the mission.
The real challenge was to return him safely to Earth.
The flight of Yuri Gagarin was a very dramatic flight,
and there were many points where things certainly went wrong,
and that could have ended the flight in disaster,
including, most significantly, the re-entry.
At 10:25, as he passed over West Africa,
with 8,000km still to go,
Vostok's retro-rockets fired, slowing the capsule down
and sending it back towards the Earth.
In order to safely re-enter the Earth's atmosphere,
the spherical landing capsule had to separate
from the rest of the spacecraft.
But the straps didn't release...
..and the whole craft started spinning dangerously
towards the Earth.
As it re-entered the atmosphere,
the friction of the air tore at the capsule.
Gagarin reported seeing flames pass the windows
and a burning smell in the cabin.
Finally, the straps melted,
freeing the landing capsule, allowing it to stabilise.
At an altitude of 7,000m,
Gagarin ejected and parachuted to the ground.
He landed several hundred kilometres off-course
in a field near the Volga River.
Gagarin was given a hero's welcome.
BAND PLAYS, PEOPLE SING
He had been promoted while still in space.
And wearing a borrowed Major's jacket,
he was greeted at the airport by Nikita Khrushchev himself.
My father gave him a big hug
and accompanied him to the door of his open limo
and told him, "You're the hero and I will follow you."
And Gagarin said, "No, no, Comrade Khrushchev,
"it was your achievement too. Please join us."
So it was the biggest celebration of the Soviet Union,
as big as the victory in 1945.
SINGING, TRANSLATED:
He toured the world.
The first man OFF the planet became the most famous man ON it.
The symbol of the Soviets' unchallenged mastery of space.
The world was captivated as it waited to see
where the next battle in the Space Race would be fought.
This is OK. Rate of descent is reading about 35 feet a second.
Alan Shepard became the second man in space just four weeks later.
My condition is still good, I'm getting ready for impact.
But his 15-minute sub-orbital flight
was a damp squib compared to Gagarin's triumph.
Even though they had made it into space less than a month
after the Soviets, it was yet another embarrassing defeat.
President Kennedy desperately needed to find a way
to beat the Russians and restore his country's battered prestige.
We choose to go to the moon!
We choose to go to the moon...
We choose to go to the moon in this decade
and do the other things, not because they are easy,
but because they are hard.
Going to the moon was certainly going to be hard.
The furthest any mission had flown so far
was just 200 miles above the Earth's surface.
The moon was a quarter of a million miles away,
and getting there was going to be expensive.
Swing into the orbit of more than 2.5 million families right now,
with the happy-go-spending,
buy-it-now young adults of today.
With their booming economy, the Americans were able
to immediately commit huge amounts of money
to developing a lunar programme that could venture so far from the Earth.
Korolev had also drawn up plans for a moon mission.
But his political masters were unwilling to bankroll
such an expensive venture.
Korolev said, "We have to build the new launcher,
"and it will be expensive."
And my father asked how much.
And Korolev told, "I don't know, but it is not important."
My father said, "It is not important for you,
"but it's very important for me.
"And we, in this Soviet Union, have other priorities.
"We need to increase production of food.
"Still we have shortages.
"We need to build more and more homes.
"And I don't want to spend all this money
"only to beat Americans on the race to the moon."
Instead, Korolev continued with his much cheaper R7 rocket,
launching a string of missions into low Earth orbit,
each of which scored a new propaganda victory.
MUSIC PLAYS
In August 1961, Gherman Titov
became the first person to spend more than a day in orbit.
A few months later, Korolev launched two spacecraft -
Vostok 3 and 4 -
that orbited the planet simultaneously.
In June 1963, Valery Bykovsky
orbited the Earth for nearly five days -
still the longest solo flight.
And just two days later he was joined in orbit
by Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space.
CHEERING
I think it's simply marvellous.
I never thought I should live to see such a thing in my lifetime.
I think it's a wonderful achievement,
and I think we might be able to persuade the wife
it would be a good idea, if I could, to get her to go up there.
But by now, the outside world was beginning to notice
that despite the noisy propaganda,
there was a remarkable similarity between all the Soviet missions.
The Russians had a big rocket, they put a capsule on this rocket,
and then they put a man in the capsule.
And that was their stunt.
And they repeated that stunt in different ways.
The idea was to give the impression to the Americans
that they were actually moving forward, that they were way ahead,
when in fact they were doing the same thing over and over again.
Finally, Khrushchev relented.
In one of his last acts as Premier, he signed the decree
authorising the development of a moon programme.
They had given the Americans a three-year head start,
and now it was a question of whether the Soviets could catch up.
Korolev knew the Americans were already preparing
to launch their first two-man missions.
Determined not to be upstaged, he'd planned another spectacular first.
On March 18th, 1965, on a freezing morning in Kazakhstan,
another R7 was being prepared for launch.
Pavel Belyayev and Alexei Leonov
would both have to squeeze into the tiny capsule,
which had been renamed Voskhod.
The plan was that, once the capsule reached orbit,
the crew would extend an inflatable canvas airlock,
and Leonov would crawl through that airlock
to become the first man to walk in space.
Leonov had started preparing for the mission two years earlier.
By the time they reached orbit,
the crew should have been prepared for anything.
As Leonov pushed himself through the airlock
he became the first man to drift free in space...
..nearly 500km up.
It was the furthest and most isolated
any human had ever been from the surface of the Earth.
As he drifted in the vacuum of space,
the greater air pressure inside his suit was causing it to expand
like a balloon.
But as Leonov tried to deflate his suit,
he ran the risk of starving himself of oxygen.
As Leonov recovered,
they noticed that the oxygen pressure inside the capsule
was steadily rising,
until the whole atmosphere became dangerously inflammable.
Four years earlier, cosmonaut trainee Valentin Bondarenko
had burned alive in a training accident in an oxygen-rich chamber.
Two years later, the crew of Apollo 1
would die in a similar training accident.
But worse was to come.
When the time came to return to Earth,
their automatic re-entry system failed.
They would have to fire the retro rockets manually.
But they would have little control over where they landed.
So they needed to find a huge uninhabited area
that they could aim for.
The Taiga is a vast, almost uninhabited area of forest
in Russia's frozen north.
Although they touched down safely,
the two spacemen were now stranded on Earth.
No-one in mission control knew where they were or if they were alive.
HE MIMICS RADIO BLEEPS
For eight years, the Russian's had blazed a trail
through the Space Race.
But Leonov's spacewalk marked the end of the first
golden age of the Soviet space programme.
The Americans' lavish spending on their moon programme was paying off.
Within days, they would welcome back the first manned mission
of their Gemini Program.
And many more would soon follow.
Their astronauts were oozing confidence.
But while the Americans' space programme prospered,
things were about to go horribly wrong for the Russians.
Sergei Korolev had been the driving force
behind the entire Soviet space programme.
An inspirational leader to an army of engineers and cosmonauts.
In January 1966,
two days after his 59th birthday,
he was admitted to hospital for a routine operation.
Three days later, he'd still not regained consciousness.
His funeral was the first time he received any public recognition.
Throughout his career, even his name had been a closely guarded secret.
FEMALE INTERVIEWEE:
With Korolev gone, his deputy, Valery Mishin,
was appointed to replace him as Chief Designer.
But he lacked Korolev's vision and management skills.
Mishin's first job in charge was to oversee the new Soyuz spacecraft
that would take a crew to the moon.
But it's development had been a disaster...
..beset by delays and a catalogue of testing failures.
The parachute system alone had failed on two of its seven tests.
The cosmonauts due to fly in the craft were understandably concerned.
The ship is clearly not ready because
it's had three failed missions in a robotic mode.
But they still went ahead and put a human being on board.
You have to understand
that the Americans, NASA,
had just flown ten highly
successful Gemini missions,
during which period the Russians had flown not a single mission.
So there's a lot of pressure
and the engineers internally felt that pressure.
But there was nobody who could stand up and say, "We shouldn't do this."
With his political masters demanding results,
Mishin reluctantly agreed that the first manned launch should go ahead.
On April 23rd, 1967,
Vladimir Komarov, a highly respected engineer and test pilot,
prepared for launch.
He was about to become the first cosmonaut to go into space twice.
To everyone's relief, the launch was a total success.
And Komarov sent out a message to the Soviet people from orbit.
But then things began to go wrong.
One of the solar panels didn't deploy, so they had power problems.
Other systems on the ship didn't work, so they said,
"Just bring Komarov back."
Of course, bringing him back proved to be very difficult
because there was so many problems on the ship,
including the automated attitude-control system
that positioned the ship properly for re-entry.
So he had to do all this manually, which he didn't train for,
but he did it very well.
But as the Soyuz re-entered the atmosphere,
a final, fatal error emerged.
Once again, the parachute system failed.
The Soyuz was heading towards the ground at 700mph
with nothing to slow it down.
Komarov was killed instantly, as the capsule hit the ground.
The remaining fuel on board set fire to the wreckage.
Mishin's first flight in charge had ended in catastrophe.
NEW SPEAKER:
But worse was to follow.
In March 1968,
a routine training flight crashed in these woods outside Moscow...
..killing Yuri Gagarin...
..the smiling symbol of the Soviet's mastery of space.
In just a couple of years,
the space programme had lost its iconic hero...
..one of its finest cosmonauts...
..and its inspirational leader, Korolev.
All three were buried with full military honours
in the Kremlin Wall.
WOMAN SINGS IN RUSSIAN:
MUSIC: Destination Moon by Nat King Cole
# Come and take a trip in my rocket ship... #
But despite these losses, the race to the moon was still on.
The American programme was going from strength to strength.
# ..Destination moon... #
During the Gemini missions, they had perfected
in-flight docking manoeuvres and spacewalks.
RADIO: This the greatest experience. It's just tremendous.
And now they were preparing
to launch the first manned Apollo missions -
the missions that would take them to the moon.
# ..Destination moon! #
The Soviets were also preparing for their moon landing.
MAN SINGS IN RUSSIAN:
The cosmonauts were learning how to use the spacesuit that had
been designed to walk on the moon.
This bizarre test rig was built to mimic the one-sixth gravity
felt on the moon's surface.
And they were already working on the lander
that would deliver a single cosmonaut onto the moon's surface.
But a successful lunar mission needed one more crucial element...
..a rocket powerful enough to carry a crew all the way to the moon.
The Americans answer was their vast Saturn V,
still the most powerful rocket ever built.
And the Russians were also working on a behemoth.
The N1.
With 30 separate engines,
it would be 16 times more powerful than the R-7.
It had been designed by Korolev,
but starved of funding and beset by political in-fighting,
it took years to get from the drawing board to the launch pad.
The hopes of the entire Soviet space programme
were resting on the success of this rocket.
The explosion destroyed the entire launch complex.
Without a rocket or launch pad,
the Soviets had no way of getting a crew to the moon.
After several more failed tests,
the giant rocket built by this nation of potato farmers
ended up housing their pigs.
With the Russians out of the race,
the Americans now had a clear run at the moon.
Less that three weeks after the N1 explosion,
on July 20th, 1969,
Apollo 11 made its final approach to the moon's surface.
'We copy you down, Eagle.
'That's one small step for man,
'one giant leap for mankind.'
# Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins
# Were launched away in space
# Millions of hearts were lifted
# Proud of the human race... #
The cosmonauts could only watch and admire.
NEW SPEAKER:
The moon race was perhaps the greatest period
of international competition in space.
But it's what happened next that would define
the future of space exploration
right up to the present day.
Over the next few years,
the Americans landed five more missions on the moon.
But as they drove around the moon's surface,
and even played a bit of golf,
they seemed to have lost their purpose.
When the Americans landed on the moon,
it causes a great crisis for NASA,
because the moon has always been a race, space was a race,
and the thing about a race is that it has a finishing line,
and a finishing line implies an end.
And that's really the way the American people saw it, too.
And so, from that day forward, NASA's been a bit lost in space.
It's not really had a purpose that has been able to inspire
the American people in the same way.
In contrast, the Soviets quickly forgot about the moon
and found a new purpose that would resurrect their space programme -
colonisation.
They would find a way not just to visit space
but to live and work there.
It was thought rapidly spinning spacecraft could produce
a form of artificial gravity through centrifugal force...
if only the cosmonauts could cope with the disorienting effects.
But experiments on the ground can only tell you so much.
What was needed was the ability to perform
long-term experiments in space.
CLICKING
In April 1971,
the world's first space station, Salyut 1, was launched into orbit.
On June 6th, Georgi Dobrovolski,
Vladislav Volkov
and Viktor Patsayev were sent to become its first occupants.
For three weeks, they lived and worked in orbit,
performing experiments that were broadcast nightly
to an audience of millions.
It was the longest anyone had ever been in space
and the crew became national heroes.
On June 29th, they re-boarded their Soyuz for the journey home.
Their capsule parachuted down to Earth exactly as planned.
But when it was opened,
the three crew members were found dead in their seats,
suffocated when a faulty valve caused the capsule
to catastrophically depressurise.
Alexei Leonov had been due to command the mission,
but the day before liftoff, illness had forced his crew
to be replaced by their backups.
Despite the tragedy, it was still a triumph for the Soviets.
They'd shown that it was possible to live and work in space.
For the rest of the 1970s, the Russians continued to send crews
to a series of Salyut space stations on longer and longer missions.
And these extended flights finally gave engineers like Georgi Grechko
the chance to go into space.
Grechko and the other cosmonauts on these long-term missions
were the guinea pigs who would learn what it took to live in space
for extended periods.
By the mid-1980s,
while the Americans were still concentrating on
short-duration flights in their Space Shuttle...
..the Russians were ready to take their next step -
the first permanent orbital space station.
Mir.
Over the years, it would become a vast orbiting laboratory,
with separate modules for astrophysics, material science,
and, as it reached full size,
a section dedicated to studying the Earth.
It was beyond anything that had ever been conceived.
Teams of cosmonauts would visit the station for up to a year at a time.
While they worked, crew members like Alexander Laveikin
gained a new perspective on the planet beneath them.
But just as the cosmonauts had finally mastered life in orbit,
it would all go wrong for them...again.
In 1991, as Mir orbited silently overhead,
the Soviet Union fell apart.
And the political turmoil on the Earth was soon felt in space.
The Soviet space programme became the Russian space programme.
But it was so short of funding that its very existence was threatened.
It was a prospect that terrified the Americans.
Their worst fear was that it would leave
an army of rocket engineers jobless
and they would go to work for Iran or North Korea.
So, instead, the American government offered to go into partnership
with the Russians.
This is an historic moment and I'm just very excited.
Mr Kopchev, I want to give you a hug.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
After decades of rivalry, the two space super-powers
would become partners.
It was a relationship that should have suited both sides.
The Americans would benefit from sharing the Russians'
experience of long-term space flight.
And the Russians would be kept afloat by the Americans' cash.
The first step was that American astronauts,
like British-born Michael Foale, would go to live and work on Mir.
To be really honest, I don't think Americans
were really keen to be involved in Mir.
They were told to be involved by the White House.
I look back on it and it was a very positive thing,
but I had to be told.
And the general feeling amongst American engineers was,
"Why's the money going to Russia? It should come to our company
"so that we can build the Space Station on our own.
"We don't need the Russians."
In May 1997, six years after the break up of the Soviet Union,
Michael Foale travelled on the Space Shuttle to dock with Mir.
The plan was that he would spend six months on the station
with its Russian crew -
Alexander Lazutkin
and Vasily Tsibalyev.
I had already had three flights, I'd done a spacewalk...
Very excited about those flights.
But going to this fairly unknown can in space -
cluttered, crowded, with 13 years of equipment,
with two guys on board, who I didn't know well,
and had not trained with, Vasily and Sasha...
I was very apprehensive.
I thought of this worse than boarding school.
The ageing station was showing the strain
the Russian space programme was under.
Just three months before, there had been a near disastrous fire.
And the Russians were still looking
for ways to cut corners and save money.
Every few months, Mir received supplies on an unmanned cargo ship.
It was guided by an automated but expensive system,
provided by a Ukrainian company.
About $2 million was being paid, each flight, to the Ukrainians,
and the Russian government didn't want to pay this.
And so they had come up with an idea, a bad idea,
to try and do this experiment where they would put the cargo ship
five kilometres away, and then fly it in using a cosmonaut,
remote control, looking through a TV camera.
The new system was like a computer game.
Tsibalyev, the station commander,
used a camera on the cargo ship to guide it towards the station.
He had trained with a simulator on Earth.
But in orbit, he and his flight engineer, Sasha Lazutkin,
were having difficulty even locating the cargo vessel.
MAN SPEAKING RUSSIAN:
I asked what I could do to help.
And so they sent me with a laser range finder to the docking port.
I looked out of this tiny little hole, and I couldn't see it.
You could see the space station getting bigger and bigger in the camera's view.
At which point, Sasha said, "Go to the Soyuz..."
That's our life boat... "..to get it ready to return home."
CRASHING SOUND
The walls of the Space Station Mir are only 3mm thick aluminium.
I heard a crunch and I waited to see the walls separate
and just see the depths of space.
And I thought, "I've got to breathe out
"so I don't have an embolism and die from an embolism."
Not really considering the fact
that I would die ten seconds later anyway from no air.
ALARM BEEPS
BEEPING CONTINUES
The rate at which the pressure was dropping,
the air was leaving the station, gave us less
than 30 minutes of what we call reserve time,
which is time to be conscious.
So I started to look at my fingernails to see if they were going to go blue.
Cos if you're going to die from anoxia,
the first thing that happens before you lose consciousness
is your fingers go blue.
The cargo ship had struck the Spektr power module.
If the crew were to survive, they had to seal it off.
Sasha knew there was a hole in there.
And he said, "It's hissing in there."
So Sasha, feverishly, started to try and take away cables that
were preventing a hatch to close on the Spektr module.
ALARM CONTINUES BEEPING
But though they successfully sealed the hatch,
they now faced another problem.
The impact had knocked the station out of alignment
and the damaged solar panels were no longer pointed towards the sun.
I remember the three of us looking out at the Galaxy.
It's utterly beautiful.
You have the centre of the Galaxy -
maybe there's a million civilisations there.
And I remember saying to Vasily, "This is a beautiful sight."
And he goes, "Yes, but it's been a terrible day."
For 24 hours, they drifted silently around the planet,
while the crew devised a plan to save the crippled station.
Using the thrusters on the Soyuz escape craft,
they painstakingly realigned the station
so the solar panels once again caught the sun's rays.
Mir was back online, but the station's days were numbered.
Just six months later, it was announced that Mir would be
decommissioned and eventually brought down from orbit.
As Mir fell back to Earth, it was torn apart
in the upper atmosphere as it made its final fiery farewell.
The death of Mir marked an end for the Russian space programme.
But it also signalled a new beginning.
Mir's replacement, the International Space Station,
was already taking shape in orbit.
The first truly international venture in space.
A collaboration between 15 different space agencies
to build a station four times bigger than Mir.
Though not everyone regarded it as a positive development.
But in reality, the ISS is the greatest testament
to the achievements of the mighty Soviet space programme.
Its very existence depends on technology and expertise
built up by the Soviets and Russians over 50 years of space exploration.
The station's crucial life support systems
are based on those developed on Salyut and Mir.
The spacesuits they use are Russian-made -
descendants of the suit Leonov wore on the first space-walk...
..and those designed to walk on the moon.
And, since 2011, the only way to get to the station
has been in a Soyuz capsule mounted on the top of an R7 rocket...
..updated versions of the originals
designed by Sergei Korolev half a century ago.
The Soviets may have lost the race to the moon,
but our continued presence in orbit owes everything
to the Russians' determination to conquer space.