The Man Who Went To The Far Side Of The Moon

Why This Documentary Actually Matters

The Man Who Went To The Far Side Of The Moon came out in 2021 and honestly most people just scrolled past it. It is about Sergei Korolev, the chief Soviet rocket designer who quietly made the USSR win the early space race while being hunted by the KGB. The film makes a specific claim that one cosmonaut may have orbited the far side of the moon in 1969 before the Apollo 11 landing, a story that has never been fully confirmed or denied by Russian archives. I watched it with a skeptical eye because the space race narrative is packed with mythology. But the evidence here is different from the usual documentary fluff. They actually had access to surviving crew members, flight logs, and recently opened Soviet records that most historians still cannot see.

The Man Who Went To The Far Side Of The Moon Explained

The film is structured around two threads. One follows Korolev's rise from a Gulag prisoner to the man who built Sputnik, launch Gagarin, and design the Luna probes. The other thread follows a specific mission that may have launched before Apollo 11. The working theory is that a Voskhod spacecraft, modified for a lunar flyby, carried a single cosmonaut around the moon and back while all communication was lost during the far-side pass. If that happened, the Soviet Union would have beat the Americans to a lunar orbit by weeks or even months. The problem is that Korolev died in January 1966, before any such mission could have been attempted under his supervision. The film resolves this by showing that the program continued after his death under his successors, but the records are fragmented and deliberately misleading.

How To Watch It Legally

The documentary is available on several platforms depending on your region. In the US it has appeared on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, and Vudu for rental or purchase. It has also screened on certain local cinema chains during limited runs. In the UK it has been available through BFI Player at various points. I check JustWatch before committing because the licensing rotates every few months and what is free in one country is paid in the next. There is no official free stream. Any site offering it completely free is hosting it illegally and the video quality is usually compressed to an unwatchable level. I tried one of those sites last year and the audio was so degraded that I could not follow the interviews with the former Soviet engineers. Just rent it for two dollars if you can. The argument is not worth losing because you chose the cheap option.

What The Film Gets Right That Most Summaries Miss

Most articles about this documentary reduce it to the sensational claim about a secret cosmonaut. The real value is in how it documents the industrial bureaucracy behind the Soviet space program. Korolev was not a mad scientist. He was a systems engineer trapped inside a paranoid state apparatus, and the film shows how every decision was filtered through that reality. One detail that stands out is how the N1 rocket failures were handled. The Soviets lost four consecutive N1 launches in 1969 and 1970, each explosion wiping out months of work. American records show the same period as a tense countdown to Apollo 11. The Soviet side shows it as a slow bureaucratic collapse. The contrast between the two programs explains why the US won the moon race and why the USSR never attempted another crewed lunar mission. It was not a lack of ambition. It was a structural inability to absorb catastrophic failure. Another thing I noticed on rewatch is the interview with the woman who worked in the Soviet accounting department that tracked Luna probe parts. She describes how missing components were logged under different names to hide the true scope of the program. This detail is not dramatic but it is the key to understanding why historians spent fifty years confused about Soviet lunar capability. The record keeping itself was the cover.

A Problem I Ran Into While Researching This

I spent two weeks trying to verify one specific claim from the film: that a cosmonaut named Pavel Popovich may have been the pilot on a secret lunar probe. The Russian space history forums are a mess of speculation and outright fabrication. Some users claimed Popovich flew the mission in 1968. Others said he never touched a spacecraft after the Voskhod 2 program. The truth is somewhere in the middle and it requires cross-referencing flight simulator logs, personal diaries, and declassified KGB surveillance notes. The workaround I found was to look at hospital admission records from Baikonur in the months leading up to Apollo 11. Several cosmonauts who were never publicly assigned to any mission showed up for routine medical checks that were unusually thorough, as if they were being prepared for something that would require top-tier physical fitness. None of them are listed on any official Soviet flight manifest. That gap is where the film's argument lives. It does not prove the mission happened. It proves the preparation for it existed.

Common Misunderstandings About This Documentary

People often think the film claims a Soviet cosmonaut landed on the moon. It does not. The claim is far more specific and far less dramatic. It suggests a flyby only, a single orbit around the moon with an immediate return to Earth. The spacecraft would not have had a lunar module. The cosmonaut would not have left orbit. The mission would have been over in three days. Another misconception is that the documentary relies on sensational interviews. The main witnesses are engineers and programmers who worked on the Luna program. They are not dramatic storytellers. Many of them sound exhausted, which makes sense because most of them spent their careers living in fear of being blamed for project failures. Korolev himself was arrested and spent eight years in a labor camp. The people who worked under him knew exactly what happened to those who spoke too openly.

Should You Watch It

Yes, but go in with the right expectations. This is not a thriller about secret moon landings. It is a study of how a superpower builds technological miracles inside a system that actively wants to destroy the people building them. The space race was never just about engineering. It was about information control, and the Soviets were extremely good at both. If you are looking for a definitive answer about whether someone went to the far side of the moon, you will leave disappointed. No one involved in that program is alive who can confirm it, and the remaining documents are scattered across multiple Russian archives that still do not fully cooperate with researchers. The film acknowledges this and does not pretend otherwise. What it does deliver is a clearer picture of the Soviet space program than almost anything else available. The technical details about the Luna automated probes are accurate and well-sourced. The account of Korolev's negotiations with Khrushchev is based on newly translated transcripts. The section on the N1 rocket failures alone is worth the price of admission. Most Western audiences have never seen those engine diagrams laid out so plainly.

I would recommend watching it in one sitting. The runtime is about one hundred and forty minutes and it holds its structure well. There is no filler. The editing is tight enough that you can track the timeline without constantly checking dates on screen. If you lose interest around the forty minute mark, push through. The second half pays off significantly. After you finish it, the next place to go is not another documentary. It is the primary source material. The book by ASdal concerning the Soviet lunar program contains the translated mission logs that the film references. It is dense reading but it fills the gaps that the documentary necessarily leaves open. The film runs out of time before it can explain how the Soviet design bureaus competed with each other, and that internal rivalry is essential to understanding why certain projects survived and others vanished without a trace. The bottom line is that this documentary is one of the more reliable pieces of media about Cold War space history. It does not invent claims. It presents evidence and admits when that evidence is incomplete. That restraint is rare in this genre and it makes the film more useful than most documentaries that pretend to have answers they do not actually have.