In February 1966, at the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union achieved what much of the scientific world considered nearly impossible: the first soft landing of a machine on the Moon. Yet the first ground-level photographs of another world were not unveiled by Moscow. They were pulled off the air by Britain's Jodrell Bank Observatory and printed on the front page of the Daily Express using an off-the-shelf radio fax receiver, because the Soviets had transmitted them in a standard, unencrypted newspaper picture format. This episode unpacks how a spy-thriller moment collided with one of the great engineering feats of the space race.

We trace the eleven consecutive Soviet failures that preceded Luna 9, the handoff from Sergei Korolev's overwhelmed OKB-1 bureau to the Lavochkin Design Bureau, and the radical rethink that followed: abandonin ...