He led the highest-stakes technological race in human history, and his own government refused to let the world know his name. To the thousands working under him, he was simply "the Chief Designer." Sergei Korolev launched the space age while carrying scars from a Siberian gulag where he survived a heart attack, scurvy, and a jaw shattered by an interrogator, an injury that would, decades later, kill him on an operating table at the exact moment his country needed him most.

This episode follows the engineer denounced by his own colleague during Stalin's purges, transferred from a deadly gold mine to a prison laboratory, and then handed the V-2 wreckage that he iterated into the R-7, the world's first ICBM and the rocket that carried Sputnik and Gagarin. It weighs the chilling motto he muttered at deadlines, "we will all vanish without a trac ...