In late 1967 a US spy satellite photographed a colossal rocket on a pad in Soviet Kazakhstan, and NASA feared the moon race was lost. What the camera could not show was that the rocket was a hollow mock-up, and that the real N1 program behind it was a chaotic scramble heading for catastrophe. This episode digs into declassified records and engineering analyses to explain how the most powerful rocket stage ever flown, a record that stood until SpaceX's Super Heavy in 2023, never once reached orbit.

The story starts with a personal feud. Chief designer Sergei Korolev refused engine designer Valentin Glushko's toxic hypergolic propellants, and Korolev believed Glushko had denounced him to Stalin's secret police in the 1930s. When Glushko walked away, jet-engine specialist Nikolai Kuznetsov was left to build rocket engines with no time to solve ...