Talking about the life and tragic death of the First Cosmonaut, Jamie Doran, a BBC producer, and Piers Bisoni, a renowned science journalist and author of several books on the history of science, talk about how the Soviet space project was born. On the pages of the book, images of brilliant designers, members of the first cosmonaut corps and many other outstanding people who stood at the origins of Soviet cosmonautics come to life. The authors also write about how the successes of the Soviet Union were perceived then, in the early 1960s, by the world community and, above all, by the United States, our most important competitors in space exploration. In working on the book, Doran and Bisoni used many monographs, archival materials and personal testimonies of eyewitnesses of those events. The book formed the basis of the famous film "Starman", filmed by the BBC.