Mankind never gains anything without cost. There never has been a bloodless victory over nature.                                                    —Yuri Gagarin, first cosmonaut in outer space Many Quadrant readers will remember the Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union. Through films like The Right Stuff (1983), about Chuck Yeager’s first sound barrier breakthrough in 1947 and the Mercury Seven, the first human space flight by the US; First Man (2018), covering Neil Armstrong’s NASA career; and Apollo 13 (1995), about the 1970 US spacecraft crisis, Hollywood has shown us those ground-breaking and dangerous times from the Western perspective. Two Russian…