If you're in London, come and see that Cosmonaut exhibit [1].

I volunteer there, and honestly I would warmly recommend it!

[1] http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/visitmuseum/plan_your_visit/...

I can't explain why, but there has always been something dreamy and magical about the Soviet space program and its spacecrafts.

I've appreciated the apollo-soyuz exhibit at the Air and Space Museum in DC since I was a kid (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/Apollo-s...).

The Venera missions to Venus were also remarkable. This dude's blog about it is a fascinating read: http://mentallandscape.com/V_Venus.htm

At least show some respect by spelling the man's name correctly. s/Korlev/Korolev/

It's been corrected in the article, so maybe someone can fix it here as well

And of course the phonetic transliteration would be Korolyov, not Korolev. ё instead of е in the middle.

Asif Siddiqi has a good book on the subject, "Challenge to Apollo". I'd also recomment Boris Chertok's memoirs, "Rockets and People Volume IV: The Moon Race". You'd learn, for example, how many launches of N-1 were originally planned for each expedition to the Moon and how that number eventually boiled down to 1.

Personally, I absolutely love the design of the Soviet space vehicles.

Perhaps it's a result of the chronic underfunding of the program, but the utilitarian look for the LK3 lander is amazing.

To be fair, that lander looks much less improvised than the tinfoil surfaces and seemingly random boxy angles of the one that actually made it.

By the way, the 1998 battlezone remake did a really good job at transferring the very different design languages of the US and the USSR military-industrial complexes to a space fantasy game setting. The recognizable styles of the fantasy designs were what opened my eyes to the clear differences in their real life counterparts. Military high tech, with its single-buyer nonmarket and extreme focus on function sure is a surprising place to find recognizable design languages!

LK - just like LEM - went through multiple iterations in design. A book about that has some pictures - http://epizodsspace.airbase.ru/bibl/filin/04.html .

great book that goes into much more detail about the enigmatic Korolev who pretty much was the iron will behind the entire Soviet space program--even more so than his American counterparts von Braun/Webb etc. http://www.amazon.com/Korolev-Masterminded-Soviet-Drive-Amer...

You can get a taste of that soviet lander towards the end of the (fiction) movie Apollo 18