This effects-filled story follows Pavel (Komarov, who also appeared in Pudovkin's Deserter and Barnet's Outskirts), a renegade space traveler. Pavel’s voyage to the moon - he's fed up with the restrictions imposed by the "Moscow Institute for Interplanetary Travel" - offers a startlingly realistic technological prophesy. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a seminal space-travel theoretician, served as the production's science consultant (he was also the author of the film's source novel, Outside the Earth) and drew up more than 30 detailed blueprints for the "rocketplane" featured in the film. There may be a rocket named after Stalin, but the film still reeks of anti-doctrinal individualism, doubtlessly accounting for Ukrainian-born Zhuravlev's sporadic post-Cosmic Voyage output.