Although a few problems occur at the Moon, including the discovery of a damaged oxygen tank and Professor Sedikh's becoming trapped under a fallen boulder, the expedition is a success and the cosmonauts return to Moscow.

Kosmicheskiy reys: Fantasticheskaya novella was initially conceived in 1924 by Russian filmmaker Vasili Zhuravlov, but it was not pursued for production until 1932, when Komsomol (the Communist Union of Youth) recommended the creation of film that would spur an interest in space studies.

Zhuravlov consulted with Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the noted aeronautical theorist and rocket science engineer, on the screenplay.

[3] Two spaceships in the film were named after the Soviet leaders Joseph Stalin and Kliment Voroshilov.

[4] Kosmicheskiy reys: Fantasticheskaya novella was shot as a silent film and had only a brief release in early 1936 before being removed from circulation by Soviet censors, who felt that stop-motion animated sequences of cosmonauts hopping across the low-gravity lunar surface were antithetical to the spirit of "socialist realism."