A story that was hardly known until now and was subject to the greatest secrecy for a long time: Libyan dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi lured German rocket engineers to his country in the early 1980s to build launch vehicles for him. His goal was not civilian space travel, but a military application of this technology. A fatal game with fire began, in which a dozen technicians around the German rocket visionary Lutz Kayser suddenly found themselves. He had tested his satellite missiles in Zaire/Congo on a huge site the size of the former DDR, but had to withdraw after international protests. Gaddafi’s Libya became Kayser’s last chance – and his fiasco.

With numerous previously unpublished archive recordings and first-hand testimonies from contemporary witnesses, this documentary sheds light for the first time on an explosive chapter of recent history that was long unknown and subject to the greatest secrecy.