Anyone watched it? Is it good?
I'm halfway through the first episode and it is looking pretty OK.
Premise
In an alternate timeline in 1969, Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov becomes the first human to land on the Moon. This outcome devastates morale at NASA but also catalyzes a U.S. effort to catch up. With the Soviet Union emphasizing diversity by including a woman in subsequent landings, the United States is forced to match pace, training women and minorities who were largely excluded from the initial decades of U.S. space exploration. Each subsequent season takes place 10 years later, with season two taking place in the 1980s, season three taking place in the 1990s, and season four taking place in the 2000s.
The US
and more importantly my Special Interest of hating the Space Shuttle made me drop it early in season 2.
Space Shuttle hate as regards For All Mankind, containing spoilers for the latter
Saw a goddamn shuttle orbiter complete with big wings in fucking lunar orbit, closed the show immediately.That shape, in that place, means that the showrunners were only ever interested in nostalgiajerking about amerikkkan exceptionalism, not in imagining a different, better timeline where space exploration continued and accelerated instead of being kneecapped by the Nixon administration and Congress.
The shuttle, as originally designed, was to have been one part of a space transportation infrastructure between the earth and moon, but was specifically designed for the earth surface to low earth orbit part of that infrastructure. The trip from low earth orbit to the moon was to have been done with a craft designed for that purpose, a craft designed never to fly in atmosphere. This is because pushing all the mass of the shuttle's atmospheric flight systems to the moon and back is obscenely wasteful to the point of total impracticality. It also has effectively no internal fuel tank. This means that once in space, all it can do is puff its way over to a space station or duck back into the atmosphere for landing.
And those wings! Those fucking wings! The show used the real version of the shuttle that flew, that we all know, so the stupid pig ignorant amerikkan hogs watching can go "ooh ooh I recognize it!" but those fucking wings were only that big because after all the cuts, NASA had to go hat in hand to the fucking Air Force to get enough funding to have anything at all to launch, and the Air Force wanted to put big ass wings on it, because they wanted the ability to launch from Florida, go once around over the poles, steal a Soviet satellite out of space, then fly on the big ass wings back down to California. Fortunately, this plan was so fucking stupid, impractical, and a causus belli for nuclear war that they never actually did it, but the shuttle was still stuck dragging all that extra wing area and more importantly, wing mass, around for its entire life.
In the For All Mankind timeline, neither the cuts to the STS program nor the resulting Air Force meddling would have taken place, so having the historic, iconic
Space Shuttle sitting there in lunar orbit just doesn't make any fucking sense, either from a rocket science or consistent alt-history perspective.
Preach!