For All Mankind: A Peek Into What Could Have Been

My first memory of the US Space program took place in August of 1977. On that late summer morning, seven-year-old me stood in front of the television watching history being made. On TV, a Boeing 747 flew over the California desert with a special passenger: the Space Shuttle Enterprise¹. In a few minutes’ time, the test shuttle was going to separate from the jumbo jet for its first flight test.

Enterprise sat on top of the 747 waiting for the moment when it would be released and glide through the air. Enterprise didn’t have any engines, so when it separated from the 747, it would gracefully glide for a number of minutes on its own until it made a landing on a dry lakebed at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

I was still a few months from being born when America landed on the moon and I have no memory of any of the famous Apollo missions. Enterprise’s first flight test was the first time seeing a space vehicle live on television.

Four years later, the Space Shuttle Columbia blasted off for its first mission in low earth orbit, beginning a 30 year period where the Shuttle was used to launch satellites, conduct experiments, and help to build the International Space Station. Enterprise’s five sisters, Columbia, Challenger, Atlantis, Discovery, and Endeavor helped us understand our world and the larger universe.

The space shuttle did a lot to further science, but I’ve always wondered why we weren’t doing more. Why didn’t the shuttle do more than go into low earth orbit? Why weren’t we going back to the moon?

Of course, NASA had a number of accomplishments after the moon missions. There was Skylab. Then Apollo-Soyuz. The International Space Station. Voyager 1 and 2. The Mars Rovers from

For whatever reason, America never went back to the moon after Apollo 17 in 1972. It seems once we beat the Russians in the race to the moon, there was little energy in pushing ourselves further. A number of planned Apollo missions to the moon were canceled due to budget cuts in 1970. Any dreams to build upon the moon landings or even going to Mars were shelved for decades. America is finally returning to the moon through the Artemis program (Artemis is the sister of Apollo) and if everything goes well, America will plant the flag again on the moon in 2024- fifty-two years after we were last there and 55 years after our first visit. I’m excited to see the US go back, but you have to wonder: if things were different would we have made it back to the moon sooner? Why did it take over half a century for America to head back to the moon?

“What if?” questions have always fascinated me because they create another world where a different choice was made. What if we had the chance to see what that other world looked like?

That’s the premise behind the Apple TV+ series For All Mankind. Produced by Star Trek alum Ronald D. Moore, the series is set in an alternate timeline where the Soviets and not America made it to the moon first in1969². As a result, the space race continued past 1969 and well into the 1990s. The drive to beat the Russians pushed America to take more chances far sooner than in our reality. After Russia places the first woman on the moon, President Nixon calls for women to enter the astronaut program in 1970, thirteen years before Sally Ride is the first American woman in space in our reality. Instead of Skylab, we get Jamestown, the first permanent base on the moon. The NASA in this alternate United States is doing what some were hoping for after Armstrong and Aldrin set foot on the moon. There is a scrappiness to the Americans that makes them want to be better and NASA is constantly improving itself and offering innovations that benefit the larger society.

The excitement of the prolonged space race is supplemented with a changed American history. Another President Kennedy. The Vietnam War ending in 1970. Ronald Reagan becoming president in 1976, not 1980. John Lennon surviving an assassination attempt. The what ifs ripple out into the wider world, giving us a look a world that looks like ours, but is very different as well.

The big story of For All Mankind’s alternate history is also the intimate story of the astronauts and mission personnel. The series did a good job of crafting these characters in a way that when tragedy strikes, and believe me it will again and again, you really do feel their pain. We get to know these astronauts beyond their fame and see them as fragile and vulnerable beings sent on a risky mission to explore an outer space that a well-known YouTuber likes to say “wants to kill you” and also the vulnerability of dealing with their respective families. You will learn to become attached to these flawed beings as they explore space as well as their own humanity.

For All Mankind does a good job in talking about social change. The Space Program in our reality has in many ways been a driver for social change. The inclusion of women and African Americans as astronauts was a marker on how progress was being made in America, but not without challenges. The first women astronauts have to deal with a lot of sexism and they along with astronauts of color are not viewed as worthy by some of the white and male astronauts. In our reality, Sally Ride, Guion Bluford and Mae Jemison show how space is becoming more and more inclusive. The fact that NASA is a driver for social change in both timelines is something I greatly appreciate. For All Mankind also wisely takes up LGBTQ issues as one of the female astronauts is a lesbian that has to be in the closet, which mirrors how Sally Ride kept her same-sex attraction and later relationship quiet until after her death in 2012.

But the main story of For All Mankind is this journey down what could have been. Why has America let 50 years slip by without us going back to the moon? What was the cost of that decision?

Writing on the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing, Ross Douthat feels this great accomplishment by America became our high point. He’s thankful that we are a more equal society than we were in 1969, but we aren’t more accomplished:

I can’t speak for any other American on this anniversary, but the weight of that compressed meaning doesn’t just move me; it makes me feel regretful, disappointed, a little bit ashamed.

There are ways in which the United States is a more just country than it was when we rocketed men onto the lunar surface in vessels that looked like something my kids would make with cardboard and tinfoil, and various Apollo-anniversary essays have emphasized the ways that astronaut culture failed to match today’s egalitarian ideals.

But as a commemoration of the moon landing, that kind of emphasis on our own era’s greater enlightenment falls flat — because what Apollo represents is not goodness but greatness, not moral progress but magnificence, a sublime example of human daring that our civilization hasn’t matched since. So, to mark the anniversary by passing moral judgment on the past is a way of burying the appropriate response — which should be awe at what past Americans achieved, and regret that we have not matched such greatness since.

So, why didn’t we go back? There are few theories: moon missions were expensive with no monetary payoff, politicians looking at the federal budget and thinking the money could be better spent, the Challenger and Columbia disasters and so on.

But maybe the biggest reason is that we became risk-averse. Douthat notes that entrepreneurship has dropped since the 1970s and companies invest less in new initiatives. The sense of “go west,” was gone. Douthat opines how in some ways life is less adventurous in the modern age:

We used to travel faster, build bigger, live longer; now we communicate faster, chatter more, snap more selfies. We used to go to the moon; now we make movies about space — amazing movies with completely convincing special effects that make it seem as if we’ve left earth behind. And we hype the revolutionary character of our communications devices in order to convince ourselves that our earlier expectations were just fantasies, “Jetsons stuff” — that this progress is the only progress we could reasonably expect.

This is probably why For All Mankind is so arresting: it shows an America that wasn’t stagnating culturally, one that was willing to take risks even at great cost.

Back in our timeline the road back to the moon begins with the launch of Artemis 1, in November of this year. The unmanned mission will journey to the moon and back. Nearly three years later in October 2024, Artemis 3 will carry a crew of four that will set foot in the lunar surface 55 years after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. For All Mankind may show us the dreams that were lost by not going back to the moon, hopefully, Artemis will be the start of a new era of dreams in space as well as earth, as we travel to the moon and maybe beyond.

Watching the video of the first test flight of the Space Shuttle Enterprise is just as thrilling as it was over forty years ago. In October 2024, I hope to sit in front of the TV to see another memorable moment take place.

1. The Space Shuttle Enterprise was originally called the Constitution. A letter-writing campaign asked President Gerald Ford to name the prototype the Enterprise after the USS Enterprise from Star Trek
2. According to Ronald D. Moore, the point of departure between our timeline and the timeline of For All Mankind is January 1966 when Sergei Korolev, the “father” of the Soviet Space Program died after routine surgery. In the alternate timeline, Korolev survives and is able to keep the program on track to go to the moon. In our timeline, a lieutenant took over and oversaw the tests of the N1 rocket, the Soviet’s answer to the Saturn V. Its repeated failures kept the Soviet Union from going to the moon.