On Friday, August 12, the premiere of the last, tenth episode of the third season of the series “For All Mankind” took place. It talks about an alternative world in which the space race between the USA and the USSR did not end in 1969. This time the action takes place in the mid-1990s and the heroes fly to Mars.
“For All Mankind”
The science fiction series “For All Mankind” was first released on Apple TV in the autumn of 2019. Its name is a reference to the text of the memorial plaque attached to the Apollo 11 landing stage, which remained on the surface of our natural moon.
The inscription reads as follows: “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind”. But in the series, the action of which begins this year, there is no such sign. In the local alternative reality, Soviet cosmonauts were the first to set foot on the surface of our planet’s moon.
In this regard, the space race, which in our world lasted all the 1960s, did not end with the landing on the Moon — in the series it continued in the following decades. On the one hand, it made NASA act bolder. Instead of stopping the research of our natural moon, its active use has begun. On the other hand, there is no smell of peace and the good of all mankind in this space.
Fiction and Reality
The main feature of the series is a successful combination of realism and fiction. The depicted world is not conditional, as often happens in fiction, but as close as possible to reality. Events take place not only in space, but also on Earth. And this is really the United States in the second half of the XX century.
NASA’s Mission Control Center is changing the way it changed during that era, the characters wear clothes and drive cars that match their time. Even the social conflicts raging around them reflect the real state of affairs.
But gradually the story is becoming more and more different from the real one. NASA is starting to train women as astronauts a decade earlier. Back in the early 1970s, water ice was found on the Moon and they began to build a base. But relations with the USSR are very tense, so the Soyuz-Apollo program is being implemented seven years later.
In the 1980s, Space Shuttle spacecraft began to fly to the Moon. Their newest model is already equipped with a plasma engine, which in our world has never reached orbit. And on the surface of our moon, an armed conflict between the USSR and the USA is breaking out.
Third season
In the third season, events take place in the alternative 1990s. And they are even more different from our world than everything that has happened in the series so far. Gorbachev managed to complete “restructuring” in the USSR, so the space race continues. In the USA, in 1992, instead of Bill Clinton, a woman, besides a former astronaut, won the presidential election.
Meanwhile, the conquest of the Moon accelerated the development of space science. Scientists have implemented thermonuclear fusion, which we still cannot bring to mind even with the help of artificial intelligence. In turn, this intensified private space exploration and the first startups in this area appeared in the late 1980s.
One of them was the Helios Corporation, which produces helium-3 on the Moon. It gave people a lot of cheap clean energy, but left a lot of oil workers out of work. In addition, another project has become a reality, which in reality has not been implemented – a space hotel.
But all this is just the beginning of the season, because a new goal has appeared in the space race — Mars. Three expeditions will start to it at once. Interestingly, at the same time, all three spacecraft flying to the Red Planet have the names of automatic probes that flew there in the 1990s and 2000s, or at least were planned for launch.
The third season turned out to be quite dynamic. Unexpected and dramatic events take place in it until the last minutes of the last episode. They are inspired by both the actions of insidious Russians and completely unexpected factors, such as American citizens who decided to harm their own space agency.
In any case, the third season is not the end of the story. It is already known that the series will be continued, but it is not yet known when it will be released. Judging by the latest series, events will take place in the first years of the XXI century.
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