For All Mankind (AH Tv series at Apple TV)

Bureaucromancer

Inoeth said:
It may be because i'm half asleep as I type this but I don't think either actually had a space station yet tho both were working on ones and may have launched the start of their stations right at the end of the season- it's been a few months since i've watched the show so details like that are eluding me.
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There's a lot of jumping about, and definitely not a mission by mission timeline, but that sounds right. The Soviets appear to still be flying single man missions, and without further details I lean toward imagining something on the level of an LK version of the LM shelter being what's extending their stay.

The Americans have a base, but it's monolithic. I suspect the show created it with LESA in mind.

OTOH they also have a multi flight LM (honestly, I think it's less a real tech based decision than something that made a couple of scripts work better), and while no Lunar station is shown there is something kind of off about the architecture involved if there's no refueling station anywhere.

The next thing we know they've gone and built Sea Dragon... I think the writers are really fond of big dumb rockets and monolithic vehicles.
 
Allochronian

Allochronian

Okay, so I was (luckily) able to see this show after learning about its existence a day or two ago.

I can’t believe I didn’t know about it, since this thread was staring at me the whole time!

I did some very light reading on the Soviet lunar program and I got the impression that they didn’t have a strong program due to poor funding to land a man on the moon, compared to the Americans. (Please correct me if I am wrong).

I was very interested in learning what the P.O.D. was because I knew that it couldn’t have just been the Soviets landing first a month earlier. Based on earlier posts, the official P.O.D. is on January 14th, 1966 when Sergei Korolev survived his surgery and was able to improve the space program? All right, it may not be a strong P.O.D., but I can suspend my disbelief a little bit.

On to my first impressions:

1) Great name for the first episode. I like the opening sequence of the show; it has a unique aesthetic.
2) The reactions from the Americans losing the race to the moon was very believable. The scene with Alexei Leonov landing on the moon was my favorite part of the episode.
3) I didn’t like the scenes with the illegal immigrants crossing into the United States. It’s such a cliché at this point, for me a least, to portray a Mexican or Mexican family finding peace and success in life by literally running away from their problems. *insert Porfirio Diaz quote*
4) I am actually looking forward to see how NASA will try to recruit women and minorities. I just hope that it is not too on the nose and is done reasonably through late 60’s-early 70’s standards, and not through a 21st Century viewpoint.
5) Interestingly enough, I was sort of expecting the whole episode to be very pessimistic. I expected Apollo 11 to crash and the crew to die. Maybe the whole show would have been more unique had the space race actually ended with the Soviets winning, making this show very short or it could have focused on the political and social changes in the Soviet Union. But I suppose that would have made the USA look way too defeated.

I look forward to see more episodes.
 
Athelstane

Athelstane

Allochronian said:
Based on earlier posts, the official P.O.D. is on January 14th, 1966 when Sergei Korolev survived his surgery and was able to improve the space program? All right, it may not be a strong P.O.D., but I can suspend my disbelief a little bit.
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Keeping Korolev alive certainly can only help the Soviets, but you're right: It's not enough to get them to the Moon before NASA. 1966 is too late for that.

Still, as you say, we can suspend a little disbelief to see Ronald D Moore play out an interesting timeline.
 

Zheng He

One thing I did not like was the bit about Ed and Karen's son getting hit by a car and dying. I know the show was trying to portray the struggles the astronauts' families were facing in reality vs. the image of perfection that was portrayed of them in the media and OTL Neil Armstrong lost a daughter to a brain tumor in the early 1960s but still, that just struck me as a little much.
 

Bureaucromancer

Athelstane said:
It still doesn't look adequate from a radiation protection perspective, but of course, there was plenty we simply didn't know about that in the 70's.
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Agreed, but on the one hand yeah, we didn't really have a sense of just how risky Apollo was in radiation terms until the 80s or 90s iirc. On the other, it's closer to acceptable than it might seem. The regolith on the roof approach is perfectly viable, it just looks like it's not enough. Using sandbags in a few layers and moving the solar panels off the roof would seem to do the trick.
 
Athelstane

Athelstane

Bureaucromancer said:
Agreed, but on the one hand yeah, we didn't really have a sense of just how risky Apollo was in radiation terms until the 80s or 90s iirc. On the other, it's closer to acceptable than it might seem. The regolith on the roof approach is perfectly viable, it just looks like it's not enough. Using sandbags in a few layers and moving the solar panels off the roof would seem to do the trick.
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Oh, I think what the showrunners have is probably realistic for what what have been tried. If anything, it the regolith piled on top is probably giving them too much credit.

But what worries me more than just background cosmic or solar radiation is the risk of Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs). Little was known about CMEs during Apollo. But in fact, there were two CME's in this period that would been highly dangerous to astronauts outside of Earth's electromagnetic field: The CME of August 2-11, 1972, and the CME of July 5-6, 1974. Even with such a thin coating of regolith, any astronauts inside the module would have received dangerous amounts of radiation. At the least, an emergency medical evacuation to Earth would be needed.

Kind of surprised that the show hasn't engaged it on some level, given that this kind of thing featured so prominently in Michener's Space. Maybe Moore just plans to have the missions timed to skip around the CME's.
 
Luath

Luath

Slight nitpick about the
Apollo 23 explosion, since the fault was in the S-II tank shouldn't the explosion have started in the second stage, half way up the Saturn 5? Yet in the episode (7 I believe) the explosion starts at the base of the S-1C, around the engines. I guess its possible that the explosion in the S-II could've knocked the S-1C's Lox tank into the Kerosene, that would cause some fireworks. Plus the explosion didn't feel all that powerful for me. Not to be morbid but the Space shuttle is less than half the size of the Saturn 5 yet the 1986 OTL Challenger explosion was still utterly massive. A Saturn 5 is a 1/26th scale atomic bomb, it should've completely destroyed 39A

Just a personal gripe.
 

Bureaucromancer

e of pi said:
OTL Shuttle? OTL Shuttle...to the Moon? Why? Why any of this?
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If season 1 is precedent there's going to be a lot of "ok, the concept is sound, but WHY would you do the tech that way" through the whole thing.

That said, for all the things that Shuttle could and should have been, I'd argue that roughly the historic configuration is, relatively speaking, one of the more likely configurations and arguable even fairly desirable if Saturn Shuttle and a small logistics only vehicle is off the table.
 

e of pi

Bureaucromancer said:
If season 1 is precedent there's going to be a lot of "ok, the concept is sound, but WHY would you do the tech that way" through the whole thing.

That said, for all the things that Shuttle could and should have been, I'd argue that roughly the historic configuration is, relatively speaking, one of the more likely configurations and arguable even fairly desirable if Saturn Shuttle and a small logistics only vehicle is off the table.
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This is a timeline that has Sea Dragon. Development budget is certainly available for a Saturn Shuttle. And then turning around and sending it to the moon...there's a lot of reasons not to bother:

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

ntrs.nasa.gov ntrs.nasa.gov

Running through the Shuttle mass properties, of the 100+ ton mass of the Orbiter and ET, about 35-40 metric tons are useful in any way on a lunar mission.
 

Sunstone77

That trailer definitely feels like someone high up wanted the show to be bigger and sexier but on the same, or even smaller, budget as the first season. Designing and rendering new ships probably went out the window in favour of using Pre-existing shuttle footage and renders and then cram some dialogue in about the shuttle to the moon being some improvised macgyver job with extra fuel and supplies to get there before the soviets to handwave all the question away
 
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