Apple premiered For All Mankind today at the Regency Village Theater in Westwood, California. Coming exclusively to Apple TV+ on November 1, For All Mankind is a captivating “what if” take on history from Golden Globe nominee and Emmy Award winner Ronald D. Moore. Told through the lives of astronauts, engineers and their families, For All Mankind imagines a world in which the global space race never ended and the space program remained the cultural centerpiece of America’s hopes and dreams.
Beginning November 1, the first three episodes of For All Mankind will be available to watch on Apple TV+. New episodes will continue to roll out weekly, every Friday.
Apple TV+, the first all-original video subscription service and home for today’s most imaginative storytellers, will launch November 1 in over 100 countries and regions. The service will be available on the Apple TV app on iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, iPod touch, Mac and other platforms, including online (tv.apple.com), for $4.99 per month with a seven-day free trial. Customers who purchase any new iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Mac or iPod touch starting September 10, 2019, can enjoy one year of Apple TV+ for free. Beginning November 1, customers can initiate the one-year free offer in the Apple TV app on the device running the latest software.
Source: Apple Inc.
MacDailyNews Take: “For All Mankind imagines a world in which… the space program remained the cultural centerpiece of America’s hopes and dreams.”
Imagine that.
As we wrote back in February 2016:
A U.S. President with true leadership abilities would immediately boost NASA’s budget ten-fold (at the very least) and patiently explain to the naysayers why it is important to push the envelope and that NASA’s budget, even with a ten-fold increase, is barely a drop in the ocean.
There hasn’t been a U.S. President with a vision of the future beyond his own term(s) and the nu… guts to stand by his beliefs in the face of PITA whiners who want every single last cent to blow on wasteful, redundant boondoggles (which somehow magically materialize into waterfront homes for lobbyists) since… we can’t remember when.
Imagine a Steve Jobs as U.S. President 30, 40 years ago. People would be living on the moon and Mars today with outposts on Europa.
It’s been 43 years, 1 month, and 28 days since man last set foot on the moon. Every person on earth should be profoundly embarrassed by that fact.
“The United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward, and so will space.” — President John F. Kennedy
“There are so many benefits to be derived from space exploration and exploitation; why not take what seems to me the only chance of escaping what is otherwise the sure destruction of all that humanity has struggled to achieve for 50,000 years?” — Isaac Asimov
“Earth is too small a basket for mankind to keep all its eggs in.” — Robert A. Heinlein
“It’s too bad, but the way American people are, now that they have all this capability, instead of taking advantage of it, they’ll probably just piss it all away.” — President Lyndon B. Johnson, overheard during a visit to the Apollo 7 crew in training, 1968.
A neat premise, much like the “what if Nazis had won WWII” show on a different streaming service.
If the Soviet Russians hadn’t gotten cocky with their earlier successes (first satellite, animal, man, woman, spacewalk) and crippled their own moon program with politics and red tape in the mid-1960s, it’s definitely possible they might have landed a man on the moon first.
The Soviet Russian and the current Russian economy is the size of Italy. They don’t have the infrastructure.
And yet, even though the US has the infrastructure and using good old capitalism to get competing companies to design the rockets… it’s currently still paying Russia something like $85 million per astronaut to launch in a Soyuz to get to the International Space Station, which was built in part by Russia.
Infrastructure is obviously only part of the equation.
The US failed early and often during the space race, whereas the Soviets had early successes but major failures later, and experienced people were removed at exactly the wrong time and couldn’t translate those failures into learning experiences.
It’s all about access to energy. With cheap abundant energy, MANY things are possible, not just creating a true foothold in Space. If CO2 levels rise, use energy to remove it from atmosphere (and produce oxygen as byproduct). If a region lacks water, use energy to desalinate sea water. Plastics floating in ocean, use energy to build and power fleets of mostly robotic ships to collect it continuously. Low-cost access to Space, build space elevators that only needs energy to lift people and payloads into geosynchronous orbit. In terms of cost, Earth orbit is halfway to anywhere in our Solar System.
We already know how to do most of these things, and the rest we can figure out. We don’t do them because the cost (in energy) is prohibitive. But what if energy became essentially free?
Right now, we need to use EVERY source of energy, not limit ourselves to the ones that are politically popular but currently inefficient and/or unreliable. That includes nuclear power, built in carefully selected locations, in the same way that large dams that provide hydro-electric power are built in carefully selected locations. A large dam that catastrophically fails is far more dangerous than a nuclear power plant. Don’t fear nuclear power. Don’t remove fossil fuels from equation while we still need them.
Once we power our way to permanent and meaningful presence in Space, we increase access to energy dramatically (exponentially), in ways that are friendly to Earth’s environment. Over time, access to abundant energy becomes very cheap. And we move on to greater things…