Many Americans view our space program skeptically, wondering why we should bother spending money on it when we have so many problems to fix on Earth. Ever since the space race with the Soviet Union ended, the US lost much of its interest in continuing to explore space. But what if the space race didn’t end in 1969? What if the Soviet Union got to the moon first, and so America continued to push its space program to compete with the Soviets? That is the premise of the show “For All Mankind” on Apple TV+. It is co-created and co-written by today’s guest: renowned science fiction screenwriter and television producer Ronald D. Moore

Ron has
worked on a wide variety of TV shows over the past few decades, including Star
Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager. He is also the creator
of Outlander and, of course, he is the co-creator of 2004’s Battlestar
Galactica.

The post Ronald D. Moore: The sci-fi optimism of For All Mankind, Battlestar Galactica, and Star Trek appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.

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  1. Taras Coolidge
    Taras
    @Taras

    In fact, according to transcripts of White House conversations released ten years ago, John F. Kennedy had little interest in space exploration.  He was very explicit about wanting to beat the Soviets (because they had humiliated him).  Without that prospect, he said, space exploration should be funded at the level of any other branch of scientific research. 

    This is not the JFK the series shows us, I suspect.

    The Soviets didn’t just lose the race to the Moon; they never made it at all.  Just as their copy of the Space Shuttle never flew.  This suggests they could not have reached the Moon before the 1970s — if at all.

    In any case, if they had beaten us to the Moon, that wouldn’t change their sclerotic socialist economy.  Reagan broke them and won the Cold War by forcing them to spend money they didn’t have.

    This is not the Soviet Union the series shows us, I suspect.

     

     

     

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  2. Bishop Wash Member
    Bishop Wash
    @BishopWash

    I chuckled when he said that they gave us a happy ending in Battlestar. They voted to abandon their technology and it turned out they landed on earth, so it’s been at least 10,000 years and we’re not back to their technology level. It was one of the more disappointing series finale I’ve watched. It did demonstrate Obama voters, willingly voting for their destruction.

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