Just the beginning where they set the stage of what has happened in the world is so interesting.
Apparently Gary Hart got elected President.
The Russians are in the America's backyard ... south and central America.
Margaret Thatcher was assassinated by the IRA.
Global Warming was averted by the use of nuclear power.
It tickles me to see this stuff, very imaginative stuff.
I thought S3 E1 was boring. It also shows why space tourism is not a good idea in our timeline or theirs. I read an article about the ISS, in which it was described how the ground controllers are in a nearly constant fight to keep the crew alive.
The Polaris space station appears to be built on the cheap with very little standing in the way of a problem being a complete nightmare which will kill everyone on board. When gravity increases above 1.5g and it starts falling apart, you know your space station sucks. When you can't remotely shut off the fuel to a damaged thruster, your station sucks. This is just more lazy writing on the part of the production crew.
They did that stuff in service to their story line. I agree with your criticisms, but FAM is a lot better in terms of plot and characters than 90+% of Science Fiction movies or series. They have to think of some way Polaris fails so it can be up for sale to the private outfit, which I forget the name of. Look back at the Challenger O-ring thing. That should not have been an issue, and probably would not have been had they stuck to the nominal rules and not launched when it was too cold.
You have to meet a fairly good story half-way.
But, I also find it harder to get into this new season. The camaraderie of the astronauts is gone, and Gordo and his wife are dead. I am still fascinated and interested in this sort of half-fact, 3/4 fiction attempt at storytelling. I think it is pretty cool. Funny to see Clinton lose the Presidential election.
The clip they showed of Clinton debating could have been the one where he was debating Jerry Brown, which was a whole can of worms. You can tell the media was on the side of Clinton because he all but tried to fight Jerry Brown when Brown challenged him on his and Hillary's Arkansas corruption.
Brown was right, but he got hustled by Slick Willy. Brown would have made such a better President.
I think the show is drifting more towards science fantasy and away from science fiction. It is unlikely that anyone could design a "single stage to orbit" spacecraft taking off from the moon, inserting itself into Mars orbit then landing. We don't even have that in the 2020's.
The USA's Sojourner does not appear to have any sort of facilities to ensure the astronauts maintain the required physical condition to function in Mars' 40% Earth gravity immediately after landing.
The solar sail on Sojourner is far too small to have any affect on the speed or trajectory of a spaceship weighing many tons. Other planned demonstration projects (Sunjammer 2015) have sails of 13,000 square feet for a craft weighing less than 400 pounds.
The lander/ascent craft on the Helios seems far too small to perform a powered descent without a parachute or landing stage to the near surface then perform a powered abort.
As far as the soap opera aspects, Danny Cooper is the same kind of unreliable loser that his father was. Ed Baldwin would have surely noticed this prior to getting him a place on Helios, much less as his co-pilot on the lander. Baldwin was also a fool for risking a long duration mission to a hazardous landing in a dust storm for a chance to be the first man on Mars. That kind of stunt would surely wipe out any chances of him being on another trip to Mars.
I totally agree with you on the Sojourner spaceship. It is unbelievable in terms of engineering, or at least it seemed that way to me. Not to mention there are no crew entertainment facilities, not to mention with hostile Russian cosmonauts. They are closer than the research scientists who are penned up in the Antarctic who have gotten cabin fever and ever in homicidal fights. Also the Danny character's psychological instability seems weird, but his saving Helios probably overrode that.
Still there is so much about season 3 that I don't like, compared to mostly liking and being surprised by seasons one and two.
Also, it always bugs me that since they did that centrifuge in 2001: A Space Odyssey everyone wants to do a centrifuge, but they never take into account the torque effects of changing course. Everything is find if they are just going straight, but as soon as they try to make a turn there would be the affects on that huge spinning mass.
The Helios lander bit was corny, but also if they are going to have a base on Mars, seems like they'd better have a backup or two for that lander. The logic of the Mars stuff is not very convincing.
But I would not say it is any more science fantasy than it was in S1 and S2. They are at least making an effort to follow the science even if they screw up the details. A lot more than last years "Stowaway" that was totally ridiculous, or any number of the scads of SF movies or shows that depict storms in space, or ships traveling at the speed of light with deflectors to ward off space debris, or the Star Trek transporter. Like the neutrino storm that rocked the ship in Covenant.
The changes in history were interesting, but the Cold War stuff and war on the Moon I found hard to believe, but still interesting in that they at least addressed a real thing in a kind of serious way. The Russians strangling their own guy to get the cooperation of the American space agency head, and her doing nothing about it, or having cooperated with the Russian guy from the start because she was a pathetic old maid?
I don't like S3 so much, but I will continue to watch to see what happens. And then the whole dig at the collective way that Helios is organized, and of course the head of the company is a black dude. All these casting the plot things are done with archetypes in mind, and it seems like young people don't even see this stuff and just absorb it like it is real.
Season 1 was a great alternate history take, with a lot of astronaut training and real drama.
Season 2 was a pointless soap opera.
Season 3 is back on track.
I liked Season 2. Season 3 relies on stuff like failing to notice Danny's psychopathy.
I also find the Russian extortion plot at NASA a bit hard to take.
The spaceships, aside from Helios are pretty unbelievable.
I also find it completely unbelievable that so many people could fit and live inside either the Russian or the American Mars ships. I would have already rigged up a jail cell for the one head Russian dude who is rude, provocative and insubordinate, or tossed him out the airlock and said it was an accident.
The astronauts as a whole misbehave worse than Sailors. Ten years of sea duty on submarines and I have not seen the same kind of bad behavior depicted by these astronauts while on a mission.
shareMaybe because this is a TV show?
shareYes of course. I understand that the producers of most TV and films show "us 2022 people" in the setting of the production no matter what it is. But do disciplined and well trained professionals really act worse than minimally trained (in comparison) Sailors on a ship? I don't think so.
While NASA has had it's share of misbehavers and malcontents in it's ranks, for the most part they did not do the outlandish things during a mission that are shown in For All Mankind. These flaws interfere in my suspension of disbelief. :)
As far as I know the only lecture (from the book, Lost Moon) an Apollo commander gave his crew was while Lovell on Apollo 13, was preparing to swing around the moon and his crewmates were busy looking out the window and sightseeing. The film Apollo 13 changed that scene to something more dramatic.
The worst antics of the time, as far as I know, were limited to drinking and infidelity while training and the Apollo 15 postal covers incident. There may be more.
I think they do because they are more disciplined statistically. They can only make the best guess they can, and then tweak with experience. TV is really awful and nothing to base our ideas about reality or human behavior - it's worse than just nonsense.
shareEd Baldwin is based upon Tom Stafford; born in 1930. This makes Baldwin about 65-66 in 1996 on the Mars mission. Too old I think.
shareThe do portray him as competent but kind of crusty.
I think of John Glenn, who went up in the Space Shuttle in his 70's, plus Baldwin in this show was working for a private company in a speculative world that had much more developed space technology than our reality.
Good points. Glenn's 2nd trip into space was a publicity stunt more than anything else. It was too bad he was given the hero treatment in 1962 and was told to stop asking for another trip into space.
shareI never hear anyone talk about this show. Should I start it? The alternate timeline is interesting does it deliver?
shareWatch a few episodes and find out.
shareThe show is more and more soap opera as it goes on. The science gets much more speculative in season 3. Season 1 is the best.
shareAfter the big catastrophe in the last episode, I'm kind of turned off, but I will watch and wait and see what happens.
sharewatch some more episodes and you may be turned back on
shareThe big stopper was the boss, first humiliating Danny and challenging him to a fight on the "bridge" in front of other people, but then not sidelining him or not shit-canning him altogether, and not even telling his co-worker to keep an eye on him. That was totally ridiculous.
shareEpisode 10 is creeping closer and closer to science fantasy. When using the Helios ascent/descent craft to return Kelly to Phoenix, it uses nearly all of it's fuel getting up, it would not have enough to accomplish a soft landing. Ed would also land hundreds of miles downrange. I don't think any of their rovers would have the range to go get him.
I think putting one of the Mars crew on the NK craft would eat up more resources than it is worth.
> Ed would also land hundreds of miles downrange.
I am not sure about that. He had to boost Kelly off to Helios, meaning she could not have that high of a rotational/orbital vector. If you looked at the diagram all her velocity component was aimed SLOWLY right into the hatch of Helios, so if she, and the descent craft were going hundreds of miles ... in less than an hour - she'd have probably gone right through the back wall of the airlock.
I don't like these kind of things ... done I think first in "The Martian", and then in "The Expanse", and people always eat it up, but the chances of that working are very low.
Also, the craft's landing weight was much less than its climbing weight. When it blasted off it was fighting gravity and atmosphere, but as it came down it was less massive and the atmosphere would have worked to slow it down. It might have worked ... with a little suspension of disbelief.
They said the module would achieve 95% of orbital speed or about 6100 mph. The direction of that speed is mostly downrange upon reaching 95% of orbiting altitude. He would need to slow down to drop faster into the Mars atmosphere and limit the distance back to the surface. At 100 miles per minute, in a few minutes up and down I think he would be hopelessly out of range of any rescue.
share> They said the module would achieve 95% of orbital speed or about 6100 mph. The direction of that speed is mostly downrange upon reaching 95% of orbiting altitude.
That is a good point. I think that is where the confusion was. It's just a TV show, and it does bug me that they never seem to go out of their way to actually massage the script into something that is near scientifically feasible. I often think about the millions of lost teachable moments that could convey understanding to audiences but are basically just filled with pap.
Just watched s03e01 and definitely starts off the wrong foot. There are the minor annoyances:
1. It makes no sense Roscosmos to exist in USSR.
2. Its boss being treated like an errand boy by the KGB, while in reality he would have been a very powerful and well connected man.
3. Testing nuclear engines on the Moon. Why?
4. People started feeling gravity when it hit 1.5g
5. Guy hit by a rope that is too short to reach his position
These quicky add up...
Major gripes:
1. The action scenes they write are as mediocre as the drama.
2. Very thin worldbuilding. Apart from the news clippings at the start of the season, we scarcely get to know how the day-to-day live changed. It is all too focused on the characters. Maybe it is budgetary constrains or imagination constraints... I'm not sure.
3. Too much run-of-the-mill family drama, too little sci-fi (at least for the first two seasons)
Well, I will continue to watch because it is an OK show and I'm fan of spaceflight and alternate/future history stories but it bugs me how much better it could have been.
One thing to really pay attention to is how the US CIA media treats any Russian reference.
All Russians are evil, spies or Russian Mafia. The country is corrupt and broken ... old tropes
from the 50s and 60s Cold War. Russian woman are ugly, or sexy porno chicks.
Your point about the Russians is a good one. I did not like how they did that at all. But what
I thought was odd was how and why the American lady ( I forget her character now ) was so
easily taken in and manipulated by the Russian KGB.
Bringing back the Cold War on the Moon was a really bad decision for this series that was
hoping to show that progress would be made over time. That's why overall I can't rate it that
highly, though the story was good and interesting while it played.
Watched episode 4. It is unbelievable that Americans still expect to see this cartoonish depiction of the soviets. Or perhaps the writers didn't know better. In places it is even laughable, like when NASA brought the cosmonauts on their ship and they were looking at their former comrade with murderous eyes. Cringe! I mean, the show is made for audience with above the average IQ, and it is hard to put up with that shit they typically would sell to the average Joe.
They continue to fuck up with the realism. Shuttle to Mars, three space ships cruising one behind the other and most importantly - methane rocket engine have no chance beating nuclear engines to Mars. Nuclear engines, even the dumbest and simplest of them, cut the travel time to Mars by a half. The Helios ship has no chance beating the others and, apart from the crappy engines, it is way too advanced for the timeframe. Well, duh, maybe I should just stop expecting realism and enjoy the sci-fi.
> It is unbelievable that Americans still expect to see this cartoonish depiction of the soviets.
That really bothered/bothers me. It was so easy for the US to
do all these things around the world, and then blame Russia for
trying to prevent Ukraine from building up enough military power
to take back Crimea, which has been Russian since the 1600s.
and is a very important warm water port.
The reason we fomented a war with Russia is purely selfish -
to keep Russia out of the EU and Russian gas from making Russia
rich the we erroneously enriched the Saudis and Iranians into
becoming global criminal regimes.
Russia could have been a valuable ally, but the US wants it all our
way or no way at all.
I finished it. Overall it is a more enjoyable season, because it has more action and sci-fi, but it is for the price of characters doing stupid things and less realism. So many ridiculous and forced moments...
Big problem of this show is that it lacks interesting characters. Except Kinnaman's character, all others are expendable. They range from annoying to boring. Especially annoying are the two dimwitted sons of Gordo. At least they managed to find actors with semblance to Gordo.
Yeah. the thing with Gordo's sons was strange. On the other hand in that generation men were rubbish as fathers and a lot of American suffered with the first generation that had to turn on the country and steal from them - otherwise known as Conservative Republicans.
share> Global Warming was averted by the use of nuclear power.
We should be working on making that happen ASAP.