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‘For All Mankind’ co-creator Ronald D. Moore talks working with Apple, NASA’s Artemis program, and Mars

It’s been a week since the thrilling conclusion of For All Mankind season 2 on Apple TV+, and Space Explored has chatted with the show’s creator Ronald D. Moore about what it’s like working with Apple on the series, NASA’s progress on the Artemis program, and more.

For All Mankind is a thrilling drama that takes place in an alternate narrative to our own history where the Soviet Union lands humans on the Moon first back in 1969. This spirals decades later when a 1980s NASA with an almost bottomless budget sends the Space Shuttle not just to low Earth orbit to also carries supplies and crew to a fully functioning lunar base.

The show was created by Ron Moore who got his start writing episodes for Star Trek: The Next Generation and continued with the series into Deep Space Nine and Voyager. Space Explored founder and 9to5Mac editor Zac Hall asked Moore what it is like to work with Apple on one of their first Original TV shows.

“Fundamentally they’ve just always really liked the concept of the show and they’ve been very supportive creatively, and financially, and just sort of in publicity and marketing and sort of across the board. It’s been interesting to be with them from the launch of the service.

Now a couple of years in and see them grow and get more familiar and get their feet under them in terms of what they’re doing. But the relationship between the production and the network has always been very solid. And they’ve just always liked what we were doing and excited by this notion of jumping through the decades and, you know, watching the technology evolve is certainly an interest to Apple in this alternate history kind of format or what are the possibilities of the space program could have been.

Ron Moore, creator of For All Mankind

Zac followed up with a question on all of the news coming from NASA and the Artemis program to send the first woman and first person of color to walk on the Moon in this decade and how it affects the show.

The fact that NASA is talking about returning to the Moon and a woman of color or people of color coming to stand on the lunar surface is really kind of cool and exciting. It’s something that we talk about a lot in the writer’s room and just watching that happen in parallel with what we’re doing.

And then we have Perseverance going to Mars while we’re working on season three. And there is a sort of synergistic effect, at least psychologically for us in the writer’s room, where it’s like, wow, you know, these things weren’t happening just a few short years ago. The space program in the United States had kind of gone into more of a fallow period after the shuttles, the retirement of the shuttle fleet.

And with the space station we didn’t even have a way to get Americans into orbit except by using Russian launch systems. And now we’re kind of back and now you’ve got the [Crew] Dragon capsule and SpaceX and it’s all kind of happening. And so it’s really great to be doing a show like this while the American public and the world public is starting to sort of become more interested in space travel again.

It feels like there’s an excitement to things like returning to the Moon and seeing more and Mars exploration. So it’s very cool. It’s really nice. It’s nice serendipitous timing for sure.

Ron Moore, creator of For All Mankind

FAM is already working on the third season for Apple TV+, although Moore has just recently signed a deal with Disney to create TV shows exclusively with them. This will take him away from continuing to work closely with the For All Mankind crew in creating future seasons, but Moore says the show is in good hands. While this might be a cause for concern for fans of the show, Moore has stated in previous interviews that they are many seasons into planning the storyline out so no need to worry about a drastic change in the series.

For All Mankind was one of the first original TV shows Apple announced that coming to Apple TV+ and among the flagship shows available at launch. With the announcement of the new Apple TV 4K and the conclusion of season 2, now might be a good time to pre-order the latest streaming box today to enjoy the show in the true fashion it was intended for.

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Avatar for Seth Kurkowski Seth Kurkowski

Seth Kurkowski covers launches and general space news for Space Explored. He has been following launches from Florida since 2018.