FOR ALL MANKIND: A WHAT-IF FOR SPACE NERDS

What if the Soviets had reached the moon first?

Back before the heady, early days of the space program and NASA, Americans and their glacially slow government were shocked into entering the space race by the Soviet launch of their space satellite Sputnik in 1958. Three years later, in 1961, President John Kennedy vowed to send Americans to the moon by the end of the decade. NASA accomplished that goal in an incredible nine years, landing Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon’s surface on July 20, 1969.

Believe it or not, the “space race” between the U.S. and the USSR pretty much ended there, and in the Seventies and the early Eighties era of glasnost (openness) both countries turned to other matters. The push for manned exploration of space lost momentum, especially after the Challenger shuttle tragedy.

But imagine for a moment that things had gone differently. You’re a young’un or a teenager (like I was) in the summer of 1969, glued to the television watching the first man stepping onto the surface of the moon. But it’s June, not July, and his name is Alexei Leonov, not Neil Armstrong. He sticks the red Hammer and Sickle flag of the USSR in the gray dust of our beloved satellite and claims it not for all mankind, but for the greater good of Marxism. That’s the opening scene of Apple TV Plus’s For All Mankind, a high-concept alternate history of space exploration created and written by Ronald D. Moore of Battlestar Galactica and Outlander fame, along with Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi. The three also serve as executive producers, with production handled by Sony Pictures Television and Tall Ship Production. Since the show requires a fair amount of production in the way of effects and set design, it needs all that backup.

The opening scene, with everyday Americans watching glumly as the Russians win the moon, was a real hook for me, because I remember that broadcast from the moon vividly. And I couldn’t figure out as I watched For All Mankind, why everyone was so unhappy until the last killer moment. Moore gives you a hint, of course, by sticking up a title card with the date (I think it was June 26) in front of the scene, which I knew was “wrong,” but the shock of the twist hit hard.

Once the Russkies land first, President Nixon and NASA and its astronauts must decide whether to go ahead with their planned launch in July. But Tricky Dick wasn’t about to let the Russians get the better of him. So the race is still on, not only to land on the moon, but to establish a permanent presence there. To mine its resources (first water ice, then lithium). And, eventually to use the moon as a launching pad to Mars. At each stage of the race, conflict escalates. Indeed, it becomes increasingly inevitable. Those agreements that were made to demilitarize space and declare it an international zone in our past are never made in this version of history. (Although at one point, the USSR and the U.S. are forced to divide the moon into distinct territories to avoid outright war.)

What is ironic about this is that Nixon’s once mere grudging support for the space program (because it was Kennedy’s baby) becomes enthusiastic as space becomes yet another theater of the Cold War. Resources flow to NASA (that in the real course of history were denied), new astronauts are recruited (including a whole new class of women), the Apollo program eventually launches up to 75 flights (the real-life Apollo program ended at 17, running from 1961 to 1972), new rockets and shuttle designs abound. The military sticks its nose in, too, sending Marines to the moon (where, no surprise, incidents arise) and arming shuttles with missiles. But, what the heck, the Republicans love it! (While Democrats aren’t so sure.) By the 80’s, new President Ronald Reagan is a huge fan, and the solar system is the limit.

But this is just the plot framework for the character development that is the heart of the show. (Season One covers the Seventies, Season Two starts in 1983 and Season Three works around the 1995 landing on Mars.) We meet the major characters we will be following as the show progresses in Episode One: Astronauts Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) and Gordo Stevens (Michael Dorman), their wives, Karen Baldwin (Shantel VanSanten) and Tracy Stevens (Sarah Jones), Chief of the Astronaut Office Deke Slayton (a real character, one of the original Mercury 7 astronauts, played here by Chris Bauer), Mission Control officers Margo Madison (Wrenn Schmidt), Larry Wilson (Nate Corddry) and Bill Strausser (Noah Harpster). In a seemingly unrelated segment, we also meet a young Mexican girl, Aleida Rosales (Coral Pena), crossing the border illegally with her family. (She later goes on to become a senior NASA engineer.) Finally, we meet the annoying Nixon Cabinet officer overseeing the space program, Thomas Paine (Dan Donohue).

Ed Baldwin is a pain who will forever regret he didn’t land Apollo 10 (which he commanded) on the moon to beat the Russians. This would have violated orders and probably gotten him and his partner killed, but he’s a former test pilot so those things don’t really figure. Gordo Stevens drinks too much and cheats on his wife, a pattern he eventually passes on to his son, Danny (played in Seasons Two and Three by Casey W. Johnson). Gordo’s first tour of duty on the moon base Jamestown is a disaster—he freaks out and causes the injury of another astronaut—but he later makes a solid comeback and eventually dies a hero. Baldwin, on the other hand, must suffer the indignities of growing older and facing the possibility of his own irrelevance in a young man’s game.

Personal tragedy also strikes the Baldwin family, a fact that plays into Karen’s search for meaning throughout the show. In Season Two, an Elon Musk-type entrepreneur, Dev Ayesa (Edi Gathegi) recruits her to snag talent for his company, something she’s quite good at. And suddenly the race for Mars is a three-way battle between private enterprise, NASA and the Russians.

In Season One we meet the first class of female astronauts in an episode titled “Nixon’s Women.” Despite pushback from NASA and the male astronaut corps, Nixon is adamant after the Russians show the smiling face of the first female cosmonaut beaming from the moon. According to this alternate history, NASA calls back several pilots from an original Mercury 13 group of women recruited and trained along with the Mercury 7 astronauts but dismissed and never allowed to go into space. (The real story is that 13 women were indeed put through the same training as the Mercury 7 astronauts by a private businessman, William Randolph Lovelace II, in the early Sixties. Despite lobbying Congress to be part of NASA’s program, they were rejected. One of the 13, Wally Funk, eventually went to space on a Blue Origin flight in 2021 at the age of 82, making her the oldest woman in space.)

Daredevil pilot Molly Cobb (Sonya Walger) was one of those originally trained, and she stays at the head of her astronaut class, with Ellen Waverly (Jodi Balfour) right behind her. Token Black “AsCan” (or astronaut candidate) Danielle Poole (Krys Marshall) gives them a run for their money. But the most surprising name on the AsCan list is Tracy Stevens, Gordo’s wife. She gave up her pilot’s wings when she got married and had two children, but now she sees her chance. She struggles, but she refuses to give up. And, though for political reasons she’s sometimes given some slack, she eventually earns her astronaut pin legitimately.

But the most interesting character of all for me is flight engineer Margo Madison, a quirky, socially awkward nerd who is fiercely dedicated to NASA and the space program. She has no life. She sleeps in her office. Her only real friend is her Russian counterpart, Sergei Nikulov (Piotr Adamcyzk), who may like and respect her, but who is being forced by his Communist superiors to squeeze her for technical information to enhance his own space program. Their relationship comes to a head in Season Three, with dire consequences.

Some of what happens in For All Mankind is admittedly over the top. I can more easily forgive the tendency to overdo it on the action front, because, truly, a lot can go wrong in space. As astronaut-turned-Chief of the Astronaut Office Molly Cobb says, “Space is an unrelenting bitch!” And Ron Moore is never one to shy away from piling on the problems to keep his viewers watching.

I have less patience, though, when the characters’ personal problems descend into soap opera hysterics. Karen Baldwin, in particular, makes some big errors in judgment in Season Two. That whole arc lowers the standard for the show by a substantial ick factor.  The writers go off on other tangents that aren’t worth exploring, too. Stick to the point—we’re talking about space here, after all, and the people that explore it—and the show flows much better.

The first three seasons of For All Mankind are available to stream on Apple TV Plus now. The show has been renewed for a fourth season according to the announcement made at ComicCon June 10.

Cheers, Donna

 

 

When you look at the night sky, you're seeing an illusion

The Andromeda Galaxy

 I write science fiction – with an emphasis on the fiction bit. However, mindful of the 'science' bit, I try to adhere to the basic tenets of physics and what knowledge I have of astronomy. But let's face it, if you're writing fast-paced space opera, you need to have things like faster than light travel (FTL). And it has to be really advanced FTL, too. I think we tend to gloss over the facts about how vast space really is, in much the same way that politicians say 'one billion dollars' without batting an eye.

One billion looks like this in dollars. $1,000,000,000. Or put it another way, one thousand million. That's eye-watering money.  But it pales when you start talking about numbers in space.

Even within our little solar system with its unpretentious sun at the centre, the numbers are large. It takes about eight minutes twenty seconds for a photon from the sun, travelling at light speed, to reach Earth. Light travels at about 300,000 km per second, so that's about 300,000 X 500, therefore 150 million km – which is the average distance of Earth's orbit from the sun. In comparison, light from the moon takes a bit over a second to reach Earth, a distance of about 384,400 km. In this context, it doesn't sound like a huge number – but it took Apollo11 76 hours to reach the Moon. It takes months for (unmanned) spacecraft to reach Mars or Venus, years to reach the outer planets.

Once you start to talk about light years, the numbers are mind boggling. One light year is a distance of 9.5 trillion kilometres. If we wanted to visit Alpha Centauri, one of the closest stars to ours, we would need to travel at the speed of light (which is impossible) for nearly four and half years, so really advanced FTL would be a definite plus, especially if it's a love story. Sexual tension can only go so far 😉. 

The size of our Milky Way galaxy is hard to determine since we're in it. Numbers vary from 100,000 to 200,000 light years or more in diameter, so if Admiral Piett was right in saying that the Millenium Falcon could be on the other side of the galaxy by now – that's one hell of an FTL drive. (Of course, that galaxy far, far away might be much, much smaller than ours…)

Once we get outside our own galaxy, the numbers become… astronomical?  One of our nearest galactic neighbours, the Andromeda Galaxy, is 2.5 million light years away.

That segues nicely (the distance, not the sexual tension) into another astronomical fact. Whenever we look at any object in space, we're looking into the past. If the sun suddenly exploded, we wouldn't know for about eight minutes. Alpha Centauri may have exploded in a nova three years ago but we wouldn't know about it for another year and a half. Fortunately for us, it's not likely to die a supernova death, which would cause major problems for life on Earth. But Betelgeuse, the red giant star in the Orion constellation, will do just that – if it hasn't gone already. It is 642.5 light years from Earth and has been behaving erratically of late. Whatever that means. It might have exploded centuries ago.

Whenever you look at the night sky, you're seeing an illusion.

And that leads us to constellations. Astrology is fun, but it's hard to imagine how planets and distant stars can have any significance in human lives. It's easy to see the planets move around the night sky. But stars move, too. We just don't see the motion because they are so far away. 

Take Orion as an example. Perhaps Orion would look the same from other planets within our solar system but over time the stars will move in relation to each other. This short video will show how much.

"It all goes to show that while we take the stars as unchanging guides, they are constantly shifting. Right now, if you want to make sure you're headed in the right direction, you find Polaris (the end of the "ladle" of the Big Dipper is helpful here). But in 3,000 BCE, the star Thuban was the north star. And if humanity hangs around for another 13,000 years, we'll get a new North Star: Vega, the most luminescent star in the constellation Lyra, and currently the second brightest star in the in the northern celestial night sky. Which means our descendants 13,000 years from now (or about 500 generations out) will have a much easier time pointing themselves due north. Something to look forward to!" [source]

Outside our solar system, maybe from Alpha Centauri, the constellations we know and love won't be visible.

And all of that gives lots of opportunities for space opera plots – on the understanding that we have super-duper FTL drives, fantastic air and water recycling systems, fabulous radiation shields, and artificial gravity. (My ships have all those, of course.)

Eye of the Mother is based on the premise that an important star in a constellation the alien Yrmak culture views as the mother deity in their religion has gone supernova. Planets in systems closest to the star can actually see it has exploded, while those further away can't see the constellation.

I've written another story which will appear in due course where the changing shape of constellations depending on the viewer's location is an important clue.

As much as I'm a Star Wars fan, I'd be among the first to agree the science in the shows is pretty ordinary. Star Trek is slightly better. Maybe. I'm happy to admit that I write a form of fantasy but I do my best to avoid magic in my books. That 'science' bit is important.

How the planets formed

I confess I'm a fan of Masterchef. This years' contestants have been great and I've enjoyed the episodes. Except… I channel-surf when the ads are on, quite often flicking to old episodes of Spicks and Specs (a music trivia show) or the food network.

Then, while I was channel-surfing three weeks ago on a Sunday night, I came across The Planets, hosted by Britain's rock star astrophysicist, Professor Brian Cox. From then on, Sunday nights became watching The Planets, with a quick flick now and then to see how Masterchef was getting along.

If you haven't seen this series – do. It's chock full of the all the new things scientists have learned from unmanned missions to all the planets in the last decade or so. Water on Mercury and on asteroids, why Mars lost its atmosphere, what turned Venus into a death trap. And last Sunday, it was Jupiter's turn. What was particularly interesting about this episode is that Prof Cox ventured into cosmology and discussed the formation of the solar system.

When I was at school the conventional wisdom (at least for kids) was that the planets formed from a cloud of material surrounding the new-born Sun. The four rocky planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars) were formed first from the heavier material closest to the sun. The lighter gases escaped further out and formed the gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune). Back then Pluto was still a planet but even then it was something of an anomaly.

Public interest in space exploration waned quickly after the first Moon landing. Not too many people tuned into the pictures from the last manned mission in 1972. Funding or space exploration collapsed. For many years the best information we had came from the Voyager flights, launched in 1977. But more recently we have data from planetary explorers like Cassini-Huygens, Galileo, Juno, Dawn, and others. So we know more about the outer planets and – most importantly – because of Kepler's search for exo-planets, we know a lot more about what solar systems look like.

And they don't look much like ours.

Kepler has found a whole bunch of 'super earths', rocky planets much larger than our home. Scientists have also found lots of gas giants as big as Jupiter whipping around their stars in close orbits, nothing like the configuration of our system, with rocky planets innermost.

So why does our solar system look the way it does?

Professor Cox explained that Jupiter formed at about the same time as the Sun. In some other universe it probably went on to become another star, forming a binary system. There are heaps of them out there. But while Jupiter has two-and-a-half times more mass than every other object in the solar system combined – planets, moons, asteroids - [1] it's not enough to start nuclear fusion. However, Jupiter's presence dictated how the rest of the planets formed the way they did. At one time in its history Jupiter moved toward the sun, coming closer than the asteroid belt and into Mars's orbit. As it did so, it sort of vacuumed up matter in its orbit, leaving less material to be amalgamated into a planet. That's why Mars is so much smaller than Earth and Venus. What dragged Jupiter out again to its present orbit was the development of Saturn, which set up a resonance with Jupiter. The larger planet orbits the sun twice in the time it takes Saturn to orbit once.

These days Jupiter's vast gravitational field protects the inner planets from debris coming in from the Oort cloud or outside the solar system, but millions of years ago, the planet's close encounter with a large asteroid deflected its path, sending the giant rock hurtling through the inner solar system where it collided with a young planet Earth. In fact, that probably happened many times with smaller asteroids – but the big one wiped out the dinosaurs.

I love this stuff. It proves that science is never static. As they learn more about the universe scientists need to revise their hypotheses so they fit the new facts. So much has changed, even in my lifetime.

Maybe sometime, somewhere, we'll find that elusive hint of life on another planet. Won't that be wonderful?

Here's a bit more about the wonderful BBC series The Planets. Catch it if you can.

Have we found a site for the next Galactic Empire?

In the last week or two there has been much excitement about the discovery of seven earth-sized, rocky planets orbiting a dim star thirty-nine light years away. Sure, that's a great start. But how likely are we to find a second Earth in that lot?

And even if we do, will we colonize? Start up the next Galactic Empire?

Like all other animals we are closely attuned to our environment, more so than many of us actually realize anymore. In these days of electricity we can heat or cool our homes, spend half the night watching TV, or reading books, source food from all over the world so nothing is ever out of season, cross distances that took years in days. Yet we cannot escape the factors which shaped us.
I think there are five vital factors we will not easily overcome.

Our perception of time

I use the word 'perception' advisedly, because time is something we measure for ourselves to put ourselves into context, if you will. But whether we think the sun is rising where we are, or setting, our bodies are built to expect a 'day' of twenty-four hours or so, because that's how long it takes for our planet to revolve on its axis. What's more, if we are suddenly wrenched from one time of day to another, as happens with long distance air travel, it takes time for our bodies to adjust. (It's called jet lag) We don't know how long the 'day' is on those alien planets. They may be tidally locked, like the moon, or like Venus where the day is 116 Earth days long. Or they may whizz around their axis in hours like Jupiter, which rotates in a little under ten of our hours.

Gravity

We have evolved to suit the amount of force the planet exerts upon is. The advent of space travel and weightlessness has proved how important gravity is to our ability to function. Without gravity our bones lose density and muscles atrophy. For our seven newly-discovered planets this is a huge plus.

Atmosphere

Most of our atmosphere, what we breathe, is nitrogen, with twenty-three percent oxygen and a bunch of other gases in smaller quantities, including carbon dioxide. It also has a level of density. There's more of it at lower altitude (see gravity). See what happens to mountain climbers if they climb before becoming acclimatized. Their bodies can't cope. And if that mixture of gases changes past a certain level of tolerance, then what? We don't know anything about the atmosphere of our seven planets. As Donna pointed out, being in the star's Goldilocks zone doesn't prove much. Mars and Venus are both in our sun's Goldilocks zone, but Venus, which is about the same size as Earth, has a hellish atmosphere, and Mars, which is much smaller than Earth, has hardly any atmosphere at all.

Temperature

Humans exist in an apparently wide range of climates, providing they can find protection from the elements. But the range is actually not that wide in the scheme of things. That very dim star is therefore something of a worry if we actually want to roam around without spacesuits, and grow food.

Light

Earth orbits a G class star which emits light towards the red end of the spectrum. We're used to seeing colors in that light. If we lived on a world orbiting a cooler star with redder light, or a brighter star with more bluish light, we'd see colors differently. But this is one where I think we'd get used to it very quickly.

Can it be done?

The recent movie The Martian did an amazing job of illustrating the problems associated with trying to live on a planet with a dim sun, not much atmosphere, and cold temperatures.

Humans are adaptable. That's why the species has been so successful. But even so, we've only ever had to adapt to the extremes of one planet. If humans are to venture to other planets and live without space suits I believe we will have two choices; terraform the planet into another Earth or modify the settlers to cope with the conditions. That would mean physically very different races of humanity occupying different planets.

SF can offer plenty of examples. One that springs to mind is Moon and McCaffrey's joint effort, Sassinak, where members of the Star Fleet have different body characteristics, depending on which planet they come from. That can be accomplished through genetic engineering, or by creating cyborgs.


I admit I don't take that route in my own writing. I simply assume all planets are earthlike, with only small variations in light, heat, time and gravity. Moon and McDevitt both used terra-formed planets in their imaginary universes - although it's hard to terra-form planetary rotation, length of year, and mass. But that doesn't mean all those variations can't be found in the space surrounding the planets they dream up. It is the reality of space.

This is a very exciting time to be alive. As our equipment improves we'll be able to learn more and more about the planets out there. The James Webb telescope will be up and running soon, opening up more and more possibilities. The planet circling Proxima B is close enough for better study. I look forward to the results.