For All Mankind

[libra]

As of 1983 ? Musk is a very unhappy, bullied, beaten 12-years old in Apartheid South Africa. He will escape that hell soon, in 1987, heading to Canada, then to the USA.
With an earlier Internet (D-mails !) his path to stardom may be... different. Paypal (or something vaguely similar) may have already been invented. Credit cards existed since the 70's via Roland Moreno (a french inventor) and if the Internet come earlier, inevitably people will want to use it to buy things without moving from their home.

Jeff Bezos born 1964 is seven years older and by 1982 in Florida he was already daydreaming of space industries and colonies, reading O'Neill books.  Ifthe Internet come earlier, his path to ultra-rich will start earlier, too.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/31/amazon-jeff-bezos-proposed-colonizing-space-high-school-graduation-speech.html

[Nibb31]

Speaking of which - there was a scene of a Saturn rocket launching off some very tall pedestal. What was that all about?

That was the milkstool. They used it for Saturn IB launches to use the umbilicals that were made for the Saturn V.

[sanman]

Sally Ride mentions the "control drum actuators" - so does that refer to a particular NERVA version, using control drums instead of control rods? Is it some kind of closed-cycle design?
Because firing an open-cycle NTR in the Earth's atmosphere would contaminate it with a lot of radioactive material.

[hektor]

So in this Universe the final Apollo flight is Apollo 45.

And the Sea Dragon escorted by Pathfinder is #17...

I realized also  that Lee Atwater is a real historical character.

I wonder now who will succeed Reagan in 1984. I also wonder if and when Elon Musk will appear. What would he be up to in such a Universe ?

I think when they were announcing the launch of Danielle Poole & co for the Apollo-Soyuz mission, they called it out as Apollo 75
The Saturn production line must have been quite busy.

Speaking of which - there was a scene of a Saturn rocket launching off some very tall pedestal. What was that all about?

Probably I misheard.

[hektor]

As of 1983 ? Musk is a very unhappy, bullied, beaten 12-years old in Apartheid South Africa. He will escape that hell soon, in 1987, heading to Canada, then to the USA.
With an earlier Internet (D-mails !) his path to stardom may be... different. Paypal (or something vaguely similar) may have already been invented. Credit cards existed since the 70's via Roland Moreno (a french inventor) and if the Internet come earlier, inevitably people will want to use it to buy things without moving from their home.

Jeff Bezos born 1964 is seven years older and by 1982 in Florida he was already daydreaming of space industries and colonies, reading O'Neill books.  Ifthe Internet come earlier, his path to ultra-rich will start earlier, too.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/31/amazon-jeff-bezos-proposed-colonizing-space-high-school-graduation-speech.html

I was more thinking in terms of Season 3 or 4...

[Yggdrasill]

SPOILERS below!




I can't say I liked the ending of the last episode. I just find it completely unrealistic that the Soviets would go to such extremely drastic measures. The attack on Jamestown is quite literally an armed invasion of a US outpost, and practically a declaration of war.

Shooting at each other on neutral ground is one thing, actually invading is *waay* different.

I guess it is supposed to be a raid to get their cosmonaut back. But the way they attacked, they could easily have killed him. There was no guarantee the medbay door would be closed. So do they not care if he dies - they just don't want him to defect? Are they actually trying to kill the cosmonaut for trying to defect? Maybe. But I can't see any way preventing a defection would be worth starting a war over. It would be less of an escalation to shoot down their lander enroute to lunar orbit.

The US would have ample justification to level the Soviet outpost, so I can't see that it would happen that the cosmonauts would go rogue and try to get their friend back, either. They would know the chance of getting off the moon alive would be minimal.

Maybe they can get things back on track in the next episode, but yeah, I think this plot twist was very wrong for the series.

[Eerie]

As of 1983 ? Musk is a very unhappy, bullied, beaten 12-years old in Apartheid South Africa. He will escape that hell soon, in 1987, heading to Canada, then to the USA.
With an earlier Internet (D-mails !) his path to stardom may be... different. Paypal (or something vaguely similar) may have already been invented. Credit cards existed since the 70's via Roland Moreno (a french inventor) and if the Internet come earlier, inevitably people will want to use it to buy things without moving from their home.

There's no reason to think Elon Musk exists in the world of For All Mankind. Point of divergence is before his birth (or more precisely, before his conception), so he's gonna be Butterfly Effect'ed away (together with all other people who were born after the point of divergence).

[libra]

The POD seems to be circa 1966 with a certain person living (damn spoilers). Not sure if only 5 years down the road and without any space program in South Africa, Elon's family and fate would be impacted. 

It's a perenial debate of alternate space histories... does the countries without a space program or families without a US space engineer / scientist, are affected ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Early_life

It boils to the following question: does the Soviets changing the course of the space race, would impact the events described below ?

Elon Reeve Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, Transvaal, South Africa.[6][7] His mother is Maye Musk (née Haldeman), a model and dietitian born in Saskatchewan, Canada,[8][9][10] but raised in South Africa. His father is Errol Musk, a South African electromechanical engineer, pilot, sailor, consultant, and property developer.[11] Musk has a younger brother, Kimbal (born 1972), and a younger sister, Tosca (born 1974).[10][12] His maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, was an American-born Canadian.[13][14] His paternal grandmother had British and Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry.[15][16]

After his parents divorced in 1980, Musk lived mostly with his father in Pretoria and elsewhere,[15] a choice he made two years after the divorce and subsequently regretted.[17] Musk has become estranged from his father, whom he has described as "a terrible human being... Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done."[17] He has a half-sister and a half-brother on his father's side.[13][18]

At the age of 10, he developed an interest in computing while using the Commodore VIC-20.[19] He learned computer programming using a manual and, by age 12, sold the code of a BASIC-based video game he created called Blastar to PC and Office Technology magazine for approximately $500.[20][21] An awkward and introverted child,[22] Musk was bullied throughout his childhood and was once hospitalized after a group of boys threw him down a flight of stairs.[17][23] He attended Waterkloof House Preparatory School and Bryanston High School before graduating from Pretoria Boys High School.[24]

[Eerie]

The POD seems to be circa 1966 with a certain person living (damn spoilers). Not sure if only 5 years down the road and without any space program in South Africa, Elon's family and fate would be impacted.

Elon's parents - probably not much. But Elon himself should be gone, because there's basically no chance the exact same egg and sperm cells will meet with even a tiny change in timing, which is inevitable, because any small divergence is going to reshuffle the atmosphere very quickly.

[MATTBLAK]

An Elon Musk inspired analogue will surely (or at least hopefully) appear in a future season.

[sanman]

It's ironic then that For All Mankind has been conceived of by Ronald Moore in the wake of SpaceX raising the profile of spaceflight again by injecting new progress in the field. SpaceX, etc are the reason why spaceflight has once again become glamorous and exciting enough to make TV drama shows about. It'll be strange if it turns out that there are no SpaceX-like private space companies in the future timeline of For All Mankind. I guess that would make it a very different alternate timeline indeed, where human expansion into the cosmos is exclusively done through govt space programs.


Once you have nuclear-powered reusable launch vehicles like Pathfinder in the picture, then how do you justify the emergence of private space launch companies? What can they do that the existing space launch infrastructure in For All Mankind can't?
(Unless they have some kind of nuclear accident with Pathfinder that forces them to retreat from that avenue of progress)

[Andy_Small]

My response is below with more spoilers

SPOILERS below!




I can't say I liked the ending of the last episode. I just find it completely unrealistic that the Soviets would go to such extremely drastic measures. The attack on Jamestown is quite literally an armed invasion of a US outpost, and practically a declaration of war.

Shooting at each other on neutral ground is one thing, actually invading is *waay* different.

I guess it is supposed to be a raid to get their cosmonaut back. But the way they attacked, they could easily have killed him. There was no guarantee the medbay door would be closed. So do they not care if he dies - they just don't want him to defect? Are they actually trying to kill the cosmonaut for trying to defect? Maybe. But I can't see any way preventing a defection would be worth starting a war over. It would be less of an escalation to shoot down their lander enroute to lunar orbit.

The US would have ample justification to level the Soviet outpost, so I can't see that it would happen that the cosmonauts would go rogue and try to get their friend back, either. They would know the chance of getting off the moon alive would be minimal.

Maybe they can get things back on track in the next episode, but yeah, I think this plot twist was very wrong for the series.

I think the CMDR of the Soviet station was so frakked when he left with the body he went rogue to destroy the american's. 

[sanman]

I think the CMDR of the Soviet station was so frakked when he left with the body he went rogue to destroy the american's.

I think the defector is what's motivating them. Maybe he's the man who knows too much, and they need to ensure his knowledge doesn't fall into American hands. Otherwise, they could have just used some cruder method like blowing up Jamestown, but instead they seem to want to penetrate it and extract their guy, or at least confirm his death.

Since the guy is defecting, you'd think that the Americans would want to de-brief him ASAP, to relay his important knowledge back home. So maybe the Soviets are acting so quickly because they want to pre-empt this, rather than just carrying out some impulsive tit-for-tat retaliation.

Then there's the question of why the Soviets are sending an armed Buran Shuttle to blockade the Moon. Their representative claimed that they believe the US is about to transport nuclear weapons to the Moon with Sea Dragon. So ostensibly, the Buran has been sent to stop this. But from the American pov, this claim is false - so is it just being asserted as some cover to justify the Soviet raid against Jamestown?

And how is Apollo-Soyuz happening against this backdrop without being canceled?

[Blackstar]

Then there's the question of why the Soviets are sending an armed Buran Shuttle to blockade the Moon. Their representative claimed that they believe the US is about to transport nuclear weapons to the Moon with Sea Dragon. So ostensibly, the Buran has been sent to stop this. But from the American pov, this claim is false - so is it just being asserted as some cover to justify the Soviet raid against Jamestown?

Keep in mind that the USAF secretly sent up a second reactor to the Moon. So the Americans know that they have done stuff that the Soviets don't know about, but may be very suspicious of.

You'll have to watch the final episode to see how this all plays out. I was able to watch all 10 episodes many weeks ago, so I know what happens. I have my issues with the last few episodes, but I also think that a lot of what they've shown has historical precedent. If you go study the history of the Cold War and events like the Berlin Crisis and the Cuban Missile Crisis, you find plenty of examples of people screwing up, firing their weapons when they shouldn't, exceeding the official rules of engagement, etc. (I believe, for example, that the shooting down of USAF Major Rudolf Anderson's U-2 over Cuba was a case where the local commander fired his missile without high-level authorization to do so.) There are plenty of examples where a mistake could have had much bigger and deadlier consequences. There are plenty of examples where rather crazy stuff happened that people have forgotten about (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_axe_murder_incident ). In other words, this kind of stuff happens all the time. 

[mjp25]

This is such a small thing compared to the geopolitical stuff but I was thinking about the numbering system for STS launches. They refer to Apollo launches by number and Sea Dragon launches by number but have only referred to shuttle launches by orbiter name. I was thinking about how NASA changed the numbering system for STS around 1984. I wonder if the numbering system is sequencial.

[sanman]

It also seems that Saturn is now legacy hardware, with only the Saturn-1B being retained for Apollo-Soyuz, and STS having taken over manned lunar flights with Sea Dragon for lunar cargo flights. (I guess it's not possible for Sea Dragon to be man-rated?)

Here's some info from a wiki site for the show:

https://for-all-mankind.fandom.com/wiki/Space_Shuttle

It mentions that STS commences operation in 1973.
The nuclear powered Pathfinder shuttle commences operation in 1983.

It's not clear to me whether Pathfinder has a payload bay similar to what the traditional Space Shuttle has.

[Blackstar]

It mentions that STS commences operation in 1973.

It says "beginning after 1973," which is a clever way of not stating when the shuttle actually started flying.

[sanman]

It says "beginning after 1973," which is a clever way of not stating when the shuttle actually started flying.

Okay, but it has to be ahead of 1981, which is when the US Air Force version starts flying (which is also the same year as the maiden flight of the Columbia in real life). So in the alternate timeline, STS starts flying sooner than in real life.

The Buran shuttle gets to fly in 1983 in For All Mankind, whereas in real life it doesn't fly until 1988.

Presumably as the first of the 2nd-generation of shuttles like Pathfinder enters operation in 1983, then the previous generation of shuttles would start to go obsolete, so that no more of them are built. Once this newer Pathfinder generation of shuttles is in service, then they might not have any more need for Skylab as their refueling post. I wonder how big their 2nd-generation shuttle fleet would grow?

[Oli]

They should have hired the writers of The Americans for this show. The depiction of the Soviets is so silly.

[MATTBLAK]

It mentions that STS commences operation in 1973.

It says "beginning after 1973," which is a clever way of not stating when the shuttle actually started flying.

Even with a massive budget increase and more priority and luck: it's unlikely the Shuttle program could have been flying earlier than 1979 or 1978 at the latest. Perhaps if a simpler configuration than the Rockwell STS Shuttles had been chosen: maybe.