Ronald D. Moore interview: an alternate reality Q&A For All Mankind

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Ronald D. Moore is something of a legend in sci-fi circles, having written numerous episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and serving in producer roles for both shows. In 2003, he went on to create and showrun the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica series. 

His latest project is the Apple TV+ series For All Mankind, which depicts the space race in a wildly different alternate reality. With the fourth season underway now, we caught up with the series creator about the show’s view of life on Mars, his optimistic take on sci-fi, and where the story may go from here.

What’s the elevator pitch on For All Mankind for folks who haven’t been watching?

The show is an alternate history, first and foremost, of the space program. And also an alternate history of the last 50 years or so. It starts with the Russians beating the Americans to the Moon in 1969. 

And as a result, everything changes. America is shocked and angered. And they decide to go all in on the space program, instead of what happened in real life where we…really, really dialed back the ambitions that NASA had to build Moon bases, go to Mars and so on. 

And the next thing you know, there are women astronauts more than a decade before that happened in the US. And we have a Moon base in the mid-70s. And everything changed…the world becomes a different place, a better place [because of] the giant investment in space and space technology.

There are still problems and things to overcome. But the show says that if we had kept going in the space program, this is kind of the path that we would have been on. This is the road that [could get] you to a Star Trek-like future, an optimistic place where we solve humanity’s problems and we reach