Full trailer
The new season has started. It won’t be For All Mankind without questionable decisions on half-assed missions getting people killed.
So now that FAM is back, time for complaining about the terrible science/physics of the show.
They are making the first manned landing on an asteroid. A small carbonaceous one that looks to be a few hundred meters across. Their ship is hovering motionless relative to one face of the asteroid. Which is of course not possible. Not only would the asteroid be rotating, an asteroid that small would likely have rotation on more than one axis, in other words be tumbling. There would be no such thing as one end of a spaceship “tidally locked” to one face of an asteroid two hundred meters away.
And that doesn’t even take into account that their intention is to wrap chains around the asteroid, connect those to a column, and push the asteroid out of its solar orbit into Mars orbit using that one little ship, something that would involve massive delta vee. And the fact is that Mars already has two sizable carbonaceous asteroids orbiting it that can be mined, no need to go dragging in a third, much smaller one any time soon
The producers must be very pleased to have such a devoted fan who watches straight after each season’s release, and continues to promote awareness of this show so avidly in forums.
Maybe they’ll name a comet after you in Season 5?
The most enjoyable moment in the premiere was the Russian grandmother of Kelly’s son bluntly telling Kelly that Ed is a selfish prick. It’s about time somebody said it!
I am interested in the new Miles Dale character; I always loved the song “Rocket Man” by Elton John for its puncturing of our image of astronauts as larger than life heroes. Miles looks like he may be like the character from the song, just a working stiff doing his job to feed his family. Of course, the whole lying about having a college education is going to bite him in the behind at some point (“and all this science I don’t understand / it’s just my job, five days a week”)
Margo’s misadventures in the Soviet Union are intriguing; I also want to see what Ellen and her lady are getting up to in retirement.
Finally… do you suppose fake President Gore created the Social Security lockbox that the real Gore never got a chance to?
Man, I just thought through the lyrics, and the story is basically a working man goes to Mars, presumably to feed his family, and he gecomes very lonely, doesn’t understand the science, rtc. And, he’s not the man theybthink he is at home. I always took that to mean he doesn’t thinkmof himself as a hero, just a working stiff trying to feed his family. But ‘guy who fakes his way onto spaceshipnto Mars and doesn’t understand tge science he’s supposed to’ fits pretty well. If we get a scene where his lie on the application comes back into play, that’d be a pretty good sign this is at least an homage to the song, if not an outright retelling.
Or, he’ll become a national hero, and in this universe Elton John writes a song about him…
Definitely doing For All Mankind Lower Decks this season.
What did they say was the cost for him to return home? $150,000. Sounds like a bargain for a round-way trip to Mars. And they didn’t do any psychological testing before he went??
And that price includes the training time.
And psychological testing? He got in by saying that he lived in “all the dorms” at his college that he definitely had went to.
Heck, they didn’t even check his college records.
I just saw the last episode and boy they sure need an union up there ASAP.
Interesting that they decided to go the route of the plight of the working man this season; it fits very much with all the labor unrest we’ve seen in real life over the last several months.
I hope Kelly and Aleida kick some NASA ass with their new venture in finding life on Mars. Dev Ayesa is obviously going to be an investor.
Margo just found herself walking into the August coup (except in this universe, it happens in the winter, in 2003, and it might end up succeeding).
Well that got dark.
But they are better at writing human drama than space stuff.
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So now that FAM is back, time for complaining about the terrible science/physics of the show.
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I am still on season 1, and what bothers me most is: conversations between Mission Control and astronauts on the moon (more than a light second away) with no latency. I am old enough to have followed some Apollo missions live, and these conversations always sounded different because of the pauses.
And that continues this week. Good drama when they aren’t doing bad science.
This episode brings back up the question of the costs of missions. Is $5000 for a Mars rock a lot or not compared to the cost to get it back to Earth?
Just watched the new episode. I’m getting vibes that Margo is going to try to return to the U.S. before season’s end. She acted more than a little naive in believing that Semenov wasn’t going to end up in a gulag (if he’s lucky) for the error in the asteroid capture; she’s at least got to be smart enough to know that, in a dictatorial regime, she is only safe as long as she proves useful to the powers that be.
Apparently with Helium-3 fusion shipping something to (or from) Mars is about as cheap as Priority Mail. Even cheaper if you are smuggling it along with other stuff.
That’s really the catch - there is no “cost” to the supplier that needs to be accounted for in the price because they’re smuggling it onboard a ship. So $5K a rock is nearly all profit for the supplier. Not sure they could telegraph any more that our Yokel without a Clue is going to end up in even more trouble when his smuggling rocks after being told not to do so is discovered.