Even the earlier referenced article made the point that the Shuttle wasn’t the optimal vehicle for a lunar program, but simply the one we had at the time. In FAM, that isn’t the case as they had plenty of craft more optimized for lunar work.
So I binged the first two seasons during the past couple of weeks. I enjoyed it and found it engrossing. (Although when I first started watching, I assumed the character they called Gordo was the real-life astronaut Gordo/Gordon Cooper.) As others said, the brief affair between Karen Baldwin and Danny Stevens was unfortunate and seemingly an unnecessary distraction. (Though it did seem to finally end the Baldwin marriage.) And given the jump ahead to 1995 at the end, I doubt it’s going to come up again.
I built a very small part of the Shuttle simulators, and I’ve been to JSC a few times on business trips, so I was looking carefully at the scenes set in the area.
And reading this topic, someone upthread really hated taking the Space Shuttle to the moon. That didn’t bother me as much. But to be honest, what did bother me was in the final episode, where Ed Baldwin was pointedly shown departing in a different car from his wife Karen and daughter Kelly. He got in his Corvette with Texas plates and drove off from the funeral at Arlington National Cemetery. It seemed implausible that he’d have driven the car all way from Texas just for the funeral.
No such luck. I just watched the first episode of Season 3 and except for what appears to be an extension of the MILF subplot, it’s looking good. They throw a lot of alternate history into the opening montage but it looks like Clinton’s GOP opponent in 1992 is going to be (the assumably still closeted) Ellen Wilson.
Just watched the first episode myself. Spoilers to follow.
The Danny / Karen subplot is definitely going to come up again during this season. The recap I just read on Vulture noted that Danny and his new wife’s dance at the wedding was accompanied by Billy Swann’s rendition of “Don’t Be Cruel”, which Danny played last season when he was trying to seduce Karen. That explains the look Karen gave when she recognized the song.
Ellen was the only main character that got short shrift in this episode; we’ll obviously be coming back to her later. Interested to see what has happened to Kelly in the intervening years, as she is apparently working at a research station in Antarctica.
Going blind hasn’t changed Molly Cobb’s personality a bit, which I am grateful for.
I kind of find Danny Stevens to be an annoying character but I like that he is carrying on his parents’ tradition of pulling off the bad decisions/heroic redemption combo. I suspect he might even become the central character on the mission to Mars, filling in Baldwin and Pooles’ obvious shortcomings as leaders (age and hesitancy respectively).
Really? I thought it was absolutely terrible, completely predictable, and idiotic. A shark-jumping episide.
The first scene of S1E1 jumped the shark. I’m surprised you still watch the show if that’s a deal breaker for you.
Alternate history is much easier to swallow than alternate physics. There could have been an alternative 1969 where Russia got to the moon first. There is no plausable 1990s where a gigantic space hotel is something affordable to non-multi-millionares, and if there were it would not be built so stupidly and unsafely. And the cake decorations sinking into the cake when gravity reached something like 1.05 but people not beginning to notice problems until gravity was past 1.5 (iirc)? And that misfiring rocket not burning through its entire fuel supply in a couple of minutes? Complete brain-dead idiocy.
Somebody on Instagram made a prediction on what happens with Ellen that I think is highly likely:
Ellen is running for president and looks headed for a win … then gets outed right before Election Day, which allows Bill Clinton to come from behind (no pun intended). No Ross Perot candidacy in this universe, so this would make sense.
Does anybody know who’s president between 1984-1992? Gary Hart?
Yes, Gary Hart is U.S. President from 1984 to 1992 in the show’s universe. He apparently won re-election in a landslide in 1988 over Pat Robertson.
Let the cost-per-pound come down enough and maybe it would be possible to throw a space hotel into orbit. And I kind of got the impression that the maybe the company might have underwritten part of the wedding as a promotional thing. And as for the thruster not burning through its fuel supply, doesn’t seem any less likely than a shuttle being brought down by a rubber o-ring.
We just started watching this yesterday, thanks to this thread. We’re really liking it. Does anyone know when Season 3 is dropping?
Episode 1 of S3 has already dropped.
It started (one episode per week) a couple of days ago. That’s what bumped the thread.
But I don’t think there is any non-science fiction way to get costs down that low. That’s the problem. This show is supposed to be rooted in an alternate timeline but in the “real world”.
This alternate timeline has had Sea Dragon since early Season 2. Its payload (550 metric tons) is shark jumpingly huge.
That is lower than I expected. Adjusting the 1962 $10-$30 per pound to 1995 dollars (and assuming a similar rate of inflation for the alt history) you get $50-$150 per pound. So getting a 180 pound person into orbit would cost “only” $9,000 to $45,000.
The price of a 20” TV in 1962 was over $500.
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