Well, I binged the whole thing over the past several days. Enjoyable for the most part, but very flawed.
Season 3 is an example of “be careful what you wish for”. I watched the first two seasons thinking “I wish they’d dial down the soap opera bullshit from 95% down to about 70%, with the rest being more sci-fi action”. And, well, they more or less did that. But the lack of realism really undercuts the whole thing.
It felt like they were on the right hard-science track, too, so I don’t know what happened. I loved seeing the Sea Dragon show up. I’d have traded the whole dead child subplot with one where Robert Truax has to argue the case for building the Sea Dragon in the first place, then showing him succeeding with ocean launch and a few other things, and eventually convincing the right people to build the damn thing. Instead the thing just appears with no real explanation, and the reason for its existence seems to be radiation concerns (stupid) instead of being cheap, superheavy launch.
They should have skipped the real-world Shuttle completely, and gone straight for the nuclear model. Their design was chubby enough to have reasonable internal tankage, which alongside the efficiency of a nuclear engine probably could have gotten it to the Moon. Well, not with an air launch. They could have put it on top of the Sea Dragon, though. There’s no reason for the original Shuttle to have ever existed in their world.
90% of the Mars stuff was… ugh. I’m ok if stuff fails the napkin math test, as long as it’s kinda close. But much of that was just obvious nonsense. Plus the stupidity of somehow GPS and the radar altimeters of both vehicles failing as they’re landing… even though it’s just a stupid dust storm. Absurd.
I liked the idea of the North Korean suicide run, and it might have even worked had they thought things through better. But come on; there wasn’t enough room to even take their suits off in that capsule. 9 months of shit and piss aren’t going to fit in there even if they tried. They could have added some low-tech improvements like an inflatable habitat to give themselves a bit more room. And some extra crates, janky solar modules, and so on at the landing site.
One frustrating thing about the show is that there’s an absolute wealth of didn’t-quite-happen space projects they could have drawn from, but largely didn’t. Getting Sea Dragon in there was commendable. But how about, say, the LESS–a folding Lunar launch system designed for emergencies. Or the MOOSE; a little one-man inflatable descent system. Maybe some upgraded launchers in the form of the Nova vehicles. And so on. All stuff that went through enough real-world design to pass the sniff test, and with plenty of opportunity for driving the plot.
The show could stand to have a few more good and competent characters. Poole seems the only one left at this point. Everyone else is completely cynical, unstable, or both.