Thread by @YNot_1989

I loved Season 1 and 2 of For All Mankind. It ticked damn near every box for plausible #alternatehistory and aerospace engineering.

But Season 3 has been hot garbage. (1)

https://twitter.com/YNot_1989/status/1555572833400414209

First, the good:

The domestic politics of the show has been more or less on point at every turn. Ellen's entire arc this season has been more or less believable... (2)

...and the public backlash from hydrocarbon workers against nuclear fusion shines a light on an unpleasant truth about the relationship between the labor movement and environmentalism that is only being reconciled today in OTL. (3)

SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT
...

Ellen coming out is the kind of implausible that I have no problem defending. #alternatehistory too often imagines darker timelines and For All Mankind is first and foremost a show about optimism and showing what the world could have been. (4)

The Bad: The Aerospace Engineering

If it was any other show this would be excusable, but the first two seasons were militantly committed to depicting realistic spacecraft that were achievable with the technology of the day. This season, its the exact opposite. (5)

Sojourner is an aerospace engineer's nightmare, makes no sense in terms of the legacy technology of the series, and in real life would be an absolute death trap.

See all those sharp angles? Those are friction failure points that would have made Sojourner burn up on re-entry. (6)

Those belly engines? That's a plumbing and weight distribution nightmare for benefit whatsoever.

And why was it built on the moon? Fueled and launched from the moon, sure, but if NASA has Sea Dragons and fleets of shuttles, this is not the Mars ship they would have built. (7)

Far more likely that Sojourner-1 would have been built on Earth, launched aboard a Sea Dragon and parked in Lunar orbit for refueling and supply for the trip out. Using next generation LSAMs... oh wait. (8)

Yeah, MSAM should have been a NASA project, as the agency has been using a mothership-surface access module model since the mid-70s.

Oh, and everyone should have copied this model. Especially the Soviets, because if you thought Sojourner was bad... (9)

What the fuck is this? Seriously, what braindead moron thought Mars-94 made any sense whatsoever? A terrestrially launched spacecraft of this mass launched without a shroud/fairing? (10)

It looks like the art department just duck taped a bunch of Soviet-punk spacecraft tropes together and hoped nobody would notice. We've already established in this timeline that the Soviet copied Buran just like in OTL, so why wouldn't Mars-94 be a copy of Sojourner? (11)

Wouldn't the Soviets have their own version of Sea Dragon in this TL? The whole point of that rocket is that it's cheap to build/launch and delivers more tonnage to space than anything else. Why wouldn't the Soviets want that capability in a race against a rival superpower? (12)

@WhaleOil2 created a more plausible version of Mars-94, which would have been better. But I maintain the mothership should have been a near direct copy of Sea Dragonized Sojourner. (13)

https://twitter.com/WhaleOil2/status/1553200669867347968

Phoenix is the only spacecraft that I find remotely plausible. It really feels like its how a private venture would have attempted a Mars mission. Converted F-1 engines, parts assembled in orbit using small civilian shuttles, I just wish it had more radiators. (14)

Now we come to the most unforgivable sin of Season 3, and again SPOILERS. North Korea.

Its established in the prologue that North Korea in this timeline abandons its nuclear program for a space program... wut? (15)

Firstly, a human space program is FAR more difficult to achieve than an ICBM program, and North Korea only achieved a barely viable IRBM in the 2010s with help from China, who is also competing with the Soviets and Americans in space in this TL. (16)

China would not have handed the North Koreans the means to go to Mars, nor would the Soviets. At BEST, they'd have a few scientists on Chinese lunar bases working in solidarity. (17)

Come to think of it, the entire geopolitics of this series by the 1990s doesn't make much sense. The Chinese by the 90s would have either still been quasi-American allies, OR forming a third bloc against both powers. (18)

I could see the Chinese attempting a bare bones Mars mission in 1994, maybe using a version of the TMK spacecraft that never got off the drawing board in OTL...

But a North Korean in a Kirkland brand Soyuz capsule? (19)

What moron in the writers' room greenlit that idea? It would have taken the astronaut 6 months to get to Mars in that capsule, with barely enough food and water to get anywhere near Mars. And we're supposed to believe he survived another year or more on the surface? (20)

If they found a corpse who clearly died a couple months into the trip, that would have been a believable twist. A 1970s Zvezda-esque base operated by the Chinese, sure, I'd buy that. But one guy in one capsule, are these writers demented? (21)

Also, they establish in the first episode that the North Korean space program is janky as hell and they can barely get to orbit, so the reveal at the end of S3E09 violates the internal logic of the series. (22)

I don't have a pithy ending for this rant, but I really want to know what happened to the show we had in the previous two seasons to get the garbage fire we have now. (23)

Oh! Here's a missed opportunity. Why aren't the Japanese a bigger presence in space? Or at least a bigger perceived threat. Did the writers forget the wave of Japanophobia that swept the US in the 1980s and 90s? They were the world's 2nd largest economy after all. (24)

That would have been a much more plausible race to Mars in Season 3. No private company, but a Japanese mission in competition with the Soviets and Americans while China is still trying to get out of the Third World. (25)