For All Mankind (2019 — 2022)

For All Mankind is an American science fiction drama streaming television series created and written by Ronald D. Moore, Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi and produced for Apple TV+. The series dramatizes an alternate history depicting “what would have happened if the global space race had never ended” after the Soviet Union succeeds in the first crewed Moon landing ahead of the United States. The series features historical figures including Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins, Mercury Seven astronaut Deke Slayton, rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, flight director Gene Kranz, U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy, and U.S. Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

In an alternate timeline, in 1969 a Soviet cosmonaut, Alexei Leonov, becomes the first human to land on the Moon. This outcome devastates morale at NASA, but also catalyzes an American effort to catch up. With the Soviet Union emphasizing diversity by including a woman in subsequent landings, the United States is forced to match pace, training women and minorities who were largely excluded from the initial decades of U.S. space exploration. Ronald D. Moore explained how history had been different in the series: “Sergei Korolev, who was the father of the Soviet space program, in reality, he died during an operation in Moscow in the mid ’60s. And after that point, their moon program really never pulled together…. Our point of divergence was that Korolev lives, … and he made their moon landing happen.”