The series has been created for Apple by Battlestar Galactica’s Ronald D. Moore…

Ronald D. Moore’s new TV series, For All Mankind, is about to take us into an alternate world where America lost the race against Russia to put a man on the moon, and decides to go ahead and put a woman on the moon instead.

Sarah Jones (The Path), Joel Kinnaman (Hanna), Krys Marshall (Supergirl), Jodi Balfour (The Crown), and Cass Buggé (Into the Dark) are the core cast in the forthcoming Apple TV+ show, which got a new trailer this week:

“I grew up with the Apollo program, as a kid, and it was really the catalyst for inspiring me to become interested in science fiction, overall,” explained Battlestar Galactica and Outlander creator Moore. “So, it was very important, in my personal life. And when I was growing up, watching the space program in the ‘70s, I thought it was gonna go places. I thought it was gonna go much bigger than it did. I had dreams of moon bases and colonisation, and all kinds of things that never came to pass. The idea of doing the history that I never got to see was personally really exciting and interesting to me.”

Moore is aware that Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle has already unsettled audiences with its alternate history setting where the Nazis won WWII, and he wanted to lean away from that with For All Mankind:

“Alternate history, not always, but tends to go to the dark and the dystopian. Terrible things happen and awful things have taken place, and the alternate world is a very dark and brooding one. Ours is going in the opposite direction. It’s a very positive one. It’s like, ‘Wow, by expanding the space racing and stepping strongly into the universe, the world became a better place, and the nation became a better place.’ It’s a very optimistic sort of idea for an alternate history piece.”

For All Mankind will stream on Apple TV+ from 1st November.