Apple TV’s For All Mankind Rivals Star Trek in Space Exploration

Following the death of Patrick Stewart on Oct. 28, 2026, Star Trek fans went online to remember one of his most iconic roles: Captain Jean-Luc Picard. As Picard, Stewart delivered one of the franchise’s most memorable lines: “Things are only impossible until they’re not.”

Picard and his crew showed audiences a vision of space travel and technology that inspired generations of NASA astronauts and scientists. The Apple TV series For All Mankind carries a similar spirit through a new cast of space explorers, imagining a future in which people establish homes on the moon and Mars.

For All Mankind, which premiered in 2019, also has a direct connection to Star Trek. Ronald D. Moore, a prominent writer and producer for the franchise, co-created the series with Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi. The show has had five seasons, with a sixth and final season due in 2027, and holds an average critics’ score of 91% on Rotten Tomatoes.

What is For All Mankind about?

For All Mankind begins in 1969 with the first human landing on the moon. But in the show’s alternate history, Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov takes that first step instead of American Neil Armstrong. The change sets up the first season’s premise: the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union never ended.

In a 2019 interview with Variety, Moore explained how changing a major historical event heightened the sense of competition. “… In the alternate history, we wanted to recapture that feeling where the Americans were constantly banging their heads against the wall about how the Soviets keep beating us at every turn,” he told reporters. “[T]hat motivated a lot of the things in the original space race, and it motivates the show to go further and have a lunar base and going beyond all that.”

The early seasons follow a core cast of astronauts and scientists, including Edward Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman), Margo Madison (Wrenn Schmidt), Gordo Stevens (Michael Dorman), Tracy Stevens (Sarah Jones), Danielle Poole (Krys Marshall), and Molly Cobb (Sonya Walger). They help lead NASA’s early advances, from landing on the moon to establishing a lunar base.

Decades pass between seasons as science and technology advance. The people behind those achievements age, retire, and sometimes die. New generations, including children and grandchildren of the original crew members, push farther into space. By the fifth and most recent season, Mars has been fully colonized, making life and work on the Red Planet commonplace.

How For All Mankind connects to Star Trek

The connection between the two series goes beyond their shared creative lead. In a 2023 interview with Collider, Moore described For All Mankind as a thematic unofficial Star Trek prequel.

“How do you get to the optimistic kind of world that Star Trek lives in, that kind of future?” Moore said. “Star Trek had posited this amazing future that we all kind of want to be a part of, but how do you get there?”

Moore said For All Mankind lays the groundwork for the science and technology that could lead to a world like the one in Star Trek. In the early seasons, astronauts travel to the moon and work toward a lunar base, while much of the action remains on Earth. By season five, Earth is a backdrop to a growing Martian civilization of scientists, laborers, and families.

“The further we go down this road, the more it diverges from the original timeline, the more deeply science fiction the show becomes in that capacity,” Moore told Collider. “However, it’s still really important to us that we keep it grounded and that it all feels real and all feels plausible.”

The sixth and final season is in the works and expected to premiere in 2027, though no release date has been confirmed. The creators have said the season will bring the timeline to the present day, imagining 2027–2028 in light of the show’s scientific discoveries and advances.

Source: Polygon