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The Moon Is Red: Apple TV does AH.

And I love the implication that only a bloody-minded paranoiac like Nixon would stick with the program.

Spot on.

At NASAspaceflight.com forum they are discussing the series, too. I gave them a good laugh writting this about Nixon

And Nixon is a godsend of a real life character for any aspiring script writer. There were things that man was and things he did, it would be hard to invent fiction good enough to beat them.
From Watergate to cottage cheese with ketchup, the rants, the slurs, the ramping paranoia... vietnam... no really the guy was better than fiction even just standing still and saying nothing. His face and his attitude spoke volume.

Just ask Matt Groening: the Simpsons and of course Futurama had so much love for Tricky Dick. He nailed the man flaws and antics to near perfection.
"ah, how stupid, what a McGovern I have been on that case !" ROTFL.

Thanks to AH.com, incidentally, to teach me about Nixon antics. There are Nixon TLs out there, that are just delightful.

In my space TL I'm trying to exploit that "Nixon vibe", too, although being non-american it is more difficult.
 
AFAIK von Braun didn't lived long enough for his past to become an issue because he died in 1977 and the controversy erupted in the 80's.
In fact here is the OTL controversy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rudolph

It is from the Arthur Rudolph OTL case that "For all mankind" got that Von Braun idea. It erupts in 1969 rather than 1984.
so it is Tricky Dick that throw von Braun under a (nazi) bus because he failed the Moon landing ? geez, what a jerk !

And Stephen Baxter did the exact same thing in Voyage, except with a fictional character called Hans Udet (not too subtle, Ernst Udet was a WWI ace that compromised himself with Hitler LW before suiciding in 1941).

For the record many at NASA were all too aware of Paperclip and that Marshall SFC, Alabama, was a hotbed of former nazi german rocket scientists. Yet nobody really cared about starting a witch hunt over the past - that was really the dominant attitude in the 50's, the 60's, the 70's.

And even more startling was the case of George M. Low, one of the brightest and boldest men out there who ended as NASA number 2 in the 70's.
He was an Austrian jewish refugee from the 30's having fled Anschluss with his family. He knew what von Braun had been but it was never an issue between them - even when they were both at NASA HQ circa 1970, Von Braun ranking number 4 in the hierarchy.
 
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I think this is a fine model for how to do AH- stay grounded in character, don't get bogged down in technical details, and let big changes get implied through background noise.

I also think it's clever how they seem to be quietly shifting the focus of the storytelling from episode to episode. Episode One is 'The Right Stuff goes wrong,' with square-jawed astronauts and steely-eyed missile men. Episode two uses Von Braun to break down some of the comforting nostalgia that the show at first seems to be appealing to. In Episode Three a new group of characters emerge and we get a feminist story complete with implications of a stronger movement to the ERA.
I wouldn't be surprised if they do something similar with race and racism later.

This is good solid stuff. Not truly great TV yet, but it's got a very promising grasp of the fundamentals.
 
I saw several kinos of the series on YouTube. It looks really amazing. The best bits were the Apollo 11 "landing", Mikhail helping them, the landing of Jamestown, and the astronaut scaring that poor kosmonaut with the thought he was about to die.
 
Watched it earlier this year and, I have to say, I really enjoyed it. There's some problems with a couple of depictions, especially the way they play the Mercury 13 sub-plot, which owes more to the popular depictions than the reality, as The Vintage Space's Amy Shira Teitel (who wrote the book on the topic) spoke to in a video she did. But I can just about excuse it for the sake of storytelling. There's enough attention to detail, especially with the technology and craft, to make me happy as a space nerd.

Though I suppose it means I might be waiting a few more years to write my own space/NASA AH with a similar POD.
 
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I suppose, with the extra money the Soviets are throwing in to their space programme, that money will not be going in to bolstering their armed forces (which was what the American imperialists were goading them to do) or keeping the People's Republics of the Eastern Bloc afloat, the Conquest of the U.S.S.R. may not happen. Or it may still happen, given how capitalism had retrenched itself in the bureaucratic structure of the country during the time it was successfully isolated by the imperialist powers.

I hope the P.R. China launches their own orbital rockets next, and are the next country to establish a base on Luna. I know the Sino-Soviet Split occurred before the P.O.D. (the "younger son" Chinese looking at the "elder father" Russian Soviet Federation and finding it revisionist and class-collaborationist). But, the difficulties of surviving together on Luna will force co-operation between the Soviet and Chinese lunar base teams. And that may force co-operation between the two countries down on Terra and slowly trigger reform of the "elder father". The nomenklatura will not like the change that is certain.

Very sorry, lads agus callachan (and lasses), my political education has started and is ongoing though reading and Marxist-Leninist and Maoist podcasts.
 
I suppose, with the extra money the Soviets are throwing in to their space programme, that money will not be going in to bolstering their armed forces (which was what the American imperialists were goading them to do) or keeping the People's Republics of the Eastern Bloc afloat, the Conquest of the U.S.S.R. may not happen. Or it may still happen, given how capitalism had retrenched itself in the bureaucratic structure of the country during the time it was successfully isolated by the imperialist powers.

TL for a comic I'm writing atm has the Soviet Union going much harder into space leads to a much quicker collapse of the soviet bloc but atm (just as a note, the whole project is v. early days) they stick the landing when it comes to internal reform.
 
i am a little bummed out that reagan has become president seemingly at exactly the same time as otl, which really just seems to be an 'ahhh its the 80s' aesthetic choice

The implication toward the end of the first season was that Reagan was going to run in ‘76 and was likely to win. It would certainly explain the progress in the trailers,
such as the Shuttle
, if it’s toward the end of a second term rather than a first.
 
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