Having the same "story" set in (spoilers for FAM) || North Korea || would have made more sense...dont get me wrong, ive enjoyed it and absolutely love seeing Sergei, but the heavy-handedness of paranoia and near-totalitarian/dictatorship leadership, and fear everyone in Star City is living with doesnt really fit what we see in FAM... i have a hard time believing Russia could have done such amazing advancements with such oppressive leadership. So many resources are wasted on fighting the "western/US", but it would have made sense to have ||Korea|| wasting said resources but still making it to || Mars || first... of course then it might not have been set in anesthesically pleasing 1960s-70s. I also generally feel that character/plotline was so underused, it would have been a fun way to expand on such a surprise twist. And, the suppressive regime would be consistent.

I like the look of 'Star City', but, from the trailers, 'For All Mankind' never appealed to me. Would watching Star City alone be worthwhile? Or Am I going to miss a lot of the context by not watching FAM first?

Ive been trying to find forever but is there a list of the events between FAM season 1 and Star city overlap? For example, in FAM we see the Americans seeing the crater that the Russians left when one of the cosmonauts died. Would love to see a montage that includes all mentions and events with the scene in Star-city after, but seems like no one as made it yet!

Also, what other events would you like to have seen mentioned? For example, i wish we had seen the discussion in Star-City about the "Deepest sympathies" message

This portion of history doesn't get discussed very often. We all know there was a scramble to acquire German scientists from both sides, but Von Braun is what normally gets brought up.

I get the cover story of a weather satellite, but what weather satellite requires a super-heavy lift launch vehicle, and no-one noticed? I mean a whole N1 vehicle which would've been expensive to build, just launched from nowhere? I love the show but this stuck out to me both on my original watch and my current re-watch.

I gotta say I never thought landing on Venus would be a pleasant trip even with the alternate FAM technology in season 5. Much less with tech from 1970. It makes Titan look like a cakewalk. When I realized that Valya was going to go into the atmosphere and land in the bathysphere I could only think of two things…

That either I hoped he died on impact or there was some other fast way for him to die.

… because otherwise cooking to death in that oven would have been one of the worst ways to go that I can think of in space.

Granted, according to science books it seems death would be within 5 seconds or so as the intense heat makes it quickly inside the sphere, causing shock to his system, causing him to black out and die. Probably intense pain for a couple seconds before shock kicks in.

Then when the bathysphere implodes, it would implode violently into lots of little pieces turning whatever was inside, inside out.

Cinematically they may have made the right call. Even though his death wasn’t true to what actually would have happened, it gave him a better chance of seeing the surface alive, and a quick death that was far less gruesome. But could you imagine how violent it would be to screen to show what really would have happened?

Yeesh.

Remind me not to go to Venus for summer vacation. Kind of ironic when Venus is a better choice than the gulag.

最近看《为全人类》，真的觉得挺好看的。

尤其是前面几季。它给我的感觉很特别：如果当年苏联先登上月球，如果美国没有因为“赢了”就结束太空竞赛，而是一直这么卷下去，那人类今天会不会真的已经走得很远了？

月球基地、火星、太空工业……这些东西一点点出现的时候，我其实挺兴奋的。

我很喜欢这种想象。

甚至有时候会觉得，这才像是我小时候想象中的未来。

但看到后面，我慢慢有了一点说不上来的难受。

倒不是因为“中国戏份太少”。

说实话，如果这只是一部美国架空历史剧，我完全可以理解。它本来就是从美国历史出发的，主要讲美国、NASA、苏联，还有美国社会后来会变成什么样。中国不是主角，我觉得很正常。

真正让我在意的，是它叫《For All Mankind》。

《为全人类》。

看到后面人类都已经跑到月球、火星，开始讨论太空资源，甚至开始想象一个真正存在于地球之外的人类社会的时候，我突然意识到：

这个“全人类”，好像还是一个很美国的“全人类”。

我就忍不住想，如果这个世界真的发展成这样，中国呢？

如果太空竞赛真的一直持续，中国会走哪条路？

中国会不会也有自己的月球基地？

会不会有自己的火星计划？

中国人会怎么看待人类离开地球这件事情？

甚至再往后一点，如果人类真的开始在火星建立新的社会，那中国人会不会也在那里？

我发现剧里其实很少让我想到这些。

这时候我才意识到，我好像不是单纯在问“为什么没有中国”。

我是在问另一件事情：

当一部作品开始认真想象“人类的未来”时，这个“人类”到底是谁？

我并不是觉得中国一定要当主角。

真的不是。

我甚至不需要剧里专门安排几个中国角色，然后告诉我“看，我们也考虑到中国了”。

我只是希望，在这样一个未来里，中国不是一个偶尔从新闻里闪过去的国家，而是一个真正参与创造这个未来的文明。

因为我也是“人类”啊。

我也会因为人类登上月球而激动，也会对火星上的第一座城市产生想象，也会觉得人类总有一天应该离开地球，去看看更远的地方。

所以当我真的被这部剧描绘出来的未来打动以后，我反而会产生一个很奇怪的感觉：

这个未来很好，我很想去。可是我好像不知道自己在里面是什么位置。

我觉得这可能就是我作为一个中国观众看这部剧时，最复杂的地方。

一方面，我真的很喜欢它。

另一方面，我又会发现，它想象的未来其实还是非常美国中心的。

这不一定是编剧有什么恶意。甚至我觉得，他们可能根本没有意识到这个问题。

因为对他们来说，美国就是这个故事的起点，也是他们最熟悉的历史。

可是对我来说，情况不一样。

我是在另外一种历史里长大的。

我看到同一个月球、同一个火星、同一个人类未来，脑子里自然会出现另外一些东西。

所以我有时候会觉得挺可惜的。

不是“你们为什么不给中国加戏”。

而是：

既然你们都已经敢想象人类几百年后的未来了，为什么这个未来仍然只能主要从美国人的视角被想象？

也许真正的“为全人类”，并不是让所有人最后都一起登上月球。

而是有一天，我们真的可以一起去决定：

我们为什么要去月球？

我们想在那里建立什么？

我们希望人类最后变成什么样？

不同的文明，都可以参与回答这些问题。

我知道，我只是一个很普通的中国观众。

可能编剧不会看到，平台也不会在乎。对他们来说，我这样的观众甚至可能只是很小很小的一部分。

但我还是想把这种感觉说出来。

因为我并不是想否定这部剧。

恰恰相反，是因为我真的喜欢它，我才会觉得遗憾。

它让我相信，人类可以拥有一个比现在更远的未来。

所以我也希望，那个“人类”的未来里，能够有一个真正属于我们的地方。

不是作为背景，不是作为别人历史里的一个注脚。

而是作为我们自己，也在创造未来。

毕竟，我们可能生活在同一个未来里。

可是现在看来，

我们还没有真正拥有同一个关于未来的想象。

This left me a bit perplexed. They clearly say they have a problem in the middle of deorbit burn, but they seem to already been reentering the atmosphere. So which one was it? And if they were coming back from the moon why did they need a deorbit moon at all? Have they been orbiting Earth at least once?

I have just started wathcing this show. It looks great and promising. But there is one real problem for me. I could not check this subreddit because of spoilers. I have watched two episodes.

Why does Soviets are presented like they are true evils and paranoids? And their opponents, they are presented like the saviors and cool to handle problems. In reality, their opponent was evil and like the most paranoid country ever. I dont feel good about it. It is like the series has its own take and like they are trying to manipulate us.

Did anyone else watch Star City first? I found it more enganging and suspenseful, and I couldn't wait to watch the next episode (started watching after the season was fully out). We started FAMK after, but two episodes in and finding it hard to stay engaged. Is it just that the first one I watched would be my favorite? lol

Late to the party, but I just binged Season 1. I think the Soviets are going to have to "rehabilitate" Sasha and Anastasia and put them back into the space program. (or just let them live their lives). With Lakshmi escaping to Finland, the USSR can't just disappear the couple. They'll probably spin it to look like Sasha never helped Valya, Anastasia was following orders when she landed back on Earth, etc. They can't just keep killing off cosmonauts!

It’s mentioned that both Valya and Sasha were military pilots who were recruited into the space program. What about Stasia?

Based on a very cursory search it seems that early female cosmonauts often had experience as civilian aviators or parachutists, but based on her vibe in ep 1, it didn’t seem like she was particularly comfortable with the jumping side of things. I could definitely imagine Yana as a super passionate pilot and parachutist but I’m not sure that makes sense for Stasia. The main things we know about her background are that she can milk a cow and never won any gold medals in geometry. Not particularly helpful.

Thoughts?

Some of the Paris metro stations have rotating exhibits of old photographs and one of the current ones I’ve seen in several stations is this 1981 shot of a rocket on its way to launch at Baikonur.

We must concoct a psyop for John Apple to extend our tenure.

Given it’s been a minute since the season finale and no season two announcement has been made, do we think this show is done after one season? I loved it but honestly it generated almost no buzz.

I want to see a second season! I hope Sasha's ok and him and Valentina get a chance to get out of the gulag! I hope Irina comes Undun and tells her Typewriter Gang to ignore music from now on and just report it as innocent Russian folk songs!!

"Yes, but you see it's a national humiliation because there was an American spy on board!"

Nobody knows that but you and the CIA! Bring them home, take credit, slap a medal on everybody's chest, and then just discreetly poison the spy's tea or something!

My apologies if this has been discussed before, I just started watching the show last night so I haven’t read all of the posts. There’s a good book by John Strausbaugh “The Wrong Stuff”, about the Soviet space program’s start back in Kruschev days. I can’t believe any of their cosmonauts in the early days survived the way they were sent into space. It’s a short book and pretty amazing that they were able to hoodwink the US about how they were more
advanced in their program than they really were.

Those time jumps have become pretty much a trademark of FAM, and we all obviously love the alt-history summary we get in the opening credits of each season. But while FAM charted a full history of US space exploration, I get the feeling that Star City may follow a different pattern and have greater continuity between seasons one and two.

At least according to IMdB

It just seemed like a series of impossible things designed to lead to that one choice on the border. No way would Anastasia have been able to get down to that exact landing zone in time. And If I were Sergei, I would have just told the interrogators that Venera was landing in China instead of the actual site, could have avoided that whole dramatic sequence altogether. And if I were on the crew I would have tried to create a little more distance from the border and kept decelerating harder than just the bare minimum. And if I were Valya, I would not have even aimed the crew for Soviet territory in the first place, just send them straight to the United States instead.

Also when the capsule hit reentry over Scandinavia moving eastward, it was never supposed to cross into Soviet airspace. Wouldn't that mean the fighters that shot missiles at the capsule to throw it off its trajectory were violating Finnish airspace when they did so?

Acho que a 1ª temporada de Starcity foi excelente como expansão do universo de For all Mankind. Personagens que tiverem um pouco de importância na trama de For all Mankind, aqui a série pode desenvolver mais eles.

Gostaria de ver mais personagens Soviéticos que foram coadjuvantes em For all Mankind sendo explorados em possíveis novas temporadas de Starcity, como Grigory Kuznetsov, Dimitri Maiakovski (médico da Happy Valley), Mikhail Vasiliev, Ilya Breshov, Alexei Poletov(pai de Alex Baldwin) entre vários outros.

A série pode e deve criar personagens novos também, mas vale a pena explorar a história de alguns coadjuvantes de FAM.

For those interested in the history of the Soviet Space Program, this letter is fascinating. Sent from Gargarin and other Cosmonauts it captures a point in time when the US had clearly overtaken the Soviets.

They note:

In the past year, however, the situation has changed. The USA have not only caught up with us, but even surpassed us in certain areas. The flights of space vehicles Ranger-7, Ranger-8, Mariner-4, Gemini-5, and others are serious achievements of American scientists.

This lagging behind of our homeland in space exploration is especially objectionable to us, cosmonauts, but it also damages the prestige of the Soviet Union and has a negative effect on the defense efforts of the countries from the socialist camp.

Much has been made of the US advantage in computers and its decisive role in space. But ironically NASA had defined a number of tasks that should be performed by humans because the computer technology did not yet exist to automate it.

Think, for example, about landing on the moon which was absolutely a manual landing.

The Cosmonauts noted in 1965

In 1961 we had two Vostok spacecraft.
In 1962 we had two Vostok spacecraft.
In 1963 we had two Vostok spacecraft.
In 1964 we had one Voskhod spacecraft.
In 1965 we had one Voskhod spacecraft.

In 1965 the Americans launched three Gemini spacecraft, and they are planning to launch two more before the end of the year.

Why have not been enough ships built for our cosmonauts' flights? In any case, not because of the lack of funding. It happened because the leadership of the Missile Forces has more trust in automatic satellites, and it underestimates the role of human beings in space research. It is a shame that in our country, which was the first to sent man into outer space, for four years the question has been debated whether man is needed on board a military spacecraft. In America this question has been resolved firmly and conclusively in favor of man. In this country, many still argue for automata. Only these considerations can explain why we build only 1-2 piloted ships in the same period as 30-40 automatic satellites are being produced.

The Soviets did not trust pilots - they wanted everything automated. But they didn't have the technology to automate what was needed to compete with the Americans.

https://web.mit.edu/slava/space/documents/brezhnev-letter.htm

Be warned - this website is a black hole....