In ‘For All Mankind,’ America Wins by Losing

Early in the current season of “For All Mankind,” the Apple TV series about a hypothetical America shaped and defined by space exploration, a bar owner is cited for putting a barrier between his watering hole and a public walkway. He argues with the police, who smile and give him a ticket anyway.

It’s an ordinary scene of code compliance, unremarkable except for where it takes place: in a bustling city on Mars.

About 5,000 people live on the red planet. Most of them were drawn by good-paying jobs connected to the local asteroid mine rather than dreams of outer space. Their lives are full of fantastical moments: copper vistas, flying shuttles, low-gravity motorcycle rides on the surface.

But inside the pressurized domes, the rhythms of daily life are more like a suburb than a spaceport. Teens fall in love, friends reminisce over whiskey, neighbors bump into each other on a Main Street-like corridor with a Starbucks and a Domino’s Pizza.

“The battle we have is, ‘Let’s not get into, like, ‘Jetsons,’” said Ben Nedivi, who created the series with Matt Wolpert and Ronald D. Moore. “We want to keep it feeling real and feeling grounded.”

When science-fiction worlds are portrayed on TV, the stories usually revolve around a society whose technology is incomprehensibly advanced, or a wasteland where some weather or zombie apocalypse has destroyed modern civilization. “For All Mankind” forgoes both scenarios.

The show — which has been renewed for a sixth and final season and has spawned a spinoff, “Star City,” that premieres this week — is built on a rip in American history. The premise is that in 1969, Soviet cosmonauts landed on the moon, a month before Americans could get there. The blow to the national psyche is so severe that it reshapes the 20th century around it by favoring advances in propulsion instead of algorithms and smartphones.

“We very purposefully leaned into the idea of, What if America lost?” Wolpert said, in a joint interview with Nedivi. “And by losing, we all wound up winning?”

“Winning” here is a continued focus on space travel. Each new season of “For All Mankind” jumps forward a decade from the last, showing viewers how after the initial moon loss the space race remains front and center in the national consciousness. Even as ships explode, nations clash and heroes die, there is a tangible optimism about the future and a conviction that humanity is better off when it pushes farther together. (“Star City,” which premieres on Friday, returns to the original race to the moon, this time telling the story from the Soviet side.)

Despite some technological leaps, the world of “For All Mankind” feels familiar: There are faster rockets and a Mars colony but no robot maids or laser weapons. The result is that even when a shuttle lands on a distant moon — a trip that is vastly beyond current technology for a manned mission — there is a sense that it is feasible, or could be.

“Could” is a concept that comes up repeatedly in the show, as well as in the interview with Nedivi and Wolpert, which took place at their Los Angeles writers’ room on a couch that sat a few feet from a wall of white boards.

Humans could have gone much farther if space had remained a national priority, they said. This could have accelerated living standards and created new technologies, which could have made Americans less cynical about the future. Whatever dramas unfold in the characters’ lives, the real goal is to convince viewers that this alternate world is plausible — or could be with a reshuffling of national priorities.

“The core of the show is, What if we got the space program we were promised but that was not delivered to us?” Wolpert said.

He and Nedivi, who share showrunning duties, describe themselves as history obsessives. They said a goal each season is to match the tone of a particular decade while tearing up historical facts.

Season 1, which takes place mostly in the 1970s, links space travel to women’s rights. In the 1980s season there are Cold War tensions on the moon; in the 1990s, space gets commercialized by an ascendant technology sector; in the 2000s, Mars is the staging ground for a union-led revolt over inequality.

The current season, which wraps up on Friday, begins in 2012. But its theme — the replacement of human work by automation — feels like it was pulled from the news instead of the history books. The plot centers on a plan by corporations and foreign governments to eviscerate the Mars colony by replacing miners with automated equipment.

The creators said allusions to artificial intelligence were coincidental, and on a mechanical level the show’s automation is more akin to self-operating dockyard trucks than a substitute for human cognition. But it resonates with the present because the fear of being displaced, either by machines or cheaper workers, is woven into the modern condition.

“I think the nature of getting closer to our present makes it feel more ‘ripped from the headlines,’” Wolpert said.

In “For All Mankind,” the struggle to retain one’s perch on another planet feels existential. Mars has its astronauts and C.E.O.s, sure, but it is the people typing on computers, working in mines and issuing tickets who make it a “colony.” It is a living city with graffiti and union fights, a messiness that makes it seem tangible in ways that a bunch of probes could not.

The show’s writers are cognizant that exploration has always been a mix of practical and aspirational — Mars begins as a goal but thrives as an economy.

But at every juncture they make clear their belief that humanity loses something fundamental and unifying when it stops pressing beyond our world.

“It’s asked in our room a lot: Like, why are we doing this?” Nedivi said. “Why are we going to space? Why the moon? Why Mars?

“I think for us,” he continued, “the very nature of being human is going to that next island, climbing that mountain.”

One of the most affecting scenes this season comes when, in the middle of a revolt over automation, everyone on the base stops to listen to a high-risk landing on the next frontier. A rebellion leader insists that the landing be broadcast in the halls, and for a moment the promise of humankind expanding its boundaries temporarily restores peace by filling every segment of Mars society with pride.

Space exploration has a special capacity to inspire wonder and unity. Even in this most polarized moment, Americans of every political persuasion and their children could find something inspiring in the recent Artemis II mission that sent humans flying around the moon.

The question “For All Mankind” wants us to dwell on is, What do we lose when we take people out of the cockpit?