Ronald D. Moore Made ‘For All Mankind’ and ‘Battlestar Galactica’ to Give Us Hope for the Future

When it comes to space at least in Hollywood there's Ronald de Moore and everyone else. Throughout his distinguished career, the 57-year-old model writer and producer has been responsible for curating and/or creating some of the science fiction's most famous and beloved works from his famous contributions to Star Trek The Next Generation, and later Star Trek Deep Space Nine. to his triumphant reimagining of Battlestar Galactica the latter of which earned him a Peabody Award and an Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Dramatic Series. Having also developed the ongoing historical romantic drama of Starz Outlander Moores's impeccable and nearly unparalleled reputation as a visionary can infuse stories with complex hearts and timely socio-political insights into our fraught modern and tomorrow's world. The plot against us and our grandchildren.

Moore is a master of sci-fi fantasy but perhaps his greatest achievement is most of all mankind his current series on Apple TV+ is about an alternate timeline in which the Soviet Union races the United States to the moon. So the start of a decade.   A long rivalry between the two countries to conquer the universe. Rooted in a recognizable reality even while re-imagining America's fortunes after its tragic runner the show is a long-running intriguing exercise in What If? Most importantly it is a celebration of creativity and ambition populated by the cast of television's most compelling and empathetic characters.

In its upcoming third season on June 10, Moore and co-creators Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedevi quickly advance into the 1990s to find the superpowers vying to get to Mars a complex task for the tech mogul. Dev Ayesa of Edi Gathegi with his designs for the red planet. The highly speculative and poignantly inspiring comeback of For All Mankind cements its place as one of the best TV shows. Thus we enjoyed the opportunity to talk to Moore about creating a believable alternative history of what holds us back from further space exploration and whether we can entrust our intergalactic future to corporate billionaires.

Season three is set in the early 90s and opens with a montage that informs viewers of what happened in the last decade's version of the show and while some things are distinctly different Gary Hart was chief others are the same as Michael Jordan Nirvana. What is the process behind determining what stays and what changes?

It's messy. Getting rid of thoughts is a lot. It's a long bookroom conversation that lasts all season. There are usually millions of ideas about what you can change that are discussed and raised on the board and back on the board. There is no good general rule about why we change certain events and not others. Some of us think they're cool fun and fun. Others have to do with our alternative history and follow certain geopolitical histories along the way things that have a special relationship with the space program and the space program of the Soviet Union and now the private enterprise's entry into that. It's literally an ongoing conversation and the final cut is one of the last things to do. It torments people in post-production all the way and it's very complex and difficult to implement.

Much science fiction has been more overtly fictional than For All Mankind. What's the biggest adjustment or challenge in creating a show that wants to represent a realistic alternative history?

It's more of a challenge because in Star Trek we've pointed to the distant past and Star Trek has a tangled history that you had to pay attention to but that was definitely resilient. For us we needed to want to say from the start This could have really happened. That was a basic idea for us. We've always been trying to say if the Russians got to the moon first how was that possible and b what would the effect be? Then every step along the way trying to come up with a realistic scenario of how this would actually happen how we would go into space more aggressively on what kind of ship and what the actual science behind the sci-fi concepts is. . So even though some of this stuff is more speculative like nuclear fusion it's actually based on something that is currently being talked about and could work the way we're talking about. It limits you but in a good way because it connects you to the real world and makes everything seem more coherent.

Do you work closely with aerospace engineers to get the right series ship designs and technical concepts? Or is it an area where you can be more creative?

We try to start from there. We have real technical advisors. Some are approved some are not. Garrett Raisman is one of our key technical advisors and was a true astronaut. Garrett is our primary reference source when it comes to these ships and how they're actually going to work and Garrett spends a lot of time figuring out the architecture of these things. We take liberties along the way but again we try to keep them grounded. It took Garrett time to find out at the Polaris Hotel at the start of Season 3 just how fast and how big the wheel is to generate 1g. It was found that it would spin too fast for our dramatic purposes because seeing through the window spinning at 1g would be so fast that it would almost make the audience sick. We had to say well we can't get him to spin out the window that fasts at first! So with Jarrett, we all discussed Well that's one of the things were going to take a dramatic license. But we knew what science was and it was still based on something very real.

Without delving into outright spoilers Season Three begins with a disaster. Do you think that it is the enormous danger posed by space travel/tourism that prevents our space program from being any bolder?

The stakes are real and I think one of the things the show has said literally since the first episode is that we as a culture and NASA as an audience representative have become pretty risk-averse. Space travel is inherently dangerous. You have to accept a certain amount of that. The way society reacted to the Apollo 1 fire the Challenger crash and Columbia now made government-sponsored spaceflights so risk-averse and terrifying that they really limit our ability to do big things. Part of the program said that from the beginning there will be tragedies. things will happen. will be bad. But we shouldn't over-correct to the point that we can't fly anymore which is roughly where we are today.

Is that what you blame on NASA's decision to withdraw from space exploration which allowed private sector forces to take the lead?

In my personal opinion, I think it is definitely an important factor. There is also the public interest. There are financing problems. And I think there is a way that NASA as a public agency must respond to the changing political winds of Congress and the administration which complicates everything. But basically, it appears to be a combination of a lack of public interest which waned after the Apollo missions, and the risk-averse nature of NASA which then limits everything and makes it very difficult to fly and much more difficult. Design test and do new spaceships the way you normally would. If you think about the military the sad truth is that we lose pilots and lose men and women every day in peacetime and in the best of circumstances because it is an inherently dangerous business. But you don't prevent the military from building aircraft carriers all of a sudden. You see that's part and parcel of what's going on it's tragic but we accept it. We accept the cost and accept the risk of doing it because we feel the goal is worth it.