For All Mankind

For All Mankind, a television series that premiered in 2019, imagines an alternate history in which the space race never ended, driving humanity to the Moon and then to Mars far earlier and more aggressively than in our timeline. As the series progresses across decades, Mars becomes a central arena of competition and cooperation between rival space powers.

The show is notable for grounding its alternate history in plausible engineering and mission design. Its depiction of reaching and settling Mars pays attention to the real challenges — the difficulty of landing, establishing habitats, generating resources, and surviving the hostile environment — while dramatizing the geopolitical rivalries that might accelerate such an effort. It treats the journey to Mars as an extension of a decades-long, competitively driven space program.

By framing Mars settlement as the product of sustained superpower competition, For All Mankind offers a distinctive answer to the question of what would actually drive humanity to the planet. Its relatively grounded approach to spaceflight, combined with its exploration of the political and human dimensions of a Mars program, has made it one of the more thoughtful recent screen treatments of crewed Mars exploration.