[war321]

I had some gripes with the way the timeline developed later on (like why in a world where Saturn Vs and Sea Dragons are getting launched, are space shuttles exactly like our world getting made? And getting launched to the moon?) but overall I do appreciate the serious take at an alternate history work on mainstream television.

[jessriedel]

One of the biggest causes of lack of realism is the audience. People know right away that “shuttle” means “post-Apollo spaceship”, and they don’t know enough about them to understand why it makes no sense to take it to the moon.

[war321]

But by being alternate history, you're already conditioning the audience to expect divergences and that presents a great opportunity to explore more varied alternatives that were being thrown around in the post-Apollo era. The Sea Dragon alone shows they were willing to expand audience expectations. They could've played around with ideas like the National Launch System (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/Shuttle_...) and different kinds of lunar tugs.

I mean, James Cameron could've gone with generic sci-fi brick or saucer spaceships for Avatar, but instead gave us the beauty that was the ISV Venture Star, which introduced a lot of people to hard sci-fi design aesthetics.

[shiroiuma]

I haven't seen this show yet, but I know a little about why the STS was developed and why it was really a bad idea (basically the military wanted the ability to launch and recover spy satellites intact without anyone seeing, and this drove the requirements).

However, if you have a big settlement on the Moon, wouldn't a "space truck" actually make a lot of sense, for carrying large cargo loads both to and from the Moon? What am I missing?

[b112]

Strong disagree. It's not the audience, because the audience watches loads of scifi without such things.

A lot of Apple TV is just weird. I suspect weird people have creative input, EG Apple execs, who shouldn't.

[rsynnott]

This is actually the future NASA wanted (kinda; the Sea Dragon was always a _bit_ on the fanciful side). The shuttle (or at least _a_ shuttle; early designs were pretty different) was supposed to sit alongside Saturn V descendants; the shuttle as a cheap frequent manned launcher (of course, in reality it was anything but, but they didn't know that at the time), and the Saturn V derivatives for big heavy stuff.

In the event, budgets got cut, and the Saturn V derivatives went away.

Granted, the Shuttle going to _the moon_ is a weird one, alright.