Ronald Moore to develop alt-history space series for Apple

Deadline Hollywood is reporting that Apple, which is developing its own live streaming video service to compete with Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon, has bought a new untitled space series from Ronald Moore. The series is based on the premise that the Space Race of the 1960s never ended. It appears to be similar to the scenario depicted in this writer’s “Children of Apollo” trilogy that is centered around an Apollo mission to the south pole of the moon in the mid-1970s.

Ronald Moore has been in space before

Ronald Moore is most familiar to science fiction fans for his reboot of the 1970s series “Battlestar Galactica” that aired in the early part of the 21st Century.

Before “Battlestar” Moore wrote for a number of “Star Trek” series. He is currently the showrunner of a time travel romance series, airing on Starz entitled, “Outlander.” It depicts the adventures of a 20th Century woman living in the 18th Century who falls in love with a Scottish Highlander warrior.

What if the space race had never ended?

How Moore is going to approach the premise of a never-ending space race has not been revealed, and it is possible that he has not fully developed the scenario of this series yet. In real history, the Apollo era space race petered out soon after the Apollo 11 moon landing. The American people and political class lost interest in voyages to the moon, and the Apollo program was canceled after Apollo 17, which flew 45 years ago.

What made it possible for the Apollo generation to endure a more prolonged space race, was that President Nixon, rather than canceling the last three Apollo missions, ramped up the space program as a means of pressuring the Soviets to be more forthcoming on nuclear arms control. At the same time, Nixon held out the carrot of joint missions with the Soviet Union, which had the side effect of reigniting interest in space exploration in the United States.

The story features an early birth of a commercial space industry, a Soviet plot to sabotage an Apollo mission, and a rescue of a crew of astronauts trapped on the lunar surface.

The idea of a space race that never ended is one of those wistful what-ifs of history. Many people who were of age when the first moon landings happened were told that they were experiencing the opening stage of a great era of space exploration.

People would be on Mars by the 1980s and living and working on the moon. In a sense then, Moore will give us a look at the possibilities that never came to be and the opportunities that were not taken advantage of.