Best of the year — Ronald D. Moore: The sci-fi optimism of ‘For All Mankind,’ ‘Battlestar Galactica,’ and ‘Star Trek’

Happy holidays! We’ll have a new episode next Wednesday, but today I wanted to re-share my favorite interview of 2020 with you all. I hope you enjoy it.Many Americans view our space program skeptically, wondering why we should bother spending money on it when we have so many problems to fix on Earth. Ever since the space race with the Soviet Union ended, the US lost much of its interest in continuing to explore space. But what if the space race didn’t end in 1969? What if the Soviet Union got to the moon first, and so America continued to push its space program to compete with the Soviets? That is the premise of the show “For All Mankind” on Apple TV+. It is co-created and co-written by today’s guest: renowned science fiction screenwriter and television producer Ronald D. Moore.Ron has worked on a wide variety of TV shows over the past few decades, including “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” “Deep Space Nine,” and “Voyager.” He is also the creator of “Outlander” and, of course, he is the co-creator of 2004’s “Battlestar Galactica.”You can also check out the transcript of this podcast here.