Review: For All Mankind, "Coming Home" | Season 3, Episode 9
Engineering can solve some problems, but not most of what vexes this penultimate hour
The problems facing the astronauts on Mars at the beginning of “Coming Home” are engineering ones. Five months has given them time to dig out their ride to Phoenix in order to return to Earth, but it still requires significant repairs, including parts whose only spares are (you guessed it) onboard Phoenix. Kelly, meanwhile, is now many months pregnant and in need of a spacesuit for the trip that will allow for her bump. NASA approaches these problems in the way they approach all engineering problems: put their best minds on it, collaborating with the Russians and Helios as necessary. The end result for Popeye—we never hear word on what their plan is/was for Kelly—is trekking out to recover supplies from other countries’ Mars probes that used Soviet technology.
But on Earth, there are much larger problems afoot that challenge the very idea of space travel as we know it. For All Mankind is built on lots of historical counterfactuals, but at its core is the idea of how the…