Review: For All Mankind, "Game Changer" | Season 3, Episode 2
Changes in management and entrepreneurial forces create a big, beautiful, messy as hell tomorrow in the race for Mars
Seeded into the premiere, Helios Aerospace is a symbol of how accelerated technological change would hasten the arrival of a certain type of company, and a certain type of leader. Dev Ayesa is a scientific pioneer, but he’s also a tech entrepreneur, and is trying to use the combination of the two in order to change how the world works. This goes from the level of workplace culture—no hierarchy, democratic decision-making—to the very idea of the space race being about the struggle between powerful nations. He wants to disrupt space travel, and Helios’ methane engine combined with the damaged Polaris hotel has the potential to beat NASA and the Soviets to Mars in 1994.
Of course, amidst our moment where a pioneer of private space technology is splashed across the front pages for other reasons, it’s easy to be somewhat cynical about Asaya’s belief that a free market Mars is better than the alternative, steeped as it is in the capitalism of big tech firms that we know from the past 15 years often fail to operate in the public interest. But as I wrote about last week, the thing about For All Mankind is that we don’t actually understand how this world works: we know the lessons from our own past 30 years, and we naturally apply them here, but how do we know that Helios Aerospace will turn out to be the Facebook of space travel? What if, in this world, red flags are actually green?