For All Mankind’s women astronauts on the fight to make space for everyone

Wrenn Schmidt didn’t know much about spaceflight when she got a part on For All Mankind, Apple TV+’s alt-history series in which the Cold War space race never ended. But with the help of the former NASA astronauts and flight directors, Schmidt got the crash course in rocket science she needed to play Margo Madison, a brilliant engineer who rises through the ranks of Mission Control in the heyday of the Apollo Program.

By Season 2, which time jumps from the mid-1970s to 1983, Madison is no longer just another math jockey. She’s the director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, overseeing numerous missions in both low Earth orbit and on the Moon. “Margo,” Schmidt told The Science of Fiction, “is the boss.”

It’s a stark departure from the real history of the space program, in which women played essential, but mostly behind-the-scenes roles as computers, programmers, and secretaries in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. NASA didn’t send the first American woman into space until 1983, and it only appointed its first female flight director in 2018. For Schmidt and the other actresses playing women who get to command missions during the height of the Cold War, it’s thrilling to reimagine this early chapter of space history in a more inclusive way. But as several of them noted in interviews with The Science of Fiction, even in For All Mankind’s relatively progressive retelling of American space history, every small step toward equality is a hard-won battle.

“One of the things I love about our show is that, yes, we are living in an alternate reality where gay rights happened earlier, where women's rights happened earlier, and where diversity is more included in NASA,” Krys Marshall, who plays astronaut Danielle Poole on the show, said in an interview. “And that's all lovely. But our story is not a Pollyanna story. It's not a Disneyland story.”