Catharsis Factor: Due to his Bitch in Sheep's Clothing status and his manipulation of a "vote" to get his way in the race to Mars, it can be satisfying as hell to watch Dev Ayesa merely get second place while the Sojourner beats the Phoenix to Mars.
Designated Hero: The main conflict of season 4 revolves around whether to send the Goldilocks asteroid to Mars orbit, which would force NASA and Roscosmos to continue investing in Happy Valley in order to build the required infrastructure to mine it; or Earth orbit, where it can be easily mined with existing technology at a fraction of the cost. The narrative treats the former as the "right" choice, with Ed and Dev believing that the Mars program and deep space exploration will be defunded if Goldilocks goes to Earth, but many viewers believe that the benefits of sending it to Earth would outweigh the potential costs, and that it's unlikely Happy Valley would be abandoned outright given that NASA and Roscosmos were already building it out before the asteroid was discovered. Furthermore, Ed and Dev are hardly acting selflessly — Ed openly wants to get back at Danielle for removing him as XO, while Dev stands to make an ungodly amount of money thanks to Helios having a near-monopoly on Martian infrastructure. Even when the CIA and KGB begin cracking down on the dissidents with torture and invasive raids, a lot of the audience were still rooting for the plot to steal Goldilocks to fail.
One with Star Trek, with Trekkie fans calling the show an honorary entry in the franchise, due to being created by beloved Trek writer Ronald D. Moore and sharing a similar optimistic view of space travel.
The show's use of realpolitik and semi-realistic physics has also endeared it to fans of The Expanse, with many considering it an unofficial prequel.
The Apollo 10 crew believes they could have made a landing, as their LEM's safety margins were just a bit narrower than Apollo 11's Eagle. In fact, Eagle did come hair-raisingly close to running out of fuel even with that advantage so there's no way they could have done it.
Ed writes his son's name on the moon where it will stand forever due to the lack of atmosphere. In real life, Apollo's 12 Alan Bean painted a picture of a boulder named Tracy's Rock with "Tracy" added on nearby sand by Bean based on the handwriting of Apollo 17's Gene Cernan, the father of Tracy. Cernan mentioned he wished he thought of doing that when taking a picture of the boulder.
Growing the Beard: Season 1’s first half got mixed reviews complaining about the overly large cast and lack of much forward momentum. The second half was seen as a big improvement as the focus suddenly tightens onto the seemingly endless Disaster Dominoes that spill out from Apollo 23 exploding, and probably not coincidentally putting Ron Moore in much more familiar writing territory. Reviews and online reaction hold that season 2 is a vast improvement with the finale receiving widespread praise.
In Season 1, after Ellen comes out to Deke Slayton and he reacts poorly, he then advises her to stay in the closet because people will only see her sexuality instead of her accomplishments. Come Episode 6 of Season 3 and Will's coming out...
Three people are killed on the Mars-94 mission in order to be the first to land on Mars. Come Episode 10, it is revealed all the sacrifices to land first on Mars were All for Nothing.
He Really Can Act: Joel Kinnaman had never been considered a particularly good actor prior to this show with his performances in RoboCop (2014) and Suicide Squad (2016) being met with a decidedly negative reception as one-dimensional. It's his performance as Ed Baldwin that ultimately persuaded people that he really could act, especially his performance during Ed's emotional breakdown in "Rules of Engagement".
Heartwarming in Hindsight: Season 1 features members of the Mercury 13, women who underwent the psychological evaluation for astronaut training but were never seriously considered for spaceflight, undergoing training so that they can actually go into space. On July 20, 2021, Wally Funk, a real member of the Mercury 13, finally did go into spacenote according to both the US definition for "astronaut wings" at 50 miles (80 kilometers) altitude and the internationally used Karman line at 100 km - the flight reached an altitude of 107 km aboard Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket.
Ed. He's surly and at times selfish, but goes through so much trauma it's hard not to sympathize with him.
Danny Stevens' descent into alcoholism and drug addiction in season 3 is pretty difficult to watch, and one can't help but feel sorry for him even as becomes increasingly violent and irritable towards his crewmates. It's made especially clear in "The Sands of Ares", when Danny — in the throes of a Despair Event Horizon — viciously blames Ed for Shane's death, only to later apologize and confess that he actually blames himself and has spent his whole life trying to make up for what happened... which has only made things worse for everyone.
Jimmy. He participates in domestic terrorism, but he's also a naive, lonely, and traumatized orphan who was manipulated and radicalized by people who saw he was vulnerable and exploited it.
"Hi Bob!"ExplanationThe phrase from The Bob Newhart Show that Ed, Gordo and Danielle repeated to stay sane during their stay on the Moon, and now repeat whenever they meet together. It's now become a running meme among fans as well, especially on Reddit, where any discussion regarding FAMK will almost always involve a long chain of "Hi Bob!" responses, with the occasional "Don't you fucking 'Hi Bob' me!" thrown in as well.
"I did not have sexual relations with that woman."Explanation (SPOILERS!)After becoming the President in Season 3, fans noted the time period and Ellen's sexuality could result in an affair-type scandal, with this phrase in particular becoming quite prominent.
Jimothy McVeighExplanation (SPOILERS!)In Season 3, Jimmy Stevens is clearly disillusioned with NASA and blames them for his parents' deaths. He then joins up with similarly disillusioned people who buy into conspiracy theories about the Jamestown crisis, some of which are true, leading fans to speculate that he will be the FAM version of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. While Jimmy ends up getting cold feet about his friends' actions, the bombing still takes place.
"North Korea lands on Mars first!" Explanation (SPOILERS!)The seemingly forced mentions of North Korea having a space program led many fans to jokingly theorize that North Korea would land on Mars before the US and Soviet missions. As confirmed in the season finale, they were right.
"They ate Danny." Explanation (SPOILERS!)Season 4 starts with Danny conspicuously absent and the implication that something terrible happened that has left Danielle guilty. Fans began to jokingly agree that the other astronauts killed and ate him. When it was finally revealed that Danny committed suicide, the fact it came right after it was noted that Happy Valley was running low on food only fueled these jokes.
Double Decker Cheeseburgers Explanation (SPOILERS!)"Home Again" has Gene Kranz and a pad worker meeting with the crew of Apollo 23 prior to launch before fixing the Saturn V's SI-C actuator. Whilst leaving the pad, Gene Kranz asks "Do they still have those double decker cheeseburgers-" right before being cutoff by the Saturn V exploding. Since then, the phrase "double decker cheeseburger" has been used as a bad omen in the fandom, especially in Season 4 when Sergei is assassinated right before taking a bite out of a Big Mac.
Narm: "And Here's To You" opens with the NASA leaders in a video conference with Ronald Reagan, with the conversation very obviously written around selected clips of Reagan to put on the screen and never coming close to being convincing that they're actually talking to each other. It's a bit reminiscent of Livia's infamous final scene on The Sopranos after the actress' death.
Romantic Plot Tumor: Karen’s role in Season 2 is mostly to run The Outpost and have an affair with Danny, her dead son’s best friend who’s at most half her age, if not younger. It is widely reviled by the fanbase for a number of reasons. Most people find it extremely squicky given that, again, Karen essentially helped raise Danny, and even fans who aren’t bothered by that usually agree that it has nothing to do with anything else in the show and mostly serves to artificially raise the drama. Season 3 somewhat addresses this by making it clear that both Karen and Danny regret what happened — Karen would like to pretend it never happened, while Danny is still obsessed with her ten years later and hates himself for it.
The Scrappy: Karen already had people who didn't like her because of some of her actions in the first season, but fans really started to loathe her in season two when she has sex with Danny, whom she practically raised and who is half her age at best.
Season 3's supplementary material has the "MoonLab" space station being shown in lunar orbit. The images of the station are literally unmodified renders of OTL NASA's Lunar Gateway station.
Season 4's opening newsreel has a rocket launch being seen from the VAB, if one looks closely they can actually see the OTL Artemis program's banner just above the VAB's low bay door.
Danielle breaks her arm in "Hi, Bob", with some nauseating close-ups of the distended skin.
Also, the subplot between Karen and Danny (see Romantic Plot Tumor above), which of course the majority of the viewerbase reacted with revulsion with this aspect, given how Karen just screwed her dead son's best friend (let alone the age gap no less).
Danielle's position as the only black astronaut on top of being a woman is oddly undeveloped, with no one seeming to have any issue with her race in stark contrast to prevalent attitudes of the time. Even when she breaks her arm and raises public questions about her fitness for the job, the focus seems to be entirely on what it says about women rather than black people. Luckily, the crew seemed to take notice and it receives more attention in Season 2.
Astronauts from the European Space Agency are shown on Jamestown and in Skylab in Season Two. The politics and perspectives of ESA astronauts during the season's USA-USSR conflict could have been interesting, but instead of keeping them around, they disappear after the solar storm, leaving viewers wondering why they were even included. Also in Real Life it was the Soviets who first started inviting space-fliers from countries aligned with them (under the Interkosmos program),note for example the first black person in space was Cuban Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez, the first Asian in space was Vietnamese Pham Tuân, and the German in space was East German Sigmund Jähn but whether the Soviets scooped the Americans in this timeline too is never mentioned.
Season 3 introduces a Cuban cosmonaut as part of the Soviet Mars mission, but her being our first non-Soviet cosmonaut character is un-emphasized and she receives little screen-time and development. And then she dies in the drilling accident.
The cosmonaut characters in general don't get to show their own point-of-view the way the astronauts and Helionauts do. Although we see glimpses of their motivations and inner lives, it's usually through interaction with an astronaut than through their own storylines, few of them last for more than one season, and a lot of it gets left offscreen (such as Kuznetov forming a deep friendship with Ed and Danielle during the season 3 - 4 timeskip).
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Retired Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield has gone on record to say that while the series' Alternate History premise is inherently interesting, he has found the execution of that premise to be "sort-of cartoonish" in some areas — more specifically, he has criticized the moment in "And Here's to You" where Helena shoots one of the cosmonauts to be favoring Rule of Drama over exploring the actual consequences that would come from a rivalry between groups of Soviet and American astronauts, noting that the astronauts and marines would have realistically been made to study Russian in advancelong before going to the moon (thus negating the Poor Communication Kills that occurs in the episode), along with how they would've been rational enough to not shoot a cosmonaut on a whim.
Vanilla Protagonist: Ed gets a lot of Character Development and is interesting in his own right, but most of his co-workers are far more colorful in many regards.
Visual Effects of Awesome: The Season 2 premiere features a 100% convincing deepfake of Johnny Carson when Tracy goes on The Tonight Show.
The Woobie: Shane Baldwin. A sweet kid who struggles with life in the shadow of his hard-ass astronaut father, keeps getting roped into delinquency by his best friend (who stabs him in the back every time they get caught), gets chewed out by both of his parents in response, and is then killed in a hit-and-run before they get a chance to reconcile.
was actually a job title to describe a person.