Apple TV+ Renews For All Mankind For Season 5 And Launches Star City Spin-Off Series

Some very good news over the long-distance relay for fans of alt-history sci-fi series For All Mankind. Apple TV+ has decided to not only renew the main show for a fifth season, but also commission a new spin-off sibling, Star City, which will explore the space race story from the Russian side of events.

Season Four of For All Mankind reached 2003, and the well-established Mars base on Happy Valley became a hotbed of blue-collar dissent and authority crackdowns. And asteroid mining became a hot-button issues, with disagreements over where this rich new source of minerals and metals should be positioned to maximize their use.

The fifth season will see another time jump, meaning we're likely to say goodbye to veteran characters such as those played by Joel Kinnaman and Krys Marshall.

Yet the new spin-off offers the chance to see the likes of NASA-chief-turned-defector Margo Madison (Wrenn Schmidt) again down the line as it resets the clock back to when the Soviet Union became the first nation to put a man on the moon. This time, we'll peek behind the Iron Curtain to witness the lives of the cosmonauts, the engineers, and the intelligence officers embedded among them in the Soviet space program looking to push the boundaries of space travel. The new show hails from Mankind creative trio Matt Wolpert, Ben Nedivi and Ronald D. Moore, with Wolpert and Nedivi running the new show in addition to still overseeing the parent series.

"Our fascination with the Soviet space program has grown with every season of For All Mankind, Wolpert and Nedivi say in a statement. "The more we learned about this secret city in the forests outside Moscow where the Soviet cosmonauts and engineers worked and lived, the more we wanted to tell this story of the other side of the space race."