Everyone wants to go to the moon on the Apple TV+ series For All Mankind (at least they did before they decided they wanted to go to Mars). An alternative history drama that asks what might have happened if Russia got there first. The series, the third season of which wrapped in August, is too starry-eyed and ambitious to be dystopian. The moon can be lonely here, even dangerous. But the space race is also an object of intense romance and optimism, a symbol of humanity’s can-do imagination. In other words, it’s basically what President John F. Kennedy imagined when he stoked the country’s passion in 1962, explaining that we choose to go to the moon not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard.

The moon hangs over us culturally as well as literally. We see it when we look up in the sky, glowing, appearing close enough to reach out and put in your pocket. It’s right there — except, of course, it’s not. It’s 238,900 miles away. So far, yet so close. On Earth, it’s everywhere you look, on big screens and small. It has tantalized since even before 1902, when the cinema magician Georges Melies sent a rocket through the rock’s eye in his short A Trip to the Moon. (The moon was none too pleased.)