Apple TV+ Is Writing the Only Serious Mars Governance Playbook That Actually Exists

While SpaceX builds rockets and NASA writes checks, Apple TV+ is writing the only serious Mars governance playbook in existence — and nobody in the actual space industry is citing it.

For All Mankind is currently in its fifth season on Apple TV+, making it the longest-running show on the service. It is also, almost incidentally, the most detailed public working-through of what Mars colonization actually looks like when the rockets land and the lawyers arrive. Not the scientists. Not the engineers. The lawyers, the cops, and the politicians.

The show takes place in an alternate history where the Soviet Union landed on the Moon first and the space race never ended. That premise gives the writers years of imaginary infrastructure to play with — a fully realized Mars colony called Happy Valley, complete with its own police force, immigration problems, labor disputes, and a growing independence movement. The current season, set in an alternate 2012, follows characters who have been living on Mars for years. They have children there. They have grievances. They have a murder to solve.

The central governance figure in Season 5 is Soviet Governor Leonid Polivanov, played by Costa Ronin. Polivanov is not a cartoon villain. The Winter Is Coming review is blunt about this: his actions are procedurally correct even when they appear antagonistic to the heroes. He is, in the show's logic, just doing his job. Ronin himself told Inverse that he sees his character's point of view even when it does not align with the show's perspective. That kind of moral seriousness about governance is not what you expect from a prestige sci-fi drama. It is what you expect from a serious policy document.

The Peacekeepers — Mars's law enforcement — are the most explicitly political element. Multiple reviews describe them as acting awfully ICE-like toward the citizens of Happy Valley, rounding up undocumented workers and acting as an arm of Earth-based government authority. Slate's review of the Season 5 premiere goes further, drawing a direct line between the show's fictional billionaire Dev Ayesa and Elon Musk. Ayesa, the review notes, is angling to build a self-sufficient Martian city but realizing, much like his real-world counterpart Musk, that you cannot just vibe your way to human success on Mars.

That line — you cannot just vibe your way to human success on Mars — is the whole story in one sentence. SpaceX has Starship. NASA has Artemis. But the governance layer, the part that determines who gets arrested on Mars and for what, who owns the water, who decides whether companies can strip-mine the poles, and what happens when Earth and Mars disagree about any of it — that is a gap no rocket company has filled. For All Mankind is filling it with drama.

The show depicts an exploited underclass of Mars residents called craters — people who smuggled themselves to Mars by hiding in cargo containers. There are labor disputes, resource conflicts, and right-wing media on Earth claiming that Mars cannot govern itself. There is a murder. There is a geopolitical standoff between Earth powers and the Martian colony over autonomy and resource rights. All of it is fictional. All of it is a stress test.

Whether the showrunners consulted actual space law experts is unclear from the outside. The governance mechanics in the show — a provisional council, appointed governors, jurisdictional disputes between Earth-based governments and Martian authorities — map loosely onto real international space law frameworks like the Outer Space Treaty and the Artemis Accords. But the details are almost beside the point. What For All Mankind has done that no policy document has managed is make these questions dramatic. The audience rooting for or against a Mars governor who is technically following the rules but is also a tool of colonial administration — that is a policy debate in narrative form.

The story is not without risk. The original Space.com interview with Costa Ronin that surfaced this story was inaccessible at time of writing, returning errors. The governance-angle reading of the show could be overinterpretation. The comparison to real-world Mars planning may flatter both the show and the industry. A SpaceX or NASA governance document that actually existed would be more authoritative than anything a TV show could produce.

But no such document exists. The Artemis Accords, signed by 67 countries, address lunar activities and reference international space law principles but do not prescribe governance structures for a permanent Martian settlement. SpaceX's Mars plans remain largely engineering specifications. NASA has no published framework for Martian civil governance. In that gap sits a prestige television show on Apple TV+, working through exactly these questions, episode by episode, with a cast that includes characters who are just doing their jobs and characters who are resisting authoritarian rule and characters who are trying to figure out how to build a functional society with the tools they have.

The next crewed Mars mission could launch within a decade. There is no governance manual. There is only For All Mankind, and it is three episodes from the end of its season.