Why? It’s not particularly good.
Later episodes fall victim to lazy "a major catastrophe is about to occur, engineering team comes up with moonshot solution just in the nick of time to save the day" more often than I'd like. And the lesbian romance storyline seemed forced. I could barely finish the third season as it really went off the rails.
The aleida character is the worst though. She somehow has super powers that no one else posseses, but they never articulate her thought process or how she does it. It's just: entire team of rocket scientists stare at problem fruitlessly. Aleida stares at problem, inspiring music plays, her eyes light up and she tells you the solution. And then she explains simple things like impulse vs momentum to other rocket scientists, as if they didn't understand it before.
The parts I loved about it faded away, but I stuck around anyway. :P
Because. It’s actually very good.
I watched it with my dad however and he wouldn’t shut up about “wokeness” (we disagree on a few things). The show is effectively an imagining of “America, made great in the first place”, and at least the core premise - that we lost our hunger for exploration after winning the space race, _used to be_ a bipartisan talking point.
Absolutely recommend it. Also, the imagined space shuttles they get to come up with are amazing.
I thought it was leaning a bit too heavily on what we consider modern issues. But then it turns out that some of the characters in the story where real and lived through this or something close to this (I forget now, but one of the women astronauts that never got to fly was a real person)