Apple TV+'s alternate-history space drama For All Mankind is heading into its last lap. The sixth and final season is currently on track for 2027, according to Collider, and it's set to do something the show has been building toward since its 1969 premiere: catch up to the present day.

That's a big deal for a series built around one flipped moment in history. In For All Mankind, cosmonaut Alexei Leonov beats Neil Armstrong to the Moon, and the Space Race the world actually lived through never happens the way we remember it. Instead, the show keeps going, decade after decade, with the Soviets and the Americans locked in a race that never lets up and a world reshaped by the money and attention that keeps pouring into space.

Co-created by Ronald D. Moore along with Ben Nedivi and Matt Wolpert, the series has run its characters, and often their children, through generations of that alternate timeline. Joel Kinnaman's astronaut Ed Baldwin and Wrenn Schmidt's NASA engineer Margot Madison have anchored much of it, with the cast rotating as the decades roll forward.

A spinoff still finding its footing

The bigger swing this year was Star City, a companion series that flips the lens to the Soviet side of that same race. Where the flagship show leans into hope and cooperation, Star City plays more like a spy thriller, built around the surveillance and control the Soviet program apparently exerted over its own cosmonauts. Coral Peña features in the new show, which arrived not long after For All Mankind's fifth season this year, giving fans of the universe an unusually generous stretch of new episodes back to back.

What it hasn't gotten yet is a second season. Star City remains unrenewed, even as its parent show heads toward its planned finish line. That's a slightly odd position for a freshly launched spinoff to be in, especially one built off a franchise Apple has stood behind since the platform's earliest days.

And that patience is really the story here. For All Mankind was never going to be judged the way most streaming shows are, on the strength of a single season's numbers. Moore and his co-creators apparently planned for a six-season arc from the start, and Apple let them get there, something that barely happens anymore in a business where shows get cancelled after one uneven run. The show has apparently stayed among Apple's more-watched originals through all of it, sitting alongside titles like Severance and Pluribus in a catalog Apple has clearly decided to keep betting on.

Whether Star City gets to keep telling its half of the story is the open question now. For All Mankind gets to finish what it started. Its spinoff is still waiting to find out if it gets the same chance.