Hi everyone. I'm Chris Marshall, and this is for all mankind, the official podcast.

Today, I want to start off with a scene from one of our episodes this season,

between my character, Danielle Poole, and Ed Baldwin, outgoing chief of the astronaut office.

I've given it a lot of thought.

I want to be the first African-American woman to command a mission.

First woman black commander is now a thing?

Seriously, we're going to parse it that fine?

You're damn right we are, Ed. If you don't give me a command spot,

I will always be seen as that weak little black girl who fell apart on the moon.

But if I were a white man, they'd have forgiven me a long time ago.

Before playing Danielle Poole, I never really thought about space.

Because growing up, I was never really exposed to anything about it.

People always have these sort of tropes that they tell their children, like, you can be anything you want to be.

But in reality, it's really hard to want to be what you don't see.

NASA and outer space felt like this thing that just wasn't for me, because I never

saw any astronauts who looked like me. Like most kids, I learned about the first black woman to go

into space during Black History Month, when all the facts and stats and achievements of black people

can at times just sound like this

big jumble of things that happened to one group of people a long time ago.

You're just learning all these things at once is like this collective black history of the past.

And it wasn't until I started working on this show that I realized that this is all very current.

It was only the 1980s when someone other than a white man went into space.

...