In the year 1987, Air Force captain William "Buck" Rogers tests the Ranger 3 spacecraft. His flight was to last only 5 months, but a meteor storm damages his life-support systems, freezing him solid, and casts Ranger 3 into an orbit which returns it to Earth--over 500 years later. Soon after Buck departs, Earth is devastated by a nuclear war caused by a renegade group of U.S. military officers. In 2491, Buck, who has survived due to the freezing, is revived and tries to adjust to life on 25th-century post-nuclear Earth. In the second season, Buck joins the crew of the Searcher, a starship dispatched to locate former Earth colonies in deep space.

When the 12 Colonies of Man are wiped out by a cybernetic race called the Cylons, Commander Adama (Lorne Greene) and the crew of the battlestar Galactica lead a ragtag fleet of human survivors in search of a "mythical planet" called Earth.

Seven very different individuals with one common connection: they are all escaped prisoners sentenced to live out the rest of their lives on Cygnus Alpha, a barren and sparsely populated prison planet far from Earth, by a corrupt totalitarian government known as the Terran Federation. Blake, a former resistance leader who had his memories suppressed by the Federation, must now try to hold together his assorted crew of criminals and others. They have control over a very powerful, but mysterious spaceship they call the Liberator. Together they try to bring down the corrupt and tyrannical Federation.

It's 1999 and Moonbase Alpha has been built on the Moon to safeguard the nuclear waste shipped from Earth. On September 13, 1999, disaster strikes and the nuclear waste explodes causing a chain reaction that hurls the Moon out of Earth's orbit and into deep space. The adventures of Space:1999 begin.

Astronauts Alan Virdon and Pete Burke are thrown 1100 years forward in time to 3085 AD to find evolved apes have become the dominant species and humans their apathetic slaves. Feared by the ape authorities, their plight turns the head of a promising young chimpanzee named Galen, who adopts the heretical idea that maybe humans aren't a lower species and can co-exist with apes as equals. As the three struggle to survive life on the run, a bond of friendship grows between them like an intricate tapestry woven right before our eyes, a multi-threaded miracle born of compassion, respect, and the desire to replace fear with understanding. The series is loosely tied to the original movie series, reusing some footage and the ape makeup (albeit on a lower budget).

Around 1970, the British and American governments receive incontrovertible evidence that aliens exist and are abducting humans. In cooperation with the United Nations, they set up a secret worldwide organization, SHADO (Supreme Headquarters Alien Defence Organisation), which operates in the 1980s. With resources and equipment under the seas, in the air, on land, in orbit and on the Moon, SHADO's purpose is to stop the alien incursions and find out why the aliens want humans.