"Cosmos", the 1980 mini-documentary series that has encouraged a generation of viewers to consider the origins of the universe and their place in this world, and is a television personality bit out of the astronomer Carl Sagan, is ready to turn back to terrestrial radio and TV operations. Only this time the spacecraft is controlled by a pilot, whose identity you might not suspect, even if you had billions and billions of assumptions.

On Friday the Fox network is to announce that it has ordered a 13-episode series, “Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey,” expected to be broadcast in 2013. As part of a creative team that includes Ann Druyan, Sagan’s widow and a collaborator on the original “Cosmos,” one of the executive producers is Seth MacFarlane, the creator, producer, co-star and animating spirit of "Family Guy", the bawdy and irreverent Fox cartoon sitcom. 

Yet behind a comic sensibility that is sometimes provocative and sometimes puerile, Mr. MacFarlane is a committed fan of the first “Cosmos” who laments a modern society that he says has lost its fascination with science. 

“We’re obsessed with angels and vampires and whatnot,” Mr. MacFarlane, 37, said in a telephone interview, “when there are many more exciting and very real and much more spectacular things to be excited about, that are right in our own planetary backyard.” 

When the original “Cosmos” (subtitled “A Personal Voyage”) was first shown on PBS from September to December 1980, it was a watershed moment for science-themed television programming. Sagan’s look at existence at its most massive and microscopic, accompanied by a contemplative score by the Greek composer Vangelis, were eventually viewed by 400 million people in 60 countries, making it public television’s most-watched short-form series until the Ken Burns documentary “The Civil War.” 

While its visions of intergalactic travel made an impression on a young Mr. MacFarlane (see the many “Star Trek” and “Star Wars” references on Family Guy dvd boxset), the courageous spirit of "Cosmos" is now difficult to reconcile with a time when NASA has no obvious successor to its space shuttle program recently completed.