It's their own damn fault, for not getting in front of the problem early enough. Andrew_Kearley is correct that Koenig et al. said that their survival was a miracle. However, not only didn't the writers lead with the idea that a higher power was responsible for all the mechanics of the moon getting blasted out of orbit, but also they never unambiguously said that anyway.
AFAIK, any way of making sense of the events in "Breakaway" involves some sort of retcon. My way of approaching the problem is to lay all unexplained phenomena about the Moon's departure on the shoulders of the rogue planet Meta, which was the source of a mysterious signal in the pilot. Unfortunately, Meta is a thread that's been dropped by the very next episode.
Somehow, the premise of the show was never fully disentangled from its conception as the sequel to UFO, in which aliens would steal the Moon as a means of disarming Earth. (Apparently, the alien gravity ray doesn't cause the Moon to dissociate into a stream of particles, and it's easier to just make the Moon leave orbit than to destroy it; perhaps the aliens are reserving the possibility of brining it back someday.) Although higher powers were encountered on several occasions who hinted at cosmic purpose and destiny, no counterpart to the UFO aliens ever appeared in Space: 1999 who could be said to be responsible for the whole thing. Having a half-baked premise was the problem, and it could never be overcome, despite what are in my opinion a number of worthwhile episodes, including most of Byrne's.
On the subject of what Freiberger et al. could have done to keep the show from crashing, where do I begin? Frankly, the higher power stuff is all but jettisoned for the second year. There is no follow-up that I know of whatsoever to the climax of the first season, "The Testament of Arkadia", which surely should have been a game-changer for the Alphans, in terms of understanding their place in the cosmos.
Instead of moving towards a higher purpose, the whole thing devolved even closer to GNDN (goes nowhere, does nothing). I would have been concerned with at least establishing a meaningful premise besides being forever lost in space, simply lurching from one random threat to another. In Star Trek TOS, you knew where the Enterprise stood. In Lost in Space, there is at least some hope that the Jupiter 2 will find Earth someday. In 1999, the Alphans had no such hope, and the show ultimately seemed to be all about falling away into nothingness, sorta like The Incredible Shrinking Man. Shrinking Man is a brilliant movie, but it would make an awful TV series, since he just never stops shrinking (unless he did, but then he wouldn't be shrinking anymore).
Even in Quantum Leap, the whole thing is seen to be for some higher purpose.
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