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  1. The Dream Survives
    Threadmarks: e of pi's Author Note

    So, there were a few things I wanted to explore with this TL. The first was some of the interesting possible failure modes for Shuttle which haven’t received as much attention because when people think of failure modes, they tend to think of the two that actually resulted in loss of crew. The...

  2. Alternate Railways: V3

    So, I don't have a full write up of this I'm happy about, but I figured I'd pitch it in general details for comments. Long Island Rail Road and the Amtrak Long Island Mainline Gauge: 4' 8.5'' Operational: 1834 - Present Geographic/Pre-1900 Historical background: The basic idea is that this is...

  3. The Dream Survives

    Thanks. We have some additional comments about the reasoning behind this and some of the decisions coming (we're all sort of working on a thesis statement of what we think it means which we'll probably have up in a few days), but to reply to a first round of comments: I think the question of...

  4. A Sound of Thunder: The Rise of the Soviet Superbooster

    Maybe if you want a thread where people post like crazy about space and current space politics stuff, you could have those discussions in the space and current politics thread in Chat, where that belongs? Not a mod and this isn't my timeline, but this thread is quiet because the timeline is on...

  5. The Dream Survives

    That's all for now folks, we may have some reflection up later on why we wrote it and what it all means and stuff, but don't expect anything at 8 PM Eastern time.

  6. The Dream Survives
    Threadmarks: Part 3: Apogee

    Apogee The concept of NASA replacing a station with a smaller commercially-enabled crew-tended platform had been rejected thanks to the diplomatic benefits of the International Space Station’s Russian cooperation. NASA was still building on the relationships they were establishing with the...

  7. The Dream Survives

    Fun fact (according to wikipedia):

  8. The Dream Survives
    Threadmarks: Post 1: Climbing the Wall

    Climbing The Wall The Shuttle is to space flight what Lindbergh was to commercial aviation. — Arthur C. Clarke[1] If the Space Shuttle was to live up to that promise, it would have to demonstrate and then safely sustain the flight rate demands of becoming the primary American launch vehicle...

  9. The Dream Survives
    Threadmarks: Post 0: Introduction Image

    The Dream Survives A Space Alternate History by @e of pi, @TimothyC, & @Usili Original Image from Advertisement from Rockwell. OMNI October 1978, p 26 Highest Resolution version from Dave Cross's Flickr "A Spaceship Has Landed On Earth", 2011-07-08 Archived Copy here.

  10. A Sound of Thunder: The Rise of the Soviet Superbooster

    I'd bet it's a lot closer to a year or less than it is to "won't launch before 2030," which was the assertion. I didn't assert it was the first flight's tankage, just that it is flight-intended tankage, and that it will be static fired, and then the first flight vehicle (whether those tanks or...

  11. A Sound of Thunder: The Rise of the Soviet Superbooster

    And considering they rolled flight tankage to the pad last month, and it's now headed back to the hangar to be reset for static fire...

  12. A Sound of Thunder: The Rise of the Soviet Superbooster

    I've interviewed a fair bit of the design team and senior leadership that's still alive so I think I have a slightly better idea of what was going on than you do, and you inventing "maybe there's classified documents that show they had other stuff wrong beyond the publicly stated reasons they...

  13. A Sound of Thunder: The Rise of the Soviet Superbooster

    That thread is actually...largely out of date with research it caused me to do and thus now probably as much wrong as right.

  14. A Sound of Thunder: The Rise of the Soviet Superbooster

    Aerojet Rocketdyne had conducted an extensive sequence of engine qualification tests on the engines in their original configuration in 1995 and the for-Kistler configuration in 1998, and the tanks were proof tested as they were produced. Obviously, as assembly wasn't completed, cryo testing of...

  15. A Sound of Thunder: The Rise of the Soviet Superbooster

    Totally unlike Elon Musk blocking Kistler money in 2004, of course, I'm sure.

  16. A Sound of Thunder: The Rise of the Soviet Superbooster

    In 2006 and 2007 (actually as early as 1998), Kistler had hardware built and assembly begun, while SpaceX was still three years from being able to say the same, so you are simply factually wrong about that. And saying "they couldn't hit financial milestones, therefore they couldn't have...

  17. A Sound of Thunder: The Rise of the Soviet Superbooster

    All this remains....incredibly off-topic for this thread, but I would point out there were like two or three near-run RLV programs in the 90s, which only a few butterflies are needed to get to succeed. X-33 probably would have worked if they hadn't sat down and made a list of every possible...

  18. A Sound of Thunder: The Rise of the Soviet Superbooster

    Or a generation late, if the 90s had gone slightly different. (Or it's possible there'd been more focus on recovery and reuse in the 70s, 80s, and 90s and first stage recovery was all wings or wing-and-jets, which is....basically the same mass fraction penalty when you work it all out, but...

  19. A Sound of Thunder: The Rise of the Soviet Superbooster

    DC-X was not a structural pathfinder, just an aerodynamic test and controls rig--it wasn't light-weighted, the tanks were extremely heavy and separate from the rest of the (also very heavy) structure, etc. The unbuilt follow-up DC-Y was to be the proposed structurally-optimized pathfinder. I'm...

  20. A Sound of Thunder: The Rise of the Soviet Superbooster

    Helps to have a higher flight rate. A lot of Delta cost was splitting the launch rate with Atlas. Vulcan has seventy something launches in its order book from day one, about 25 to 30 more than Delta IV's entire flight record, and a solid 3/4 of Atlas V.
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