AHC: Space Exploration Wank

[Mr.Progressive]

Your goal, is to MASSIVELY expand the US space program. I'm talking landing on Mars, Venus, Astroids, and moons of Jupiter. I'm talking bases on the moon and Mars.

I'm talking about NASA running the Freedom Station, while launching Saturn Vs and Space Shuttles at the same time.

 

[Thande]

For a serious take on this, see e of pi's Eyes Turned Skywards.

For a less serious (but fun) take, MarkWhittington's Barry Bush.

 

[Mike Stearns]

Your goal, is to MASSIVELY expand the US space program. I'm talking landing on Mars, Venus, Astroids, and moons of Jupiter. I'm talking bases on the moon and Mars.

I'm talking about NASA running the Freedom Station, while launching Saturn Vs and Space Shuttles at the same time.

Three words. Soviet. Moon. Landing.

 

[Workable Goblin]

For a serious take on this, see e of pi's Eyes Turned Skywards.

He posts the posts, but we write them. As he will probably come by and mention.

I wouldn't exactly call it a wank, as despite perceptions it doesn't really do that much more than the OTL program if you line them up carefully side-by-side. Shuttle is substituted by Spacelab/Freedom, for example, while Artemis replaces Freedom/ISS from OTL. For something like what the OP wants, it's probably not ambitious enough.

 

[Mr.brightside]

It could be the byproduct of a multi polar world.

 

[e of pi]

He posts the posts, but we write them. As he will probably come by and mention.

Well, now you've got me feeling all obligated. But yes, Eyes is very much a joint effort, and while I may be more of the public face, the timeline wouldn't be nearly as good without Workable Goblin's contributions to research and editing, and of course his handling of all the unmanned missions.

Your goal, is to MASSIVELY expand the US space program. I'm talking landing on Mars, Venus, Astroids, and moons of Jupiter. I'm talking bases on the moon and Mars.

I'm talking about NASA running the Freedom Station, while launching Saturn Vs and Space Shuttles at the same time.

I think you either have to massively drive down launch costs to get this full list, or have ASBs intervene. In order of descending feasibility:
1) A space station program is quite feasible with a Shuttle that's actually economical to fly, so there's probably just a higher R&D budget during the Shuttle decision required to have the LEO parts happen (though probably in that case you retire Saturn V in favor of vastly cheaper Shuttle-launched payloads assembled in LEO). More of a politics problem than a technical one.
2) Lunar base or Mars landing--I rank these as about equal in terms of feasibility. You could perhaps do this even on OTL NASA's budget as long as you scrapped...well, basically everything else (see: Stephen Baxter's novel Voyage). Getting the funding to do this and LEO ops is a bit more of a challenge, but if you have cheap RLV lift, may be doable. As above, politics, not tech.
3) Asteroid landing--depends on the mission profile and how often you plan to do it. As IOTL, if you have a HLV and capsule capable of a Mars mission, it's probably doable.
4) Mars base--all the difficulties of a lunar base amplified by a longer way to go to run it. Probably breaks the bank without a lot of ISRU, lunar prop sourcing, and more. Still, at least feasible with realistic near-term technologies.
5) Manned landings on Jovian moons--given the delta-v required and the mission length implied, not really practical with current technologies.

 

[brovane]

Your goal, is to MASSIVELY expand the US space program. I'm talking landing on Mars, Venus, Astroids, and moons of Jupiter. I'm talking bases on the moon and Mars.

I'm talking about NASA running the Freedom Station, while launching Saturn Vs and Space Shuttles at the same time.

My story "The Journeys of the Saturn" still in progress has Lunar exploration and a Space Station at the same time.

http://wiki.alternatehistory.com/doku.php/timelines/the_journeys_of_the_saturn

 

[Thande]

He posts the posts, but we write them. As he will probably come by and mention.

I wouldn't exactly call it a wank, as despite perceptions it doesn't really do that much more than the OTL program if you line them up carefully side-by-side. Shuttle is substituted by Spacelab/Freedom, for example, while Artemis replaces Freedom/ISS from OTL. For something like what the OP wants, it's probably not ambitious enough.

My mistake, apologies. I wouldn't call it a wank, no, but that's why I described it as a 'serious take' on 'as much space as reasonably possible' - I would regard it as being basically as far as you can go without it becoming a wank, if that makes sense. (I am resisting the temptation to create specific terminology for that situation which references Sting from the Police...)

 

[Coalition]

Cheap costs to orbit. Not just construction cost and time, but also turn-around between launches. For example the shuttle heat tiles were designed to be reusable, but gluing them in place and making sure the glue was good took a long time and was very expensive. One idea would have been to use a massive belly made of wood. It would have been expendable after each landing, but instead of reattaching the tiles you can have several woodworkers making new belly boards. When the shuttle returns, the old one is taken off, ad a new one put in its place. The old one can then be used as fuel for a BBQ party to celebrate the old launch/prep the new launch.

This would be the primary way to get a bigger space program. If the launch costs are halved, that means you can launch more and larger items into orbit. Saturn Vs would be used as big dumb boosters to carry heavy payloads (100+ tons), while other designs would be reviewed to see which could put people into orbit for cheaper, while keeping them safe.

 

[Generaloberst]

The Soviets manage to get a more successful program. The US and the West, not willing to be outshined by the Soviets, will certainly try to one up them. I could see bases on the Moon, manned missions to Mars, more interest in asteroids.

 

[arrowiv]

You can also have Mondale and Proxmire out the way in Congress. Have them defeated in elections thanks to political dirty tricks and/or negative advertising.

 

[Workable Goblin]

You can also have Mondale and Proxmire out the way in Congress. Have them defeated in elections thanks to political dirty tricks and/or negative advertising.

They were symptoms, not causes (and both of their seats were pretty secure). The fundamental issue was that there wasn't a lot of interest in continuing space exploration on the part of the public--you know, the people electing Congress. We beat the Russians to the Moon. That was cool. Job done, now let's build sewers.

To change this, you need to get people interested in space, somehow. The usual way discussed to do this is to make the Soviet program more successful, but I'm not necessarily sure that would work (and it sure wouldn't be easy, because the Soviet program was a titanic mess, especially during the '60s). By 1968-1969, culture had shifted, and I just don't know that the Red Menace would be as effective in getting support at that point as it was a decade earlier.

Otherwise, there aren't a lot of options aside from literal aliens. The state of technology is too primitive for the economics of space development to be attractive; heck, it may still be too primitive today, even with some decades of additional development. Without life on Mars or Venus, there's no big scientific attraction, no large amount of additional glory to be had. Yes, planetary exploration is still cool and scientifically attractive, but it's not going to drive human interplanetary missions in the 1970s or 1980s. Just robots. And of course of the Spanish trinity of God, gold, and glory, God is right out what with the lack of natives to convert or anything.

So I think the best you can do without stumbling into highly implausible decisions or literal alien space bats showing up is to try to spend the limited resources available after Apollo more wisely (gee, real surprising, ain't it?). Or avoid Apollo altogether, and have a more steady-state program that doesn't have this ideal of infinite resources available to it. In either case, you're likely to end up doing more, simply by virtue of not chasing unattainable ideals but focusing on doing what you can with what you have.

 

[Driftless]

You can also have Mondale and Proxmire out the way in Congress. Have them defeated in elections thanks to political dirty tricks and/or negative advertising.

Neither was going to lose.

Mondale was nearly unbeatable. He was Humphrey's protege, but more of a centrist

For most Wisconsinites during that era, Bill Proxmire was your eccentric Uncle, who you admired, even though you thought he was just a little odd (in a good way) He usually combined a liberal's sense of social justice, with a conservative's opposition to large chunks of government spending and anything he perceived as waste. He was not a fan of any part of the military/industrial complex, and the space program got caught in that bucket in his view. In 1970, he re-won his seat with 71% of the vote & 73% in 1976.

For Proxmire, if you could somehow woo him to the light side, perhaps with some proto-private/public space investment plan?

 

[Dathi THorfinnsson]

Why? That's the question.

There's only so much money people are prepared to spend on publicity stunts (which is what the Manned Program really is, as much as I love it).

So, you need to have some over-riding reason. Discovering an alien base on the moon might work. Discovering an alien civilization on Mars would work. Having nuggets of unobtainium lying around on the surface of the moon might work, if unobtainium actually had any use. Solar Power Sats from Lunar resources might work IF everything went perfectly....

O'Neill's L5 colony, with Lunar resources and SPSs was a serious stab at providing a rationale, but the design was iffy, as were the economics.

Europeans settled the New World mostly because the cost/benefit ratio was so good. Individuals could pay passage and get cheap land (for North America), or nations could send a handful of men and get access to LOTS of gold and silver (Spain).

There's no free land for agriculture in space, and even if gold nuggets were common on the surface of the moon, it probably would be too expensive to mine the stuff with current tech. And a proper cheap space transportation system would require a market first.

-----
OK, DotCom bubble lasts a little longer. Kistler actually gets their financing lined up (that's probably 2 independent PoDs). The K-1 works as advertised (ha, ha), or at least can be made to work vaguely somewhat like advertised (that might be possible). You now have affordable access to space, sort of.

New markets develop. More reusable launchers are built. Lockheed turns the VentureStar into a TSTO and it's vaguely affordable; Boeing resurrects the DC-Clipper, as a first stage of a TSTO (probably won't work as an SSTO affordably).

That gets lots of stuff into Earth orbit (LEO, MEO, GEO). It still doesn't get a moon base.

But maybe it makes lunar exploitation of lunar resources feasible. Firstly for oxygen (oxygen in LH/Lox engines is most of the mass), then maybe for metals for space construction.

Again, exploitation of near earth asteroids, especially for earth orbit infrastructure, might be feasible, IF we first get that cheap(ish) access to space. Carbon for lifesupport, iron for structural stuff. Maybe hydrogen.

 

[TFSmith121]

Landings on Venus????

Landing on Venus is bad news...but, go back farther, eager young space cadet!

Make your POD a German-dominated Europe (1940 POD? 1941?; take your pick, with stalemate in the Med, the US winning a cobelligerant Pacific War against the Japanese in 1941-43, the British Empire devolving into something more resembling the Commonwealth crossed with NATO, and the USSR collapsing a la 1917 in 1941-42, with something akin to a German-"Brown" Russian-Italian Axis by the middle of the decade) which leads to a West-Nazified Europe Cold War from the late 1940s onward; the need for overhead reconnaissance "behind the Festung" leads to very high altitude, long-range overflights, and both sides start spending seriously on efforts to get to LEO, along with competing special weapons programs.

Fission weapons are delayed by maybe five years, fusion by another five, perhaps...and no one dares use them for anything other than testshots.

In essence, all of the above leads to the Cold War emphasis on high altitude recon, except a decade sooner. Given the relative lack of micro-electronics, that requires man-operated recon systems, which means LEO HSF around 1950, MOL/Salyut type recon stations by mid-decade, and workshops (Skylab/Mir by 1960), which makes a lunar presence by the mid-60s possible, and a sustained campaign by both blocs to occupy various points on the Moon for the "prestige" factor as much as anything else by 1970...

Other priorities will come, but I could see a general extension of HSF-focused exploration of Mars using NTR for the interplanetary stages by 1980, the inner planets by 1990 and 2000, and the outer planets in the early 21st - which, given a seven-decade-lifespan for the Union of National Socialist Republics analogous to the USSR, presumably the whole thing starts grinding to a halt at about the time Project Zeus gets to the Jovian system...


Best,

 

[matashowski]

I'm wondering if you can't achieve this with some kind of psychological POD in America and the Soviet Union.

A complete shot in the dark: Some kind of plague sweeps the world sometime in the sixties. Doesn't collapse civilization, but a lot of people die unpleasantly. Perhaps it strikes disproportionately the elderly and and children, leaving the 'Decision making' age bracket grieving but intact. It shakes peoples enough that space exploration is seen not as some contest to beat the Russians, but a vital aspect to the continuation of the species. You get not just massive public support, but demand for moon bases, space stations, so on. Anything to get us off this rock and spread the risk, so to speak.