There is a next step after exoplanets. It would require faster than light. I think the nearest black hole to earth is over1000 light years away. There are other potential stellar phenomenon like nebulae globular clusters white holes naturally forming wormholes binary stars the galactic edge which could only be reached with considerable effort.
How ambitious can alternate space histories get?
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Okay, that ISOT idea is kinda hilarious. I'd actually like to see that.
I think orbital solar power is something we'll likely see in OTL sometime this century, since it's one of those things that should become economical and so might as well be done, once spaceflight becomes cheap, like asteroid mining. But to have it come earlier, and make it the reason for the rapid expansion and commercialization of spaceflight, as the SPS program and O'Neill saw it, would be rather more difficult. Since it was seen as a solution to the long-term energy problems that were feared back then, you'd pretty much have to make those problems reality. As in, find a way to keep oil expensive for a much longer time, keep nuclear power a politically untenable idea, and maybe some ideas to avoid the development of new oil extraction methods would help. Ideally, with a dire enough future outlook, maybe it could end up being something that the US is pouring money and resources into with all the effort and urgency of its WW2 projects. Don't quite how plausible it would be to make it that urgent, though the project could be pushed forward at some degree of urgency with the right situation, I hope.
Late to the party. As long as the paradigm for reaching orbit is throwing mass out the back end of a thermos, space travel isn't going anywhere. OTL may not be the max, but it's not far off.
Now, if you want to ASB fusion or wire with the tensile strength for beanstalks, then sure. If you get cost to orbit down to dollars a kilogram, anything is possible. And I'm sure Saint Elon is just around the corner with that.
Now, if you want to ASB fusion or wire with the tensile strength for beanstalks, then sure. If you get cost to orbit down to dollars a kilogram, anything is possible. And I'm sure Saint Elon is just around the corner with that.
This may or may not be real
Helion announces world’s first fusion energy purchase agreement with Microsoft | Helion
Helion
www.helionenergy.com
There is also the Deepmind Article
DeepMind Has Trained an AI to Control Nuclear Fusion
The Google-backed AI firm taught a reinforcement learning algorithm to control the fiery plasma inside a tokamak nuclear fusion reactor.
There is also the DOE story
US scientists achieve net energy gain for second time in a fusion reaction
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility achieved the feat using lasers to fuse two atoms
www.theguardian.com
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Unfortunately, the anti-nuclear movement in OTL has mostly kept us more dependent on fossil fuels. It has also led to calls to lower living standards to stop climate change.
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I asked my father-in-law, who is a nuclear physicist and once turned down a chance to work with Teller, if he was excited about the fusion news. He laughed noting the complexity of the setup. Net energy gain does not mean usable power source is around the corner. Indeed, if you look it up, the timeline for that is 2050 at the soonest, 2070-80 "realistically". That's the timeline put out by the people doing it.This may or may not be real
Helion announces world’s first fusion energy purchase agreement with Microsoft | Helion
Helion
There is also the Deepmind Article
DeepMind Has Trained an AI to Control Nuclear Fusion
The Google-backed AI firm taught a reinforcement learning algorithm to control the fiery plasma inside a tokamak nuclear fusion reactor.www.wired.com
There is also the DOE story
US scientists achieve net energy gain for second time in a fusion reaction
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility achieved the feat using lasers to fuse two atoms
I remember when ITER was exciting 25 years ago. And that was 20 years after we were supposed to have fusion power generators.
Anyway, the timeline was the 20th Century. There will be no fusion in the 20th Century, and no huge space program either.
All of the big tech companies want fusion power to run their data centers. A lot of money is being poured into fusion research, especially AI to run fusion power plants. They want more reliable power. This is where most of the money is. My prediction is that they will try and do what Tesla did for electric cars for fusion. They will find a group of young insanely driven people to work on the project.
news.mit.edu
Fast-tracking fusion energy’s arrival with AI and accessibility
MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center will receive DoE support to improve access to fusion data and increase workforce diversity. The project is being led by Christina Rea of the
news.mit.edu
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Great! I'm sure we're "twenty years away".All of the big tech companies want fusion power to run their data centers. A lot of money is being poured into fusion research, especially AI to run fusion power plants. They want more reliable power. This is where most of the money is. My prediction is that they will try and do what Tesla did for electric cars for fusion. They will find a group of young insanely driven people to work on the project.
Fast-tracking fusion energy’s arrival with AI and accessibility
MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center will receive DoE support to improve access to fusion data and increase workforce diversity. The project is being led by Christina Rea of the
Maybe if they had gone for an Earth Orbit Rendezvous, they could have been left with a cislunar spacecraft made solely for extra-atmospheric flight, that docks and transfers crew and cargo with a rocket in Earth orbit, and a lander in Lunar orbit. That might be a vehicle conducive to many return journeys.
15-20 years is about right with some false starts. Helion might "kind of work" but not be there fully...
Fusion thermal might be a better option than nuclear thermal. It would be cleaner. How about a helium 3 fusion thermal rocket with both the liquid part and the helium 3 part mined from the moon.
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Ha! Not as late as me
Speaking of "fusion" and "AI" I recall a story in Analog (IIRC) from the late 70s/early 80s where they were trying to use an AI to control the plasma flow from a fusion reactor but the logic kept breaking down. Then one researcher has an epiphany as he's watching his nephew being forced eat broccoli. So he reprograms the AI to "know" that plasma 'tastes' bad and if the plasma hits the wall then the AI will 'taste' it and lo and behold we now have controlled fusion power
I thought the "first" rule was there were always Zeppelins in common use in any alternate history?
The OTL Apollo CSM actually DID fit on the smaller Saturn as we saw in the Apollo/Skylab missions
And studies were done for launching it on the Titan III and it was found to be doable. But by that point NASA was looking beyond Apollo.EOR was seen by most people as "the" way to go but it came down to which mode was going to be faster to get the Moon and the plain truth was the fastest and essentially easiest mode was going to be Direct from the Earth to the Moon and landing using LOR. Putting up a LEO space station and then using EOR to get to the Moon was the "Next Logical Step" but it would have taken time that the Apollo (and US Space) Program just did not have. Which is why von Braun finally dropped it in favor of LOR, it was the only way to meet the deadline. And as the chapter cited points out, once you've 'skipped' a basic step it's hard to go back and do that step while trying to maintain a momentum.
Realistically OTL's Apollo program skipped over what was the expectation of the progression which was supposed to have been:
Orbital flight using expendable vehicles and stages
Leading to the development of a reusable (winged of course) fully reusable orbital vehicle which would then drop the price to orbit significantly
Leading to the building and use of a LEO permanently manned Space Station from which we would build and launch other expeditions to the Moon and then the planets.
Each step taking a couple of decades.
Instead we put a small number of men on the Moon and returned them safely to the Earth in about a decade with a huge expenditure of money and resources, and a laser focus that allowed for no other side-tracks.
I'd like to assume that a more measured pace might have given us a chance to build up a more sustainable in-space infrastructure, but given how such a program would likely also have a lesser budget and general support it would be dicey.
Neither do I and likely most who have commented on this thread
But we're a minority compared to those that do, or actually worse those that are ambivalent about itIt's still government money, Musk even admits that. He's spent very little of "his own" money on SpaceX and relied heavily on NASA and DoD for funding and still does.
Randy
I have to agree with the rest that there is actually plenty there to attract interest.
But I'll also agree with the general sentiment that there's "nothing" in space that has a direct potential be a great 'draw' for the majority of people on Earth. That's essentially why you have "national" space agencies doing most of that kind of work. There's been all kinds of 'interest' in trying to research and demonstrate industrial process in space but the high cost of doing that research is a major hurdle. And for the most part industry found alternatives that were cheaper and easier to access.
Actually they mention that the original Jupiter mission was re-directed with the "Prime" crew mostly replaced by the three hibernating astronauts replacing the crew that was originally scheduled to accompany Poole and Bowman. (The original idea was for the mission to be to Saturn with the alien probe signal going there, and Jupitar was only used for a gravitational slingshot maneuver) Poole and Bowman (for some odd reason of "movie logic) weren't "read into" the actual mission so having to keep that truth from them is why HAL went nuts.
"In universe" as it were a Jupiter mission was just the next step in exploration having landed people on Mars and started a small base there. The frantic pace was dictated by the Movie's "in universe" need for there to be an already planned manned mission to Jupiter and that the Moon be heavily developed as a way to find the original monolith. The other driver there was the belief that Orbital Nuclear Weapons platforms would be placed in space by most nations as deterrents to nuclear war, while at the same time representing the possibility of a sudden devastating nuclear war at any moment. So it was assumed that nations would press forward in space development to have an infrastructure in orbit to deploy and maintain those ONW platforms.
Randy
Not really as we see with the Soviet Space program, which the military essentially ran.\
Speaking of ASB
and why does everyone forget Yangel? Randy
In our Sputniks game (which I wrote up as "Sputniks", q.v. on this site), there were five Soviet players (l. to r.): Suslov, Yangel, Brezhnev, Chelomei, and Mishin (Korolev had died at that point). We played over the course of a decade, and most of the players changed over time (Mishin's player was Khruschev), but Jesse was Yangel from beginning to end.
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This is an aspect of James Webb's achievement that deserves more credit. He was utterly ruthless about his focus on Kennedy's goal. Nothing was allowed to distract from it! Every aspect of the program had to make the schedule work. He worked to keep a a healthy and steady science portfolio (also very much to his credit), but on the HSF side, everything was about The Goal. He happily threw as many Apollo Applications babies off the sledge as necessary when he had to, because that was stuff that could only come after The Goal.
He did spend a hefty chunk of what he *did* have in 2002-08 ($100M or so), and it was more than (say) Beale, Vector, or Kistler's founders were able to invest. And that turned out to be just enough to get them to the point where they could even have a chance to fight for that NASA money. But that had as much to do with his management of the company as his checkbook.
But while government contracts were critical to SpaceX's survival in 2006-14, and remain important now in SpaceX's revenue stream, they have been profitable from just launch revenue since 2017, and they've since been able to access what they needed in the VC markets, so they've never been reliant on Uncle Sam cash in the way ULA, LockMart, Boeing et al always have been. And now, with the Starlink money starting to roll in, they have even more maneuvering room to work with.
SpaceX could develop Starship without any government money. But it would take them longer.
It achieved a great thing but it left the US in a lurch for a follow on. Webb had a vastly better grasp on the real attitudes of the politicians and public whereas Paine did not.
Er from what I've been able to gather that wasn't Musk's money but essentially a "loan" from Tesla by way of background investment. (Which Musk is still doing today) He already had an agreement with Griffin (from about 2001) that he'd have DoD money to work with before he got NASA money to develop "a rocket" (which was the Falcon 1) and then a "bigger rocket" (which was initially going to be the Falcon V but was convinced by "Investors", which at this point is obviously the DoD/Nasa, that he needed to embrace the medium to heavy lift market right away) which got us the Falcon 9. Those guarantees allowed him to lobby for other peoples money which is still a practice of SpaceX today.
Er, SpaceX had gotten large amounts of governments money every single year they've existed. 2023 has been the only year they didn't directly seek government payout or an investor input but that's because NASA (and the DoD) are not willing to shell out money for the "milestones" that SpaceX claims but has not actually reached. (The USAF and USSF have both been burned by shelling out money to SpaceX for projects that have gone nowhere and were dropped by SpaceX once the payouts were made, guess it's NASA's turn) and so far it's been by moving money from the Tesla stock bubble to SpaceX that has kept things running this year.
It's supposed to have been cash positive for the first time in the fourth quarter of this year but many people watching don't see that SpaceX/Starlink numbers actually adding up. Starlink is still nowhere near the promised goals and the fact that the FCC has pulled the rest of the money from it's award (for Starlink not meeting goals) makes that announcement seem even less credible.
No SpaceX has always needed government money just like any other aerospace company. The failure to meet goals and the disaster of the first 'test launch' have put SpaceX into a significant crunch even with Musk shoveling money from Tesla into the project. Let's be honest here it's already taken them longer than "planned" to get the non-working (so far) vehicle they have now. A series of bad decisions (mostly based on Musk's requirements not reality) have been plaguing the project from the start but this is "current events" rather than "Alternate History" so...
Randy
I love the idea of a more gradual space program that eventually surpasses OTL (in fact, that's what HASDA is supposed to be, but some people thought it was boring so it's currently on hiatus).
Could a reusable winged launch vehicle be economically viable, or does it have to be an automated VTVL rocket like Falcon 9?
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