PC: "2001" technological level by 2001?

[TranscendentalMedication]

This may border on ASB territory, but would it be possible to have a level of technology resembling the film "2001: A Space Odyssey" by the year 2001? I realize that we actually have a great deal of the technology presented in the film that simply differs in appearance, I'm mostly concerned with the space travel/colonization aspects.

Bonus points if the P.O.D. is around/after 1968.

[SergeantHeretic]

This may border on ASB territory, but would it be possible to have a level of technology resembling the film "2001: A Space Odyssey" by the year 2001? I realize that we actually have a great deal of the technology presented in the film that simply differs in appearance, I'm mostly concerned with the space travel/colonization aspects.

Bonus points if the P.O.D. is around/after 1968.
We were seriously o nthe way, all it would have taken was for us to NOT quit.

If we had just kept the spending at "Apollo program" levels from 1969 to 1999 that would have done the job.

The thing is that the tech level in that film really wasn't that spectacular in hindsight and as you point out we have some of it right now.

[NothingNow]

We were seriously o nthe way, all it would have taken was for us to NOT quit.

If we had just kept the spending at "Apollo program" levels from 1969 to 1999 that would have done the job.

The thing is that the tech level in that film really wasn't that spectacular in hindsight and as you point out we have some of it right now.

We have the vast majority of it, aside from the Space capabilities and the ability to put humans into hibernation.
And HAL, but really, you could easily get away with not having a sophisticated AI on such a mission, indeed, a Macintosh 128K, (introduced in 1984) or Apple Lisa (introduced 1983) would be overkill for 90% of the mission's needs, while pretty much everything else (mostly needed to keep the crew sane on such a long trip) could be easily handled by a laserdisc player, a tv and a bunch of Tabletop RPG books.

[SergeantHeretic]

We have the vast majority of it, aside from the Space capabilities and the ability to put humans into hibernation.
And HAL, but really, you could easily get away with not having a sophisticated AI on such a mission, indeed, a Macintosh 128K, (introduced in 1984) or Apple Lisa (introduced 1983) would be overkill for 90% of the mission's needs, while pretty much everything else (mostly needed to keep the crew sane on such a long trip) could be easily handled by a laserdisc player, a tv and a bunch of Tabletop RPG books.
That's fair enough, the only thing they needed an A.I. for was so it could flip out and kill everybody.

As you point out al lthe real functions can be handled by tech we had 20 years ago.

After all, it isn't as if the computer needs to KNOW what is' doing, is it?

[NothingNow]

After all, it isn't as if the computer needs to KNOW what is' doing, is it?

Nope. It just needs to crunch some numbers, and that's it. It's also why one of the most advanced processors currently in use in space is a radiation hardened derivative of the IBM PowerPC 750, (the RAD750) better known as the PowerPC G3 (since pretty much everything else is massive overkill.) Incidentally, it was first released for sale in 2001 (but could be accelerated with more funding,) so if you wanted to, you could bring a Blueberry iBook G3 with you, helping to make the long annoying voyage a little better, since you now had porn and could bring some music along with you on a trip, while still having fairly up to date style.

And before you ask, no, iPods only came out in October 2001, so they're a no-go, but maybe on later missions, but an Apple MessagePad 2100 (discontinued in 1998 IOTL) could work just as well, and has a couple of PCMCIA type II Slots, so you could expand things fairly easily, including using IEEE 1394-1995 cards, which at the time would've been top of the line, and ideal for networking systems aboard ship, but not as good as IEEE 1394a, which is a bit more power efficient.

And of course, Ziggy Stardust would be among the albums included in such a mission.

EDIT:Along with Strauss' Also sprach Zarathustra, and maybe some Kraftwerk, along with Daft Punk (let's face it, Discovery is an awesome album for a space mission.)

[SergeantHeretic]

Nope. It just needs to crunch some numbers, and that's it. It's also why one of the most advanced processors currently in use in space is a radiation hardened derivative of the IBM PowerPC 750, (the RAD750) better known as the PowerPC G3 (since pretty much everything else is massive overkill.) Incidentally, it was first released for sale in 2001 (but could be accelerated with more funding,) so if you wanted to, you could bring a Blueberry iBook G3 with you, helping to make the long annoying voyage a little better, since you now had porn and could bring some music along with you on a trip, while still having fairly up to date style.

And before you ask, no, iPods only came out in October 2001, so they're a no-go, but maybe on later missions, but an Apple MessagePad 2100 (discontinued in 1998 IOTL) could work just as well, and has a couple of PCMCIA type II Slots, so you could expand things fairly easily, including using IEEE 1394-1995 cards, which at the time would've been top of the line, and ideal for networking systems aboard ship, but not as good as IEEE 1394a, which is a bit more power efficient.

And of course, Ziggy Stardust would be among the albums included in such a mission.

EDIT:Along with Strauss' Also sprach Zarathustra, and maybe some Kraftwerk, along with Daft Punk (let's face it, Discovery is an awesome album for a space mission.)
Also "Albeido" by Jean Michelle Jarre.

[grdja83]

Have a miracle of human cooperation and end the war in Vietnam in '68 or '69. Somehow.

Getting HAL is actually cheaper than the space stuff. Its just one breakthrough, once we still don't have today and don't know is it even possible and how. You need two things. Real working and powerful electro-optic circuits. Say that in early '80es due to usual "Omg we can't push silicon further, Moore's law is doomed" and DARPA knowing to look ahead you get a huge government investment push to go beyond silicon and you end up with eletro optics somehow. Maybe add in space based zero gee labs providing some crucial breakthrough. There's the hardware.

For the AI part. Just like the book said. Have Minski and his team succeed major time and get self replicating neural networks that can learn in any situation and avoid all ANN traps IRL ANN systems are limited by.

Its a mathematical leap of genius that may or may not be possible. It could have maybe happened in 1980. and we could IRL happen to wait for it for next 100 years. Mathematics can be deceptive at times. Always remember "I have a truly marvelous proof of this conjecture, sadly the margins of this book are too narrow for me to write it down".

[SergeantHeretic]

Have a miracle of human cooperation and end the war in Vietnam in '68 or '69. Somehow.

Getting HAL is actually cheaper than the space stuff. Its just one breakthrough, once we still don't have today and don't know is it even possible and how. You need two things. Real working and powerful electro-optic circuits. Say that in early '80es due to usual "Omg we can't push silicon further, Moore's law is doomed" and DARPA knowing to look ahead you get a huge government investment push to go beyond silicon and you end up with eletro optics somehow. Maybe add in space based zero gee labs providing some crucial breakthrough. There's the hardware.

For the AI part. Just like the book said. Have Minski and his team succeed major time and get self replicating neural networks that can learn in any situation and avoid all ANN traps IRL ANN systems are limited by.

Its a mathematical leap of genius that may or may not be possible. It could have maybe happened in 1980. and we could IRL happen to wait for it for next 100 years. Mathematics can be deceptive at times. Always remember "I have a truly marvelous proof of this conjecture, sadly the margins of this book are too narrow for me to write it down".
Actually the only thing we need anAI for on the discovery mission is to go nuts for dramatic reasons and kill most of the crew. practically, a comp we had in the 90's could do the job.

[Faralis]

Actually the only thing we need anAI for on the discovery mission is to go nuts for dramatic reasons and kill most of the crew. practically, a comp we had in the 90's could do the job.

But, but ...


Dave, what are you doing?



;)

[NothingNow]

Getting HAL is actually cheaper than the space stuff. Its just one breakthrough, once we still don't have today and don't know is it even possible and how. You need two things. Real working and powerful electro-optic circuits. Say that in early '80es due to usual "Omg we can't push silicon further, Moore's law is doomed" and DARPA knowing to look ahead you get a huge government investment push to go beyond silicon and you end up with eletro optics somehow. Maybe add in space based zero gee labs providing some crucial breakthrough. There's the hardware.

No it isn't. Electro-optical circuts require a hell of a lot more materials science knowledge than we had back in the 1980's, nor was there the fabricating capability to take advantage of such a system available (so it'd literally be technology just sitting on a shelf until the 90's.) Nor would it be fast or powerful enough to support anything, since realistically, the most powerful computer anybody would even consider sending on such a mission is at most in the 2 GFLOPS range, like a Cray-2.

For the AI part. Just like the book said. Have Minski and his team succeed major time and get self replicating neural networks that can learn in any situation and avoid all ANN traps IRL ANN systems are limited by.

Its a mathematical leap of genius that may or may not be possible. It could have maybe happened in 1980. and we could IRL happen to wait for it for next 100 years. Mathematics can be deceptive at times. Always remember "I have a truly marvelous proof of this conjecture, sadly the margins of this book are too narrow for me to write it down".
It's A) a useless piece of hardware for the mission, and B) the theories used in 2001 are very wrong, and rely on a set of assumptions regarding cognition that have no resemblance to what we know actually happens, and just leads down the path of Chinese Rooms and other parlor tricks, not a real AI.

Actually the only thing we need anAI for on the discovery mission is to go nuts for dramatic reasons and kill most of the crew. practically, a comp we had in the 90's could do the job.

Actually, a guy with a slide rule and a sheet of paper could do everything pretty easily, but he weighs more.

[RazeByFire]

They had SSTO Airliners to the Moon, IIRC. Love to see how that could happen by 2001 when we don't have it today.

[Faralis]

They had SSTO Airliners to the Moon, IIRC. Love to see how that could happen by 2001 when we don't have it today.

Nope they had SSTO Airliners to a Space Station orbiting Earth ... the tech today could probably exist if there was a little interest on it.

Also IIRC we only see the last art of the voyage so it could be perfectly a 2 stage launch like the Virgin SpaceShipOne, so it could be already done ...

[M79]

Westmoreland get permission to take the fight to North Vietnam in the days after Tet and we truly bomb them into submission. We support the corrupt SV regime but avoid lots of American dead. The Great Society is abandoned along with the massive wealth transfer in years after while the space program is boosted significantly. Russian rocket scientists collaborate following the death of Korolev and are allowed to pursue a more safe alternative to the N-1, Russia lands on the moon in 1972 and the US responds with a manned mission to Mars but is narrowly beaten by Russia in 1978. Permanent bases on the Moon and Mars are established shortly thereafter along with expeditions to find resources in the Asteroid Belt, the stagflation of the post-Vietnam era OTL is avoided with overall tech actually increased slightly such that 2001 has OTL tech 2004-5. Instead of HAL the mission to Jupiter uses supercomputers which might be difficult for average people to imagine in OTL while the astronauts play Grand Theft Auto III and Castlevania Symphony of the Night et al. for two years each way. Maybe a VASMIR system makes the trip only 8 months each way, or maybe we devise space tech beyond current visions in the process.

[Brady Kj]

Is a 1978 Mars mission plausible, even with abandoning the Great Society?

[NothingNow]

Nope they had SSTO Airliners to a Space Station orbiting Earth ... the tech today could probably exist if there was a little interest on it.

So, something like the Reaction Engines SABRE? Pretty much the only reason no-one developed the pre-cooler before now was that no-one really wanted a cheap SSTO system.

Is a 1978 Mars mission plausible, even with abandoning the Great Society?

Nope. You just have a bunch of dead astronauts in a can, while Great Society cut the poverty rate in half. It's the better investment.

[SergeantHeretic]

Westmoreland get permission to take the fight to North Vietnam in the days after Tet and we truly bomb them into submission. We support the corrupt SV regime but avoid lots of American dead. The Great Society is abandoned along with the massive wealth transfer in years after while the space program is boosted significantly. Russian rocket scientists collaborate following the death of Korolev and are allowed to pursue a more safe alternative to the N-1, Russia lands on the moon in 1972 and the US responds with a manned mission to Mars but is narrowly beaten by Russia in 1978. Permanent bases on the Moon and Mars are established shortly thereafter along with expeditions to find resources in the Asteroid Belt, the stagflation of the post-Vietnam era OTL is avoided with overall tech actually increased slightly such that 2001 has OTL tech 2004-5. Instead of HAL the mission to Jupiter uses supercomputers which might be difficult for average people to imagine in OTL while the astronauts play Grand Theft Auto III and Castlevania Symphony of the Night et al. for two years each way. Maybe a VASMIR system makes the trip only 8 months each way, or maybe we devise space tech beyond current visions in the process.
M79, your post is riddled with so many misaprehensions about the 60's and 70's it is not even funny, let's take them one by one,

First, the war in VIetnam was unwinnable neither Saigon nor Washington had the slightest idea what they were doing or who they were fighting, or even why. In Washington the war was run by whiz kids and ad men who had no idea how to fight a genuine war and in Saigon the South Vietnamese governemnt, was so corrupt and fecklessly stupid that they were practically a collection of Sacha Baren Cohen charecters.

Winning that war, was just not going to happen.

Regarding the "Great society' and the alleged "Massive transfer of wealth" I hate to break it to you, friend but guns cost more than butter, they always have and they always will blaming the social programs for the reccesions and lack of money for NASA while at the same time urdging a massive ramp up of an unwinnable war, betrays a drastic ignorance of the reality that guns cost more than butter, and they always have and always will.

Third, the biggest opponents of space exploration and space development were, are and always will be conservative bean counters who did not and never would understand the future applications of the technology.

We waged an unwinnable war that cost us bilions of dollars per year for ten years at the cost of 56 thousand American lives on behalf of a wildly incompatent kleptocracy that Washington had no clue how to fight, and you have the temerity to blame the lack of a massive space boom on the reletive pittance that was spent on social programs?

Really now, dear fellow.

[SergeantHeretic]

So, something like the Reaction Engines SABRE? Pretty much the only reason no-one developed the pre-cooler before now was that no-one really wanted a cheap SSTO system.



Nope. You just have a bunch of dead astronauts in a can, while Great Society cut the poverty rate in half. It's the better investment.

Indeed it is, education and living standards go up, and this lifts social standards and technological standards and everything else with it.

It's called practicing an enlightened self interest.

Or as the Holy Bible says, "Cast thee loaves upon the waters, and they will return a hundred fold to the shore."

[SergeantHeretic]

No it isn't. Electro-optical circuts require a hell of a lot more materials science knowledge than we had back in the 1980's, nor was there the fabricating capability to take advantage of such a system available (so it'd literally be technology just sitting on a shelf until the 90's.) Nor would it be fast or powerful enough to support anything, since realistically, the most powerful computer anybody would even consider sending on such a mission is at most in the 2 GFLOPS range, like a Cray-2.


It's A) a useless piece of hardware for the mission, and B) the theories used in 2001 are very wrong, and rely on a set of assumptions regarding cognition that have no resemblance to what we know actually happens, and just leads down the path of Chinese Rooms and other parlor tricks, not a real AI.



Actually, a guy with a slide rule and a sheet of paper could do everything pretty easily, but he weighs more.

Yeah, but the 90's era Computer can do deveral hundred different things at once while "Captain Rogers" makes notes about the neat space things.

[NothingNow]

Indeed it is, education and living standards go up, and this lifts social standards and technological standards and everything else with it.

It's called practicing an enlightened self interest.

Or as the Holy Bible says, "Cast thee loaves upon the waters, and they will return a hundred fold to the shore."
well, it's also a massively better investment than sending folks to Mars in a space capsule with radiation shielding that isn't really good enough for a long trip, (but worked well enough for a couple of weeks above the Van Allen Belts.) You'd have to seriously develop a completely different system of radiation shielding to make it work, while remaining light enough to be easily launched on extant rockets, and you'd need to build the whole ship in space, since you'd have to cary several months of supplies with you, and stage supplies along the way as well.

Yeah, but the 90's era Computer can do deveral hundred different things at once while "Captain Rogers" makes notes about the neat space things.

But you don't necessarily want it to hundreds of things at once, and a computer can't be an XO.

[SergeantHeretic]

well, it's also a massively better investment than sending folks to Mars in a space capsule with radiation shielding that isn't really good enough for a long trip, (but worked well enough for a couple of weeks above the Van Allen Belts.) You'd have to seriously develop a completely different system of radiation shielding to make it work, while remaining light enough to be easily launched on extant rockets, and you'd need to build the whole ship in space, since you'd have to cary several months of supplies with you, and stage supplies along the way as well.



But you don't necessarily want it to hundreds of things at once, and a computer can't be an XO.
Both fair points, switch me if they aren't.

As to the second, the comp doesn HAVE to do a hundred things at once, but would it be nice if the capability was there?

Better to have and not need and all, especially since by oh, say, 1995, the capability existed and for a negligable wieght penalty.

[Shevek23]

We don't actually know the Pan Am ship we saw was the sole stage and IIRC the book describes it as a horizontal take-off two-stage craft; the passenger stage rides atop a winged booster stage that returns to the launch site.

It is very remarkable how much of the volume of the spaceplane we see is devoted to passenger space, judging by where the windows are on the exterior. (And that it has windows at all). This suggests to me that ITTL, while on the whole Shuttle design was not as badly derailed as it was OTL, still at some point someone realized how much smaller the Orbiter/spaceplane stage could be if all the propellant were kept in a disposable external tank. Actually since there does seem to be some volume reserved for tankage inside, I suppose they use the main engines for final orbital matching as well as for launching, and for that need a bit of fuel tank inside the ship.

Designs like that were seriously drafted when the movie was released and could probably work with 1970 tech; at most, they'd need some incremental improvement in engines that might take a decade or so, and improvements in thermal protection that might take that same decade--or more, to arrive at a superior solution to OTL. Assuming Dr. Floyd took a ride in a second-generation (or third!) new spaceplane, the first generation Shuttle might have much more closely resembled ours and launched between 1977 and 1982, there might even have been a second generation launched in the early 90's, and the Pan Am version we see might be a brand-new third generation.

Be nice if we are indeed looking at a SSTO, but with such relatively small propellant tank volume available I'd have to conclude they have to use a compact, light and powerful form of fusion!:p And if they can do that, they shouldn't be taking years to get the Discovery out to Jupiter (I presume we are going by movie story and not book story here--Clarke himself took that path when he wrote 2010); Discovery should be a much more compact design that scoots out there at full 1 G acceleration all the way in a few days. Well OK, maybe they can't manage that kind of thrust and performance yet--at least not sustained for many days--but they can surely manage a lower acceleration constant thrust if they have fusion-powered SSTOs, which would still take just weeks or maybe as much as a couple of months, and constant acceleration design implies again a much more compact sort of design.

So, no fusion power yet. At least not for rockets, maybe there are net power generating big ones on the ground. Fission rockets have terrible thrust-to-weight ratios and would still require a lot more propellant volume than we see shown; the sensible conclusion is that the Pan-Am shuttle uses chemical fuel, presumably hydrogen-oxygen, and boosted to orbit on a flyback booster stage of some kind and used an external fuel tank that is either disposable or using advanced tech (mainly really good and lightweight thermal protection) flies back too, retaining only a small amount of hydrogen and oxygen (or conceivably some denser fuel than hydrogen, if the engines are dual-mode, or there are two sets of engines--if the tank is recoverable, perhaps the "main engines" went down for recovery with it) for final orbit shaping and deorbit burn.

Definitely not single-stage then. Very probably all fully reusable though! And clearly horizontal landing, conceivably horizontal take-off, perhaps using airbreathing engines a la Skylon (http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/skylon.html).

Skylon is of course supposed to be SSTO, but clearly the Pan Am spaceplane can't be a Skylon because the British spaceplane is mostly propellant tank; something like a SABRE engine could have served for the booster stage and something like Skylon's thermal protection strategy could conceivably return a second stage fuel tank and rocket engine to Earth.

The biggest hurdles I see to matching what we see on the screen to reality by 2001 are:

1) Right sort of engine for Discovery; the book says (IIRC) they are some sort of nuclear-powered plasma drive. Clearly from the way the ship is laid out, they don't produce a terribly high thrust (or the strung-out design would be completely impossible, the spine would snap); they do however produce a big delta-V relatively quickly (within a day or so, or maybe just hours) then shut down and coast, rather than thrust continuously. I suppose such things might possibly have been evolved if we kept plugging away at NERVA. I'd think that for any big nuclear engine it could be designed either to sustain a low thrust a long time (say, the entire transit time, boosting speed up halfway out then braking the rest of the way) or, by making the engines bigger, exert a higher thrust for a shorter time. In both the movie and the book they did the latter and Discovery is in unthrusted microgravity most of the time, and again clearly the maximum thrust can't approach 1 G or that design would be hopelessly impractical, no matter how important it is to get the crewed sphere far away from the radioactive engines--they'd at least need to use three spines to make it a tripod or something like that. Therefore I conclude that nuclear-plasma or not, the total delta-V available from these babies is not a whole lot more than the minimum required for a Hohmann minimum-energy transfer orbit and the main reason they use the nukes rather than hydrogen-oxygen chemical rockets is that at least the mass ratio is kept down to something reasonable by using a high-ISP advanced nuclear rocket. Such an engine would seem to be attainable without any really wild breakthroughs; clearly it has to be more advanced than your basic thermal nuke rocket a la NERVA.

2) Cold-sleep technology; given decades of devoted research I suppose a breakthrough or two might have been stumbled upon.

3) HAL or equivalent tech. The need for a self-aware true artificial intelligence is of course mainly plot-driven; I forget if they say in words the technology is optical though it looks that way when Dave is deactivating HAL. Clearly if we aren't trying to replicate the plot we could have all the orbital, Lunar, and even Discovery technical eye-candy without anyone knowing how to make a true AI yet. But I wouldn't dismiss the possibility either; if Minsky was barking up the wrong tree I have my own notions as to what sort of approach would result in a true AI. It might happen by accident. The question would be, why would NASA or whatever successor agency is running Discovery's mission want an AI. But if human beings in space on the massive scale shown in the movie make sense, so would a nice reliable AI--if something happened to the human crew out around Jupiter a good AI could react to contingencies much more quickly than light-speed bound mission control at Earth; assuming all goes well the human crew could use a reality check from an AI that is capable of following their imaginative and speculative leaps, understand their purpose, but using massive processing power and hard-wired rigid logic offer a rigorous critique of their half-formed notions and refine them swiftly to a tightly focused plan or more firmly grounded conclusions. I actually think the plot element of the story of HAL going nuts, especially for the reasons and in the manner outlined by Clarke in the book, makes tragic sense; the problem, a theme found to a mild degree in Clarke's work and much more obviously in Kubrick's, is a conflict between fully enlightened reason and the half-logic of a "national/species security" mindset; see Dr Strangelove for this theme explored in exhaustive detail! There's really nothing "wrong" with HAL; it's our institutions that are screwed up. By the nature of the problem, the screwed-up institutions that plan and launch the mission are blind to it and won't recognize the likelihood that a true self-aware AI's interests might diverge from theirs, especially if they persist in treating it as a fully owned piece of equipment rather than as an independent person; if they do that (as they are quite likely to do, since developing an AI, even with the help of serendipitous accidents, is likely to be a very costly process and even a refined product is going to be a pricey piece of machinery) what they are doing is re-inventing slavery. Slave revolts seem quite likely! This is my general suspicion, the trope of the Robot Revolt is in fact a form of Marx's proletarian revolution, bypassing the human working class to fall instead on the new artificial working class.

4) Above all, to achieve what we see on screen in the movie by calendar year 2001, we need the economic and political will to build such a fantastically heavy and elaborate array of human-inhabited structures in Earth-Moon space. What is the motivation?

Perhaps very early space station experiments, in Skylab or conceivably MOL, or maybe an early Soviet Salyut, achieved spectacular and practical results in some valuable zero-G technique, leading to a "space rush" whereby both sides of the Cold War supported a much more massive early effort to get facilities built and manned on a scale practical for production of something or other--computer chips maybe, perhaps medicines. Then, in the course of building and expanding these things yet more serendipitous zero-G discoveries were made, meanwhile various emergencies where humans in orbit saved the day established very firmly the principle that on the whole, humans are cost-effective to maintain in space.

The Moonbase (actually moonbases, we know the Soviets have their own separate one at least) is presumably mainly about supplying materials to the orbital enterprises, but with a heaping side of research science.

Since they are in orbit anyway and perforce going to develop solar power for utility purposes, perhaps yet another branch of the budding space industry is solar power satellites.

All this traffic into space helps justify the costs involved in developing reusable launch systems, at least for human passengers.

Personally I don't see the logic of carrying hardware and supplies up in a man-rated reusable system, and generally I wouldn't expect a massive stream of product coming back down to Earth, so the "Shuttles" would be mainly for carrying people up and down. However if the Orbiter/spaceplanes are being orbited efficiently by reusable lower stages, I suppose the same sort of stages can boost cargo canisters one-way up to orbit; the three-stage system I speculated on--SABRE booster, hydrogen rocket second stage that lobs the spaceplane into an orbit approaching the final orbit, and spaceplane itself--ought to work just as well to send 50-100 tonne payloads to rendezvous with structures like Space Station V.

Actually let me refine the speculation a bit--I'm thinking now a modified Skylon might be it; the OTL Skylon REI hopes to make is strictly SSTO, with the payload to orbit being contained inside the fuselage, which is mostly hydrogen tank. I have to wonder how the heck they can justify the risk to possible human passengers; I've read their arguments that at least Skylon as they design it is superior to the STS in terms of risk management. But survivable abort modes is one of the OTL STS system's glaring inadequacies--if we aren't grading on a curve of foolhardiness but soberly developing a reasonably safe and survivable STS, perhaps a Skylon approach is improved by sticking a spaceplane like the Pan Am one we see on top of the fuselage instead of buried inside it. This hurts the aerodynamics but simplifies the interior design of the fuselage. Manned payloads go piggyback in that spaceplane, which is separable from the Skylon-like main orbital booster. If something goes wrong that makes an abort to full spacecraft emergency landing risky or impossible, the spaceplane blows off the main craft using high-acceleration emergency rockets analogous to the Mercury/Apollo escape towers--more like the Dragon system, built in to the spaceplane itself and possibly used at lower acceleration and longer duration burns for routine mission purposes too. The spaceplane can clearly handle reentry from full orbital speed and therefore presumably stabilize and come under control after emergency separation at any time during the ascent; instead of riding back down to Earth inside the Skylon, it routinely separates once the Skylon-like booster has achieved a transfer orbit that lobs it to reach the desired orbital height--the spaceplane then has to match orbit on internal fuel, and retain a reserve for maneuvering plus deorbit burn. There is no backup for surviving reentry; presumably everyone is very confident its thermal protection and other integrity will not fail.

In this scenario, the Skylon-like booster itself nearly but does not quite achieve a stable orbit; it is in an elliptical orbit that is nearly up to the destination orbit at apogee, and somewhere in the upper atmosphere at perigee. It orbits most of the way around the Earth and if it were not for Earth's rotation would reenter on an approach to its launch site, coming around the Earth from the other side. Since Earth will rotate some 20-23 degrees eastward while it is looping around, and its approach to perigee will put it in air that seriously affects the craft moving at orbital speeds at a considerable distance back from perigee, it needs to have major crossrange to fly itself all the way back to the launch site. But being empty of both propellant and payload, it is now quite light and either could reasonably fly itself on light hydrogen-fueled thrust in airbreathing supersonic mode all the way back, or land as an empty glider at some field to the west and refuel with just a small amount of hydrogen there to take off and fly itself back that way. Or if operations with these things are on a massive enough scale, and the geography of launch sites permitting, there might always be ships returning from launches from sites to the east that can be used at the more westerly landing site for another launch, and the booster craft cycle around the world drifting westward like that.

So in this case, a cargo rather than manned launch would involve substituting for the space plane a cargo carrier, which is little more than a framework--no thermal protection needed unless a fairly large amount of stuff needs to be returned to Earth, which would be seldom--and a small rocket with a small amount of propellant just for final orbital maneuvers. In this way masses considerably greater than a Shuttle could place in orbit could be sent up, and the same launcher, reusable with horizontal take-off and landing, also carries manned reusable spaceplanes into orbit. For much more massive payloads bigger and more specialized systems would be required but given the high traffic we see into orbit in the movie, presumably the Skylon-like thing I've described here gets heavy use and optimal economic reductions in cost per payload.

Meanwhile space-based technical advances and very good management in the Soviet Union helps avoid the 1980s tailspin of the Soviet bloc; the "space race" continuing as an elaboration of capabilities that yield actual profit rather than a series of costly stunts helps to validate the Soviet system, especially if some of the key breakthroughs that form the POD happened in the Soviet program. So the USSR is still around in 2001 and indeed 2010 and beyond. This helps stabilize the Western bloc too; Americans go on bankrolling big NASA and Air Force space project budgets, private industry ponies up more and more too because of proven opportunities to make profits in orbit. The
EEC nations and Japan get roped in under the American umbrella more or less due to their security arrangements with the USA and Americans being more flexible and expansive given the foreseeable benefits of expansion in space.

It all hinges on proving there is something immediately valuable and highly profitable that can best be done by standing the immense cost of establishing a permanent human presence in orbital space--it can't be done on Earth, nor by robots launched from Earth. Given such an industrial lure, everything else follows except the specific technologies discussed for Discovery--including to be sure the crazy AI!:p

[SergeantHeretic]

Shevak, Buddy, where ya been man? I missed ya.

[Maxwell Edison II]

It all hinges on proving there is something immediately valuable and highly profitable that can best be done by standing the immense cost of establishing a permanent human presence in orbital space--it can't be done on Earth, nor by robots launched from Earth. Given such an industrial lure, everything else follows except the specific technologies discussed for Discovery--including to be sure the crazy AI!:p

Earlier breakthrough in photovoltaics, a worse energy crisis caused by OPEC or several OPEC countries going Iran?

[SergeantHeretic]

Earlier breakthrough in photovoltaics, a worse energy crisis caused by OPEC or several OPEC countries going Iran?
We have much more oil than anyone thinks we do in fact there are many domestic oil wells that have been deliberatly banked.

The strategic engery plan is to cap and save domestic oil and deliberatly us Middle East oil until it's gone, effectively leaving the Arabian dictatorships with NO leverage at all when their stores are exausted.

We are already developing Alt Energy and industrial sources for when our oil runs out in the next two centuries, but we want the Middle Eastern hostile power bloc to be left with nothing long before then.

[Shevek23]

While I'm not sure it's reasonable to say we "have more oil than we know what to do with"--surely we are at least depleting the most easily found and most easily mined stuff and a lot of the "surplus" petroleum is known but hard hence expensive to mine, whereas if Third World people are going to belatedly get their share of a First World lifestyle the demand will skyrocket, meanwhile there are grave environmental costs and consequences to consider--I share the Sarge's doubt an energy "crisis," however hyped at the time, can explain a positive like a massive investment in space. For instance, better photovoltaics alone can probably be developed much more cost-effectively here on the ground than in orbit. Sure, the quality of orbital solar power is better-brighter light, easier to keep the panels aimed at the Sun, shorter periods of darkness; sure the costs and losses involved in beaming the power to ground stations have to set against the costs and losses involved in using the weaker and more sporadic surface light. Still, the costs of boosting up panels and structural stuff into orbit along with riggers and maintenance crews is going to be great compared to such costs for ground installations; we might ned three or more times the number of panels on the ground, plus a bunch of costly auxiliary stuff like means of power storage not needed with an orbital installation. But that multiplied cost would probably be low still, compared to launching a smaller amount.

No, we need a more positive reason. Some process that happens in microgravity, that benefits from having people handy to adjust and fix things rather than robots, and pays off big. Crystals for industry, medicines, stuff like that. One might serve to keep NASA (and Soviet!) budgets for manned orbital space development high, then others might later be found to lock the sector in as a permanent part of the industrial economy, leading to more development of cheaper launch methods, fixed orbital installations that get upgraded and develop the arts of human survival and effective operations in space.

Given that, I do think the notion of selling orbital solar power would appeal more as much of the infrastructural costs are already covered; the SPSs piggyback on other programs, and help lower their marginal costs too. Of course having orbital manned complexes on a big scale will cause development of photovoltaics to redouble--still while some space-based solar power will be sold I expect most of the extra power capacity will come from ground installations.

It might on the whole be a less tense world than ours, if the Soviets discover and develop some of this stuff first and use the margin of higher productivity they gain to leverage both higher standards of living in their bloc and more efficient methods generally; meanwhile the West might belatedly catch up then forge ahead in space leading to a richer world; if we have the wisdom to let a lot of that rising wealth trickle down to the Third World the upshot might be greater stability and tolerance. A kinder, gentler, richer, much more secure and stable Soviet bloc, China somewhat better off due to spinoff technology like good cheap solar panels and perhaps fusion power plants, the Third World more stable and with fewer bloodbaths, genocides and famines leading to more tolerance and less violence in politics.

But that's my optimism speaking! Anyway on one hand the Heywood Floyd flight scenario seemed to show a USA with more in common with 1960s techno-optimism and a rather ritualized East/West split; on the other there are undertones of potential serious crisis. Given how scary my own lifetime has been (I was born in 1965) I suppose it could be a lot more relaxed than our world and still unnervingly tense at times.

[Asnys]

No, we need a more positive reason. Some process that happens in microgravity, that benefits from having people handy to adjust and fix things rather than robots, and pays off big. Crystals for industry, medicines, stuff like that. One might serve to keep NASA (and Soviet!) budgets for manned orbital space development high, then others might later be found to lock the sector in as a permanent part of the industrial economy, leading to more development of cheaper launch methods, fixed orbital installations that get upgraded and develop the arts of human survival and effective operations in space.

It's been a long time since I took a look at this setting, but wasn't the explanation in the books the development of orbital nuclear weapons stations?

On a more positive note, I've read some papers suggesting immiscible alloys might be profitable, and could only be manufactured in freefall. I haven't had a chance to do much research on the subject yet, so perhaps this has already been investigated and proven fruitless. But a breakthrough in immiscible alloys could kill two birds with one stone, giving both a reason to go to space and better materials to build the spaceships to take you there.

[Shevek23]

Shevak, Buddy, where ya been man? I missed ya.

I've been around, but some days I just preferred to actually go to sleep for more than a couple hours rather than get entangled in stuff here!:o

I missed you too; got any plans for Planet Earth ISOTed to the 50's Sci-Fi system?

It's been a long time since I took a look at this setting, but wasn't the explanation in the books the development of orbital nuclear weapons stations?

On a more positive note, I've read some papers suggesting immiscible alloys might be profitable, and could only be manufactured in freefall. I haven't had a chance to do much research on the subject yet, so perhaps this has already been investigated and proven fruitless. But a breakthrough in immiscible alloys could kill two birds with one stone, giving both a reason to go to space and better materials to build the spaceships to take you there.

I don't remember any talk of space weapons stations in Clarke's book (maybe more of it in 2010, though that came out before SDI made the subject topical again). But I first read 2001 when I was in third grade and as a military, Air Force in fact, brat I'd have taken the notion that of course we'd develop space military capabilities for granted, not being up on stuff like treaties we'd already adopted before 1973. Then rereading it later I'd probably gloss over that. Floyd and the Russians he meets on Space Station V get along well enough in the first book and the Soviets are transiting through an American, or at any rate clearly Western and US-dominated station, so in 2001 (the year) at any rate detente is holding, still or perhaps again, In Space!!! Also Dr. Floyd knows at least some of these Russians from previous meetings and even has hung out with them in Odessa for some time, so US/Soviet relations have been tolerably good a lot of the time. The book 2010 had very little if any of that stuff about another very tense period with the world on the knife edge of WWIII which permeated the movie; in the book everyone was more worried about the Chinese than anyone else.

None of this proves there wasn't an interim of tension, chest-pounding, and an orbital arms race.

But I don't see how such an arms race would lead to all this civil infrastructure. It might but unless something positive, like zero-G fabrication revolutionizing industry and creating a lot of wealth to spread around, happened first or at least concurrently, I am not sure the USA even could afford the scale of expense necessary to establish the foundations just as a military boondoggle. Of course we are way more willing to spend money on that than civil space exploration and you could tell better than me just how much extravagant stuff we might have with say 1/10 of the net military expenditures of OTL from 1967 to say 1992. But the Soviets would have to at least appear to be keeping up and without something breaking very well for them in their civil economy and civil society in general, such an effort would probably have led to an earlier and even messier collapse than OTL.

Now I suppose if civil/industrial and scientific human infrastructure were being built up in space during the 1970s and '80s, our hawks would have gotten nervous if we didn't have some means of defending them; a certain expansion of dubious space weapons capability might have tagged along in the slipstream quite naturally and so both sides might have built up quite an arsenal on the side; probably that would lead to flashpoints and controversy. But it would also bring DoD and the Soviet military bureaucracy firmly in on the infrastructure and thus solidified political support on both sides for sustaining, and growing, the whole venture.

If the Johnson, then Nixon, administrations had caved in a bit more to the military aerospace lobbies in the later 60s, that might have led to the Air Force going ahead with MOL, and the fig leaf of a scientific aspect to the mission might have led to early discoveries of useful money-making stuff beyond satellite applications. Exotic alloys seem exactly the kind of thing that might do it. I've already indicated why it would be better perhaps if it was the Soviets that got there first but no harm in Americans doing something along those lines first, putting it on the back burner, then the Soviets doing a lot more of it in a mixed stunt/panicked surge of effort, then Americans coming back with a big sustained effort involving serious money.

As someone else suggested, it sure would have been nice to avoid the Vietnam quagmire. But I fear that wasn't in the cards. If by some chance the US foreign policy establishment had backed out of propping up South Vietnam with some graceful excuse (which I think means the inevitable fall of Saigon and incorporation of the South into the North) there was plenty of other trouble stirring from our point of view to get stuck in like Bre'r Rabbit to the Tar Baby. Cuba for instance, if JFK weren't already preoccupied with Southeast Asia could we have kept ourselves from even more efforts to dislodge Castro? Maybe we could after the Cuban Missile Crisis! There were lots of other messes all around the world though and if we dodged the Vietnam bullet there'd be little to check our machinery from getting us in over our eyebrows somewhere else, in the Middle East or Africa or Latin America--flashpoints everywhere. If South Vietnam did fall to Hanoi, we'd have more to prove.

Might as well stick with the devil we know; any of those alternative quagmires could just as easily lead to WWIII; at least we know how the two superpowers kept that outcome at arm's length OTL and we don't have to roll the dice again.

I doubt space industry could have developed fast or early enough to offset the stagflation crisis of the earlier 1970s, nor prevent the OPEC oil shock. But it might be just in time to make the recovery of the later 1970s more buoyant and sustained and widespread, perhaps checking the rate of inflation and/or the growth rate of the real economy might make inflation seem less scary, so the 1980s could involve both a stronger Western economy and less ideological shakeups. We might still get the same pattern of changes in mood and leadership because the turn to the right characteristic of the West (at least the Anglosphere, in Britain and the USA) was not solely driven by the economic malaises of the 1970s. Anyway even if politics ebbs and flows much as OTL I'd expect serious divergences of general world conditions from OTL around the 1980s.

(If someone wanted a really tough version of this challenge--let them try to get the world of Gerry Anderson's UFO show, with the covert and overt cover capabilities of SHADO, by 1980! I don't think even a grave threat of alien invasion could get any of that stuff going that massively that soon! If that is Anderson's zany tech could be made to work at all!:p)

[SergeantHeretic]

Shevak, I DO have plans to continue that timeline, but I haverestarted it as a story thread starting from January firts 2012/1954.

The title is, "Wierd tales and strange times."

[M79]

M79, your post is riddled with so many misaprehensions about the 60's and 70's it is not even funny, let's take them one by one,

By all means.

First, the war in VIetnam was unwinnable neither Saigon nor Washington had the slightest idea what they were doing or who they were fighting, or even why. In Washington the war was run by whiz kids and ad men who had no idea how to fight a genuine war and in Saigon the South Vietnamese government, was so corrupt and fecklessly stupid that they were practically a collection of Sacha Baren Cohen charecters.

Winning that war, was just not going to happen.

Post-Tet the North Vietnamese forces are having to replace the Viet Cong en masse, and with Cronkite making commentary about negotiation instead of victory it costs the administration middle America. McNamera left and Clifford came in, Westmoreland was replaced by Abrams soon after, negotiations began and the war started to slowly wind down. Keeping South Vietnam alive as an existant state is possible, and that it wnat I mean by victory in this case.

Regarding the "Great society' and the alleged "Massive transfer of wealth" I hate to break it to you, friend but guns cost more than butter, they always have and they always will blaming the social programs for the reccesions and lack of money for NASA while at the same time urdging a massive ramp up of an unwinnable war, betrays a drastic ignorance of the reality that guns cost more than butter, and they always have and always will.

Repeating phrases ad nauseum does not make them true. Look up the federal budget and tell us how much goes into defense versus medicare and medicaid combined.

Medicare was started with the best of intentions but has become a system plagued with cost overruns, inefficiencies, and which has become the baseline for much of the nation's healthcare. NEA endowments have come under scrutiny for providing federal dollars for things whose interpretation as...art...is controversial at best in some cases. Public Broadcasting has become concerning as taxpayer money is provided to NPR which seems to be rather partisan at some instances.

Not all facets of the Great Society were bad, but the "war on poverty" was a fiscal nightmare that seems to have provided asphalt for the highway to somewhere very warm.

Third, the biggest opponents of space exploration and space development were, are and always will be conservative bean counters who did not and never would understand the future applications of the technology.

It might also be because we were facing a crunch of a very expensive war in Southeast Asia combined with launching massive federal programs aimed at trying to provide aid to the poor of the US. Unfortunately resources were limited then just as they are limited now, without a very good reason to keep pushing the envelope in space we're not likely to continue doing so. Russia landing on the Moon would be a good incentive.

We waged an unwinnable war that cost us bilions of dollars per year for ten years at the cost of 56 thousand American lives on behalf of a wildly incompatent kleptocracy that Washington had no clue how to fight, and you have the temerity to blame the lack of a massive space boom on the reletive pittance that was spent on social programs?

One program might have a "pittance" spent on it, but in total it was not as inexpensive as you suggest. The deficit jumped from less than $4 billion in 1966 to over $23 billion by 1972. Social spending was 39% of public spending in 1965 ($75 billion), by 1972 it was about $185 billion or over 46% of public spending dollars. NASA's budget in 1965 was just under $5.1 billion (about 4.3% of public spending) and in 1972 was $3.42 billion (about 1.5% of the budget). One of the problems our government seems to have is what it promises versus what it delivers, especially when it tries to promise lofty things on tight budgets.

[SergeantHeretic]

M79, with all due respect you are incorrect regarding the Vietnam conflict.

I shall elaborate.

Starting in 1962 the United States initiated military assistance to a fundementally incompatent massivly corrupt and absurdly stupid Saigon Regime.

The enemy knew the ground they fought on, we did not. The enemy knew what they wanted to acchieve i nthe war. We did not. The enemy knew how to fight an assymetrical war. We did not. The enemy knew how to take stock and recover strategically from a chain of tactical defeats. We did not.

I am sorry, but those are facts.

In that war we won many tactical victories, but did not, could not win the war, because we did not have a strategy to win the war. ALl through the progress of the war we faced a determined committed enemy that knew what they wanted and had a very good strategic plan on how to get it.

We did'nt have any such thing.

For as long as we continued a major full scale war on behalf of Saigon, Saigon could survive, howver the proplem is that Saigon was prepared to fight to the last G.I. and the last B-52.

Blaming Walter Kronkite for the American Defeat in Vietnam is like claiming trees moving makes the wind blow.

It is like claim WIlliam Randolph Hearst started the SPanish American war.

O.K.?

Do you understand?

Saigon was absolutly positive that they simply would not have to wage their own war and so they didn't. After all, why should they when it's "Mighty Whitey" to the rescue?

This was compounded by Washington's total absence of a war plan for the duration of the war.

You, good sir, are suffering from the cultural myth of "Doltchstoss" The popular and incorrect myth that AMerica was "Stabbed in the back" by the media and the domestic political dissidents.

That cultural conciet is simply not correct.

It never was.

In fact, much of Middle AMerica's dissatisfation was rooted in the revalation in 1968 that the Pentagon did not HAVE a strategic plan for victory in the Vietnam war.

Given that fact, it doesn't matter how much military force is applied, if those applying that force demonstrably do not have any idea what they were doing, or what they wanted to acchieve.

SUpporting the Saigon regime commits the United States to an effectivly open ended war that the North Vietnamese are fully prepared to fight for years, or even decades if that is what it takes.

The military ramp up from 1966-72 and the total cost of the war is why the deficit jumped so drastically, combined with the SPace program and the Great SOciety."

You speak of "Government inefficiency" but you seem unwilling to credit that same government incompatence in regard to the Vietnam conflict.

That, good sir, is just bizarre.

The actual Soldiers, Sailors, Marines and Aircrew in Vietnam were fighting a war, that was why they thought they were there.

The whiz kids and ad men and political hucksters in Washingon from 1962 to 1972 didn't have the slightest idea what they were doing and that fact was made plain to middle AMerica by the release of the Pentagon papers and the reporting of the tet offensive by Mr. Kronkite.

Yes, we destroyed the Viet cong, but take note of the reality that the North VIetnamese were fully prepared for that contingency and moved into a full scale offensive war against us.

During that time Washington continued to behave as if we were fighting "Yellow cavemen in black pyjamas"

An insulting demeaning and wildly incorrect estimation of our enemy.

We never took the North VIetnamese seriously as an enemy and that is only ONE of the many strategic blunders we made in that war.

Period.

[SergeantHeretic]

If you want to have a "2001:ASO" level of tech BY A.D. 2001 the answer is simplicy itself.

Take the budgets for the War in Vietnam and the NASA effort to reach the moon and reverse them.

That's all you really have to do.

Let Saigon sink or swim.

Make it clear to them that while we ARE willing to help them we will NOT serve as the defacto South Vietnamese Military.

If we do that, Saigon will probably fall and the Communist North wins much Earlier, but we spent tens of thousans of lives and billions of dollars trying to save Saigon and the North won anyway, so, i nthe end nothing will be lost and quite a bit gained.

[NothingNow]

If we do that, Saigon will probably fall and the Communist North wins much Earlier, but we spent tens of thousans of lives and billions of dollars trying to save Saigon and the North won anyway, so, i nthe end nothing will be lost and quite a bit gained.

And this is the system that put man on the Moon and Mars is a hella better propaganda than "If you try anything else, we'll do you like Allende got done."

[SergeantHeretic]

And this is the system that put man on the Moon and Mars is a hella better propaganda than "If you try anything else, we'll do you like Allende got done."
Indeed, Going to the moon was one hell of a coup for us. scientifically politically and socially.

Crank that up to eleven with a landing on mars in the 80's or 90's and the U.S> becomes EPIC WIN!

[Dathi THorfinnsson]

Indeed, Going to the moon was one hell of a coup for us. scientifically politically and socially.

Crank that up to eleven with a landing on mars in the 80's or 90's and the U.S> becomes EPIC WIN!

No, actually. A huge propaganda win? Sure. Huge inspiration for those of us who were kids at the time? Sure.

Yes, there were minor science results, wed have gotten more for less money wwith uncrewed robots, à la lunokhod.

What apollo did, in retrospect, was waste billions of dollars on a dead end, AND make nasa think they were divinely ordained to have massive budgets, and success in bleeding edge tech with only minor fixes.

A mission to mars wwould likely have destroyed the us space program...

[Shevek23]

It comes down to the question, is there a good reason to go into space or isn't there?

For me, it's an emotional imperative. I grew up just thinking it was inevitable and good we'd move into space. I grew up on or near Air Force bases with all sorts of nifty tech; I saw 2001 when I was 4 or so and it impressed the heck out of me; Apollo was happening at the time, and later while living in Florida I went to Cape Canaveral in the company of my Dad's uncle who was working for Hughes in their space division at the time; he pointed out the Skylab on its launcher. I watched UFO in syndication and it just seemed right and plausible we'd have a Moonbase (and pink sports cars, and everyone would wear turtlenecks and women would have metallic purple hair, at least those who worked on the Moon would) before I got to college. We were doing it, great things would come of it, get on board!

But rationally speaking, I can't name one thing that humanity needs out of space travel, certainly not manned space travel with all its extra costs and risks. I think we should do it anyway, just because. But I can't answer someone who says, "this costs money, I don't see why we should, tell me why we ought to!"

If we experiment around up there enough, I think it's a good bet we will find something useful to obtain or make up there. If we explore enough, I daresay we'll find something. Certainly space exploration--especially the unmanned probes, which are far more cost-effective despite the likelihood something will go wrong that a guy with a wrench could fix in 10 minutes--yields great dividends in scientific data. The system probes we've launched have completely transformed our knowledge about how our solar system formed, revealed fascinating things it contains--very greatly enhanced human knowledge.

Again though the question arises--who cares? I care, the scientists care, and pragmatically speaking someday we are going to be awfully glad we knew this or that sooner rather than later or never. By then, though, we'd take the knowledge for granted. Someone has to explain to skeptics just what we gain in terms they understand, or else bypass these skeptics and get the resources they need from someone who is persuaded.

I gave the positive scenario--by good fortune we find something early that makes it clearly worthwhile to a sufficient majority of decision-makers, and it bootstraps from there.

Without that the old standby seems to be "defense." The trouble with tapping that vein of largesse is, either sooner or later it becomes apparent the elaborate investment isn't really necessary and the momentum runs out, or worse, the weapons get used. We've been pretty good about making huge arsenals of weapons that we don't get around to actually using, but once they exist the temptation to justify them by finding a real use for them is always there. In any case, if we don't stumble upon something that makes the space effort economically self-sustaining--and that's a tall tall order considering the basic difficulty of launching massive amounts of stuff into orbit and beyond, and then keeping human beings alive in a radiation-soaked vacuum and through various perilous passages--launches atop huge stocks of high explosive, aerocaptures at high hypersonic speeds that could easily incinerate most materials we have handy. It's pricy as hell. It would get cheaper per ton launched if we did a whole lot of it but then the total bill would be high--as some politician in Washington said, "A billion here and a billion there and soon you're talking real money!:p"

The payoff has to be very substantial. That's why I follow ASB timelines where there's alien tech left littering the System. (We don't know what the value of such stuff would be if we started finding signs of it tomorrow OTL; in the timeline I'm following it happens to already be paying off.)

More predictable stuff like zero-G alloys, crystals, biochemical processes and so on--it seems likely we can either achieve acceptable results on Earth, or adequately get the job done with robots. And we can live without it because we have hitherto, and get around to it when it seems cost-effective, which is manaña.

Hopefully the scientific and competitive impulses will continue to capture some crumbs of largesse; hopefully we can muddle through our problems on Earth well enough so such largesse is available. I stubbornly hope we keep trudging forward and am disappointed at our apparently slowing snail's pace.

I could nitpick at SergeantHeretic a bit but by and large I think she's got it about 'Nam, as I already said--and added that unfortunately, given the nature of US society in the Cold War and almost certainly any conceivable world power in a similar situation, a large amount will be pissed away in wars of dubious purpose and morals, by the nature of what makes a nation a great power. Great Powers get that way by messing around and manipulating things to their advantage which makes them enemies. Some are the kind of enemies one is proud to have, like say the Nazis or the Japanese militarists, others are people doing pretty much what we'd like to think we'd be brave enough to do if the tables were turned.

There's no way we could have reversed the DoD and NASA budgets; even I am willing to admit there's a certain minimum needed for adequate national defense--way lower than what we spent of course, but higher than NASA's peak budget by far.

And given the nature of American society and possibly any workable society, if something as primally imperative as "defense" is not invoked, there's a good chance that that same wealth wasted on dubious projects around the world would not be available for any public purpose, and if it was it wouldn't be for something as airy-fairy as space exploration for the hell of it. The fact is, both the US and Soviet space efforts were intertwined with national defense efforts. Had there been no effort on either side to develop ICBMs for instance the amount necessary to develop decent space launch rockets would have to stand alone, no borrowing rockets and approaches and facilities already paid for under the military rubric. The total cost to society would of course be lower, but if we had to pay for the whole thing under the category of "NASA" that agency's costs would stand out all the more, being considerably greater. On those terms, as a standalone project without supporters counting on its spinoffs to in turn feed back on empowering national defense, I doubt we or even the Kremlin could have justified the cost. It would be a matter for that distant tomorrow when everything is so much cheaper and easier--a tomorrow that would be more delayed, if it ever could come at all, without stuff like weather satellites and comsats and the like!

It's not hard for me to believe zero G is going to turn out to be good for something, something very valuable. So I hope we don't dismiss the possibility of a bootstrapped space rush I've outlined as simply ASB. But if we knew what it was we'd be having the rush right now, or started it before some people on this board were born. Until we stumble upon it though, I fear space, especially manned space, will always be a marginal project. Even with the occasional space arms race or two, unless these lead us to a catastrophe that will put an end to technological civilization for the foreseeable future.:(

[SergeantHeretic]

Shevak, I can tell you why I am a far out space nut.

I firmly believe, that the societies that make the prudent and responsible choice to forego space exploration, will have their ruins studied and pored over by the space faring civilisations that made the irresponsible imprudent desicision to go int ospace in a big way.

"Cast thee loaves upon the water, and they will return a hundred fold to the shore."

[wietze]

1) Right sort of engine for Discovery; the book says (IIRC) they are some sort of nuclear-powered plasma drive. Clearly from the way the ship is laid out, they don't produce a terribly high thrust (or the strung-out design would be completely impossible, the spine would snap); they do however produce a big delta-V relatively quickly (within a day or so, or maybe just hours) then shut down and coast, rather than thrust continuously. I suppose such things might possibly have been evolved if we kept plugging away at NERVA. I'd think that for any big nuclear engine it could be designed either to sustain a low thrust a long time (say, the entire transit time, boosting speed up halfway out then braking the rest of the way) or, by making the engines bigger, exert a higher thrust for a shorter time. In both the movie and the book they did the latter and Discovery is in unthrusted microgravity most of the time, and again clearly the maximum thrust can't approach 1 G or that design would be hopelessly impractical, no matter how important it is to get the crewed sphere far away from the radioactive engines--they'd at least need to use three spines to make it a tripod or something like that. Therefore I conclude that nuclear-plasma or not, the total delta-V available from these babies is not a whole lot more than the minimum required for a Hohmann minimum-energy transfer orbit and the main reason they use the nukes rather than hydrogen-oxygen chemical rockets is that at least the mass ratio is kept down to something reasonable by using a high-ISP advanced nuclear rocket. Such an engine would seem to be attainable without any really wild breakthroughs; clearly it has to be more advanced than your basic thermal nuke rocket a la NERVA.

All plasma drives are electric, and think early enough start of development would have helped getting at that point. Nuclear power in this is simply the easiest way to generate enough electric power for the plasma drives to work.
As for the spine, i would have thought the spine to be bulkier, as as a plasma/ion drive can for example use magnetic acceleration (like a linear accelerator), and the full length of the spine could have been used to accelerate the plasma/ions, with only the reactor been at the end (for safety reasons). Of course if they have superconducting coils it would not have to be that bulky.

As for your comment about exchanging Nasa's & vietnam war budget is totally right sergeantheretic.

[SergeantHeretic]

[QUOTE
As for your comment about exchanging Nasa's & vietnam war budget is totally right sergeantheretic.[/QUOTE]

My whole thing is this,

If SOuth Vietnam is going to be saved at all, then Saigon has to save it.

We can give them some military assistance and matriale support, but if they cannot survive without the United States basically waging their war FOR them virually in toto, then their defense is a hopeless effort and should be abandoned.

"If little Jimmy never learns to do his own homework and studying at school then you'll be doing little Jimmy's work for him until he's FORTY!"

[Dan Reilly The Great]

If you are willing to accept a TL that bears some strong resemblance to 2001 with some differences below the surface, it is very doable.

If you bump computer tech up 10 to 15 years, you could get a computer that can do the same job as HAL meanwhile it has strong superficial resemblances. I mean you could build a "HAL simulator" today with off the shelf home computer parts and some decent programming ability. Program it with a voice style interface like SIRI, but with better voice recognition along with more processing power than you get with a smartphone and you could easily get a very similar setup to what they had in 2001.



With a POD that butterflies away all the treaties that preclude the usage of nuclear weapons in space and suddenly you can cheaply and easily start zooming around the solar system in ORION style spacecraft. Maybe if you kill off the shuttle before it goes beyond the design stage, then have NASA go with a much more affordable disposable launch system(perhaps a man rated 'bus' and a larger but similarly cheaper freight launch system), you could have NASA build a handful of simple but rugged nuclear bomb propelled spacecraft that can make regular runs to both the moon and Mars. Maybe even throw in a Sea Dragon style launcher which allows you to start putting massive payloads into orbit really cheaply, and if you are looking to build ultra durable ORION style ships, a seadragon becomes a much more viable kind of booster as you actually need the kind of lift capacity it provides.

Then have materials sciences get a bit of a leg-up and then maybe by the early nineties you've got mass drivers tossing payloads into orbit for even cheaper. If you can get a man-rated version, perhaps it can be used to launch your pan-am SSTO space plane too.


The only thing that is iffy is the cryogenic hibernation that you see in the movie.


Question, if you can establish a large enough presence on the moon, would it be cheaper to mine all the raw materials then manufacture all the components of a space station on the moon, then launch it into orbit from there? Lower gravity does make orbital launches cheaper, but I dunno if it would be worth it.

[M79]

Starting in 1962 the United States initiated military assistance to a fundementally incompatent massivly corrupt and absurdly stupid Saigon Regime.


We had people on the ground and in operations in 1961, where does 1962 come from?


The enemy knew the ground they fought on, we did not. The enemy knew what they wanted to acchieve i nthe war. We did not. The enemy knew how to fight an assymetrical war. We did not. The enemy knew how to take stock and recover strategically from a chain of tactical defeats. We did not.


We wanted to preserve South Vietnam, the question was how far do we go and what else would we need to do from there. Also we had knowledge of how to fight irregular wars before Vietnam, go to your local military surplus store and you might even be able to pick up a copy of the Army handbook on the topic from about 1965.


In that war we won many tactical victories, but did not, could not win the war, because we did not have a strategy to win the war. ALl through the progress of the war we faced a determined committed enemy that knew what they wanted and had a very good strategic plan on how to get it.


They lost a lot of people and most of their original army in the South trying to do it, we broke most of their forces during/after Tet and it too them a great deal of time to replace them all.


For as long as we continued a major full scale war on behalf of Saigon, Saigon could survive, howver the proplem is that Saigon was prepared to fight to the last G.I. and the last B-52.


Which is why they were placing hundreds of thousands of troops in arms, your insulting omission of their efforts notwithstanding.


Blaming Walter Kronkite for the American Defeat in Vietnam is like claiming trees moving makes the wind blow.


His reports led to shift of American popular opinion away from the war and contributed to Johnson not seeking nomination in 1968. Nixon takes over and begins a detente process, breaking deadlock in negotiations with North Vietnam after it appears detante policies could lead to Hanoi potentially having to accept a forced peace instead of "negotiating" for more concessions before talking about a settlement.


Saigon was absolutly positive that they simply would not have to wage their own war and so they didn't. After all, why should they when it's "Mighty Whitey" to the rescue?


They did wage their own war, they were fighting for their existance and they knew the score. Theiu was a dictatorial jerk but that does not make him an idiot, his people preferred him to Communist rule from the looks of things and there were South Vietnamese fighting in the war too.


In fact, much of Middle AMerica's dissatisfation was rooted in the revalation in 1968 that the Pentagon did not HAVE a strategic plan for victory in the Vietnam war.


Again, Cronkite played a role in the American shift of public opinion in 1968 as well.


Given that fact, it doesn't matter how much military force is applied, if those applying that force demonstrably do not have any idea what they were doing, or what they wanted to acchieve.


The military had ideas about how far they wanted to go but the folks in DC had other ideas. Let generals run the war and let DC make the policy, it works out better.


The military ramp up from 1966-72 and the total cost of the war is why the deficit jumped so drastically, combined with the SPace program and the Great SOciety."


Space funding went down as a total number and a percentage over that time frame while Great Society funding went up on both counts. Vietname was a costly war in human and monetary costs but not the only factor in the deficit at the time.


You speak of "Government inefficiency" but you seem unwilling to credit that same government incompatence in regard to the Vietnam conflict.


Are you sure about that? Read the posts I've put up...


The whiz kids and ad men and political hucksters in Washingon from 1962 to 1972 didn't have the slightest idea what they were doing and that fact was made plain to middle AMerica by the release of the Pentagon papers and the reporting of the tet offensive by Mr. Kronkite.


So you are saying Cronkite did play a significant role in shifting public opinion away from Vietnam?


Yes, we destroyed the Viet cong, but take note of the reality that the North VIetnamese were fully prepared for that contingency and moved into a full scale offensive war against us.


We hit the VC very hard in the months following Tet and wiped out what, half of the Viet cong? The NVA had to replace a lot of the fallen troops and it took them a significant amount of time to rebuild.


We never took the North VIetnamese seriously as an enemy and that is only ONE of the many strategic blunders we made in that war.



Is it that we did not take them seriously or that we underestimated their reserves based on niave optimism?

[M79]

If you want to have a "2001:ASO" level of tech BY A.D. 2001 the answer is simplicy itself.

Take the budgets for the War in Vietnam and the NASA effort to reach the moon and reverse them.

That's all you really have to do.

Let Saigon sink or swim.

Interesting, a funding level equivalent to a "war on space" could have interesting ramifications. Also that sort of funding would allow companies looking into larger space stations by 1980 (50+ people) to go ahead and escalate or even realize their plans.

[omega21]

No offence, but could we take the Vietnam discussion to PM? It's cluttering up the thread.

[SergeantHeretic]

M79, we are going to have to agree to disagree lest we derail this thread any further than we already have.

I am willing to leave it at that if you are.

I have one opinion about the Vietnam conflict that to me, is the correct opinion and you have a sharply differing opinion. I think for the sake of peace o nthe boards and the direction of this thread we should let it go.

Are you amenable to this?

[M79]

Deal.

What about keeping the US military interested in space more overtly than OTL, like MOL-type projects or X-20 flights?

[SergeantHeretic]

Deal.

What about keeping the US military interested in space more overtly than OTL, like MOL-type projects or X-20 flights?
NOW you're talking, This I could very well see.

[Shevek23]

Maybe McNamara goes out the revolving door of office sooner?

I'm not sure that would help much in the matter of MOL and Dynasoar; I believe MOL wasn't canceled OTL until the Nixon Administration, while Dynasoar was axed early on. In both cases there was some question just what the Air Force was doing with manned space projects. The policy, laid down in the late Eisenhower administration, that NASA was generally going to be responsible for humans in space on the theory that US space efforts were mostly peaceful (with unspoken reservations about orbital surveillance, which however was shifted over to the CIA and NSA, both out of DoD's chain of command) was not cast in concrete; the White House always reserved the option of military space missions--if the services could think of legitimate ones! That was the problem with DynaSoar; when it came to explaining why the spaceplane should be an Air Force project, the mission scenarios the Air Force came up with were all in some combination physically dubious (wait, now, you're going to enter the atmosphere, do your {fill in blank here} mission then aerodynamically turn around and skip back into orbit and return to base...I'd like to see the numbers on that!:rolleyes:) or politically far outside the policy box. Insofar as they had clearcut military roles it wasn't clear why unmanned missiles and surveillance satellites couldn't do the job cheaper and safer. MOL was a consolation prize McNamara was willing to tolerate (and did, until he left office) because it was less technically questionable and less destabilizing. (Manned surveillance may or may not have been cost-effective--probably not, especially in view of advances in technology not realized yet in the early '60s, but trying it out was part of the point, and surveillance in general was a capability each side would happily deny the other, but not at the cost of losing it themselves, and so was a lot less controversial than talking about orbital strike capabilities).

What I wish about DynaSoar was that NASA were more interested in exploring alternatives to the basic ballistic capsule for manned missions, and funded to develop them in parallel with the moon mission. It would have been very cool if they had something close to DynaSoar in operation by 1970. Space tech experts on this thread are dubious that such approaches would offer worthwhile advantages over ballistic capsules but again it would be nice to have tried it out and see rather than simply never go there.

The STS is a very different sort of deal; its liabilities overlap those of any spaceplane to some extent but it bothers me that in dismissing the wisdom of incrementally developing return vehicles with serious aerodynamic maneuvering abilities they often equate the STS with the whole spaceplane concept in general.

Getting back to getting rid of Mac--well, it was my heuristic starting point, but in fact both Kennedy and LBJ had a lot of confidence in him, clearly he was doing the job they wanted done, for good or ill. The policy of making NASA alone responsible for manned space operations seems like a sound one to me unless one comes up with a specific space mission for military astronauts and every one I've ever heard of either pretty much duplicates the NASA mission or is hare-brained IMHO, either because of questionable technical claims or because of very aggressive and destabilizing intents (putting actual weapons of any kind in space for instance, or devising suborbital bombers). We just come up empty with legitimate military missions in space that aren't a likely spark to set off Armageddon and that can't be done as well or better by NASA--if they can be done at all! (An example of a technically hare-brained scheme would be suborbital troop delivery--on a scale where rapid response to a nearby friendly stronghold landing point would be more than a PR stunt, the cost would be incredible, whereas sending a craft reentering from nearly orbital speeds directly into harm's way seems like a good way to get it destroyed and its human payload killed.)

So McNamara was only doing his job when he put the kibosh on USAF doing DynaSoar; a different Kennedy/Johnson SecDef would have done the same, and so probably would a Nixon appointee if he'd been elected in 1960 instead.

MOL however did survive quite a few budget cycles and was getting close to being operational when it was axed, perhaps it could make it. Part of the MOL package was to be Big Gemini, which might conceivably have been replaced by a DynaSoar type spaceplane as the manned capsule the crew rode up in and returned in. If that is NASA went ahead and developed it, and it turned out to have advantages worth the inevitable liabilities--as a NASA spacecraft, with no modifications to weaponize it, it wouldn't be so controversial.

So we might get both. But if we get DynaSoar at all it can't be for the military purposes the Air Force tried to sell it with.

[SergeantHeretic]

Shevak, the only thing that I have to say about Macnamara is this, I have never heard of, or seen anyone more in love with the smell of their own farts that was taken seriously for so long.

[Faralis]

Shevak, the only thing that I have to say about Macnamara is this, I have never heard of, or seen anyone more in love with the smell of their own farts that was taken seriously for so long.

When he was in Ford he helped save the company, and his time with LeMay was also quite productive ... if you are not a Japanese, that is.

His "lets bring private market system to the defense system" was a complete disaster though ( although IMHO it looked like a good idea at the time ) ...

[SergeantHeretic]

When he was in Ford he helped save the company, and his time with LeMay was also quite productive ... if you are not a Japanese, that is.

His "lets bring private market system to the defense system" was a complete disaster though ( although IMHO it looked like a good idea at the time ) ...
OPinions vary.

[Shevek23]

Everybody hates McNamara. The doves hated him during the war, the hawks have institutionalized hating him.

Oddly enough though, JFK evidently didn't hate him. LBJ kept him, nearly up to the point where he himself had to call it quits.

Wrong (as everyone seems to think) or right (as he must have been from time to time if only on the broken clock principle) he fit right in with the rest of "the best and the brightest."

On the matter of DynaSoar I think he was right, as far as his own job was concerned. The Air Force could not explain why they needed this thing.

I just wish NASA had picked up where they had to leave off. But that was not in McNamara's field of responsibility.

A lot of the hate and blame laid on him personally seems more properly to me to be discontent with the shortcomings and blind spots of US society in his times in general. That said--of course he rightly bears his share of it. Blame, and credit.

[SergeantHeretic]

In my humble opinion the greatest reason we don't have the tech level from the movie "2001" in 2001 AD IOTL was because we were spending shit-tons of money and thens of thousands of people in a lost cause defending an absurdly incompatent fecklessly stupid kleptocracy, but at this point that is just my opinion, so, make of it what you will.

[arrowiv]

Another factor to consider- WI anti-space Senator William Proxmire is voted out of office much earlier because of, say, problems with his voters or even a victim of a political dirty trick? How would his absence in the Senate affect NASA funding?