Oho, Edmund Muskie!
Am I excited? Well, not extremely--most of what I know about Muskie is from reading Hunter Thompson's
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail (1972) where he doesn't come off as a very inspirational figure--other than that I've got nothing, and it has been decades since I read that. Nor is HST considered a mainstay of sober journalism.
(I've had the experience of re-entering the USA in the 1980s and having a US Customs officer, inspecting my baggage and seeing a copy of
The Great Shark Hunt, comment "I don't want to see that!" Fortunately for me this was pre-9/11, so I was let go, with my book. It's almost like we had the idea of free speech or something.
)
I'm going to have to read up on him now I guess. Anyway as a boilerplate New Deal legacy Democrat, and with Nixon having not apparently worked to start the ball rolling on polarizing the nation on right-left lines as he did OTL, I suppose the Muskie admin will fit in a spectrum with OTL Johnson to Carter, more in an LBJ direction.
Except we don't have a strong sense of just how much of the cultural ferment of OTL's 1960s carried over to this timeline. My sense is, it would have been somewhat muted, but perhaps by that same token, has not evoked as strong a movement of cultural counterrevolution and so a bit of cultural radicalism is still fermenting. Indeed Abbie Hoffman OTL said "the Sixties went on to 1975" or something like that, so here we might see a reversal--instead of LBJ's second term being a cultural hurricane, with a suppressed/repressed hangover lasting until Nixon leaves office in disgrace, we have a low-grade countercultural fever under a neo-Eisenhowerian consensus, and in Muskie's term it might blossom flamboyantly, so that the counterculture is seen more as a 1970 thing in retrospect, with its precursors being seen as persistent Beatnikism.
Or possibly the whole thing just slips by smoothly, as a gradual evolution, with no period of apparent cultural war going on.
So--"American on the Moon by '76," except much less sense of a war-like emergency crash priority.
Paradoxically, since we still haven't seen the foundation of a single central civil space agency, the Air Force still has an opportunity to leverage this into absorbing the mission as its own, thus finally getting sufficient clout to make DOS a priority in Congress. As I've remarked here before, assuming the military has the mission of undertaking exploration of the unknown is the default assumption of European civilizations, if not all of them indeed. It's a Lewis and Clark situation, naturally you give the job to men in uniform. Muskie's quoted words give no indication that he sees it as important to separate the mission from any involvement with the military. Building DOS all by itself looks too much like just more weapons building to be sure--but building up DOS as a jumping off point for deep space is in line with the way exploration has generally been done and won't seem very odd to anyone.
The Air Force's opportunity is to enlist von Braun and Faget onto their team, with the understanding they aren't designing spacecraft as weapons systems but as exploration vehicles--but the Air Force absorbs the exploration mission, explicitly, and so on one hand space exploration is funded via DoD's huge slice of pie, on the other the military might reasonably resent diversion of resources away from their prime mission of defense, indeed waging war. But with this mission, the role of the military is softened in public perception, and thus justified even in times when it seems the existential military threat to the USA is remote--as might happen if a round of detente occurs.
As I understand the basic dynamics of US politics in the Cold War era, Muskie is not likely to lead the way in detente, however. As a Democrat, his party suffers from the "Who Lost China?" rhetoric and Democrats must prove they are hawkish and firmly anti-Communist; as the party of the business establishment Republicans like Nixon are free to alternate between leveling charges of being "pink" on their Democratic opponents and at the same time cut deals with Leninist regimes at their discretion, on the assumption that as the party of free enterprise of course they aren't plotting to turn the country Communist, but as sensible businessmen they will negotiate deals to our advantage.
Muskie then can be expected to take a hard line against the Soviets, especially if the latter are quasi-Stalinist and also successful.
OTOH as I've said, I don't have much of a sense of the cultural sea changes the US underwent in Nixon's two 1960s terms here. The New Left of OTL despised the Democratic party in power as much as the paleoconservatives and businessmen of the Republican party. Here with the Democrats less thoroughly in power, might radical progressivism have been concentrating more on taking control of the Democratic Party from below, so that big shots like Muskie might not like the hippies, but realize they are a force to contend with if he's going to keep control of a party that can still win elections? Might Democrats be evolving toward openly embracing and defending certain planks that are clearly and forthrightly socialist, such as universal medical care? Might not Nixon's own wonky welfare technocracy have legitimized such trends in the Democratic party?
The effect might be for Democrats to denounce the Soviets entirely because of repression, while supporting the concept of public intervention in private markets for the greater good under democratic control.
I realized at this point that I raised some questions a long time ago, when we were first discussing Nixon's election, about how situations like Vietnam would develop, and now I can't remember if you have dealt with them in updates while I was distracted by technology, or if they have indeed been addressed at all. I'm going to have to go back over the archives to check on that.
Meanwhile--Wernher von Braun is nearing the end of his life OTL--he died in the mid-70s IIRC, so he doesn't have long to go on influencing events unless his OTL death was early and easily butterflied. He needs a successor soon.
Back to space technology--if in fact the Air Force gets to absorb the Lunar mission, and deep space exploration in general, as part of its own mandate, I suppose the most sensible thing is do go with both EOR and LOR--that is, develop the DOS as a staging base for assembly of translunar stages to enable a LOR mission at the Moon.
There is an alternative to developing either new capsules or stretched Dyna-Soars as direct reentry vehicles too; I've suggested it before--aerocapture (or "aerobraking," the standard aerospace terminology of OTL that distinguishes them strikes me as perverse and therefore hard to keep straight
) to low Earth orbit with a single pass. (Having to do it with multiple passes takes too long and leaves the manned return vehicle exposed to the, um, Vernov belts). The energy to be gotten rid of in a direct return to Earth from Lunar space is twice that that a craft returning from orbit needs to get rid of--this implies to me that the same heat shield that can handle surviving low orbital reentry can handle the task of reducing near-escape velocity to stable orbital velocity.
Thus, a "standard-issue" Dynasoar, if only it were generally suitable as a deep space vehicle (I say it isn't because it is too small) could in principle, without any improvement of its TPS, come in from Lunar space, skim the atmosphere so as to brake off the excess speed above orbital speed, cool off in orbit, and then reenter the atmosphere for final glide-down in standard fashion.
Alternatively, it, or another craft designed for this aero-manuever, could do the atmospheric braking, then rendezvous with a space station such as DOS-Gateway, and its crew could transfer to a standard return vessel there. This holds out the prospect that the aerodynamic deep space craft, remaining in orbit as it does, might be reused for another deep space mission.
Note that this sort of thing can be done by a capsule with suitable lift/drag ratio (which might be far less than one) or, if the higher L/D of Dynasoar is desirable, that craft already is superior to the OTL Shuttle in that respect and far superior to the capsules. If that's desirable. It might not be--I've never worked out the math of this maneuver, which I believe has been done once anyway, with a Soviet Zond, and called (by Americans obviously) skip-reentry. (Assuming it goes straight down for final reentry instead of heading off to dock with a space station). So it can be done, and by a capsule, and perhaps therefore no spaceplanes need apply--though perhaps there is an advantage to doing it with a higher L/D vehicle.
I'm thinking specifically about dealing with the narrowness of the reentry window. Infamously enough the OTL Apollo had to hit a 2 degree window--if reentry angle were shallower they'd bounce off the atmosphere (as I'm suggesting they might want to, but here to an unpredictable, probably too high, degree); too low and heat builds up too fast and they burn up. A craft with a greater L/D range might be able to compensate for a wider range of angles and guarantee the net drag is just enough to put them in low orbit regardless.
I wonder if there is any chance Faget will settle here on some variant of Kehlet's
lenticular proposal?
Convair's lenticular alternative for Apollo would have had a hypersonic L/D of 4.4! Others in the same vein had much lower hypersonic L/D. These are Apollo proposals and so the idea is again to achieve high braking, capsule-style, in the hypersonic regime and then to consider advantages and disadvantages regarding subsonic flight and final landing. Here, I'm suggesting something different, namely these craft aerobraking to orbit and not being intended to operate as landing craft or in the subsonic regime at all. Hence my choice to illustrate the Convair version. In addition to an obvious potential for high maneuvering capability at hypersonic speeds, we also have here a compact design that also, according to Wade citing Kehlet anyway, would have low heating of the capsule.
When I was looking for alternate links to Encyclopedia Astronautica, I came up with not much--but I did stumble upon other military projects investigating hypersonic (or anyway high speed supersonic) applications of the lenticular concept--notably the "
Pye Wacket" air-to-air missile briefly developed for the B-70's self-defense. You can see a few other concepts for military space planes listed on the first link I offered.
So apparently OTL, the lenticular concept was not alien to various high-speed military, indeed specifically Air Force, projects, and even without Kehlet offering his views in the context of Apollo which would not happen here, I suspect that in this timeline, with the Air Force interested in orbital-speed craft that can also maneuver aerodynamically at those speeds, someone would propose a lenticular DynaSoar, and we need not assume here it was rejected mainly on technical grounds but rather due to a preliminary commitment to the more conventional airplane shape evolving from X-15.
We already had the Air Force a bit embarrassed with the last post at the limits of the Dynasoar design; if at this juncture they see an opportunity to grab the Moon landing mission, they might step back and consider whether developing lenticular craft can simultaneously give them something viable for a moon mission return capsule (either skip-orbiting as I suggest, or direct-landing) and also an improved DynaSoar with superior hypersonic aerodynamics.
In the past three or four years I've been enthusiastic about this approach, and the worst drawback I've encountered (aside of course from the question of just how believable is that Convair claim of L/D of 4.4, and other claims) is the matter of landing on water, should the vehicle be designed for direct-reentry or the DynaSoar mission which also involves landing. It seems believable enough that it can land on land pretty well, flying as a glider (with those ladybug wings deployed one can see in most proposals) to a horizontal approach--then, Kehlet stressed, there would be no need for landing gear as such, rather the hull can simply touch down and be dragged to a rocking stop on a typical runway! Alternatively of course there could be wheels, or skids.
But what if it has to land on water? That would never be the plan, the idea is to land at a ground base. But suppose something goes wrong and it must come down at a random location, which would imply mostly ocean--or coming down at an unchosen location that does happen to be over land, it may be the only suitable "terrain" is a big lake. Now what?
Turns out it has poor characteristics in this case, tending, when coming in with substantial horizontal speed, to bounce off wave crests, being violently tumbled in the process so that it is quite likely to then come down upside-down!
A possible solution, should such a craft be planned as a reentry vehicle or designed to survive that as an emergency contingency, would be to have a drag chute pop out the back to reduce the airspeed, then have retrorockets a la Soyuz to brake the final descent, dropping it straight down on whatever surface, land or sea, at low to zero horizontal speed.
If it isn't designed for routine reentry, but only provided with the means of surviving an emergency one, there wouldn't be the built-in ladybug curved wings; to stabilize the saucer shape in subsonic gliding flight it would be necessary to have something like a parachute-wing deploy in back anyway--such a fabric "wing" would probably be very draggy. But now I'm trying to visualize a single solid-fuel rocket that rides that parasail, and upon the pilot choosing the landing site, fires--first backwards and up a bit, to brake the airspeed, then swinging up to slow the fall, before being released to drag itself and the chute away from the crash-land site, while the capsule falls straight down a few meters.
I guess a design meant to reenter routinely could have such rockets installed on the ladybug wing, or even on the bottom, TPS side of the hull, to give such a brake-to-stop, drop option if a suitable runway is not available. This might even be designed to be the routine mode of landing, if it turns out the G-load of this maneuver is bearable and it saves wear and tear on the TPS. Which note, would have for an Apollo type have been disposable ablative surface, and for other applications a metal tough heatshield, not something like the Shuttle's fragile tiles!
