AHC: Permanent Human Settlement Outside of Earth

PragmaticAntithesis

IOTL, the furthest from Earth humanity has ever gotten was Apollo 13, which only barely cleared the Moon. This was in 1970, which is over 50 years ago. Humans have never gone further since.

With a POD after Apollo 13 set the record for furthest human from Earth, make permanent human settlement outside of Earth's gravity well (a permanent moon base doesn't count) a reality with the first human settlers landing before 2020.
I don't mind where the settlement is. It could be the mars base planned IOTL for the mid 2020's; it could be a cloud city on Venus; or it could even be an air bubble under the ice of Europa.
 

Dr Dee

Would Buzz Aldrin's idea of Mars cyclers/castles count? I guess that's really stretching the definition of 'settlement' but I'm assuming they would be relatively permanent fixtures that would take advantage of Earth's gravity without being imprisoned by it.
 
Aisha Clan-Clan

Aisha Clan-Clan

Germany wins the cycle of world wars. Reichsfuhrer Oskar II decides to liberalize treatment of the lesser races to make it deportation to martian penal colonies. You get a few million dead in the process of building the colonies but you get human colonies off earth by 2020.
 

PragmaticAntithesis

interpoltomo said:
Germany wins the cycle of world wars. Reichsfuhrer Oskar II decides to liberalize treatment of the lesser races to make it deportation to martian penal colonies. You get a few million dead in the process of building the colonies but you get human colonies off earth by 2020.
Click to expand...
True, settling other planets does seem like a natural conclusion to the Nazi concept of Lebensraum. The land on Earth will run out eventually, after all.
 
Mad Bad Rabbit

Mad Bad Rabbit

No Vietnam War allows much higher NASA budget and weakens antinuclear protest movement. Tons of reactors are built, blunting the 1973 oil shocks and avoiding the decade of malaise.

A permanent Moon base is built by 1999 as a massive porkbarrel project for dumping nuclear waste (after Yucca Mountain is rejected). Unfortunately the waste explodes, flinging the Moon out of Earth's gravity well so now it counts.
 

Colonel Zoidberg

The Cold War dick-waving contest gets escalated even further and becomes worldwide, dominated by the Americans and Soviets but with more support from Europe, China, Japan and maybe South Korea if they have something to prove against their neighbor to the north.

It probably starts with military bases in space, which turns into military bases on the moon. The questions, of course, come down to “can people make money doing this?” and “what strategic value do we have for this?” It probably comes down to resources, the ability to find water and grow food, and what businesses can make money.
 
marathag

marathag

Banned
1970: plans for Orion Drive craft to be assembled in LEO, and completed spacecraft, with 400 ton landing craft/habitat is funded by Congress for a Bicentennial event, with Viking I to verify the planned landing site
 

Galba Otho Vitelius

The Earth gets conquered by space aliens in the late twentieth or early twenty-first century, and the space aliens relocate the surviving humans to their home planet.
 

Galba Otho Vitelius

I suppose my response earlier was almost literally ASB, but so would be humans from Earth constructing a settlement on another planet or moon where they could survive, within fifty years of starting with 1970s tech.
 

Blue cat

PragmaticAntithesis said:
IOTL, the furthest from Earth humanity has ever gotten was Apollo 13, which only barely cleared the Moon. This was in 1970, which is over 50 years ago. Humans have never gone further since.

With a POD after Apollo 13 set the record for furthest human from Earth, make permanent human settlement outside of Earth's gravity well (a permanent moon base doesn't count) a reality with the first human settlers landing before 2020.
I don't mind where the settlement is. It could be the mars base planned IOTL for the mid 2020's; it could be a cloud city on Venus; or it could even be an air bubble under the ice of Europa.
Click to expand...

I suppose if you can accept a non self sustaining colony a handful of humans might be able to survive on Mars in a suitable shelter or perhaps an asteroid in a suitable shelter (or maybe in a space station at one of the LaGrange (sp ?) points) if a continual series of supply missions were flown to re supply them.

I suspect this would be a major undertaking for a great power (ie they might need to mobilize a singificant part of their GDP.)
 

Veiovis

Out of your 3 examples, the Mars one is the most realistic.

That said, most realistic in this case still means "Lol nope", space enthusiasts who believe they have been betrayed by NASA and swindled out of a space opera nothwithstanding. We barely maintain permanent settlements in Antartica, which is a great fertile and warm plain within walking distance of your front door in comparison to anything ofworld.
 

YYJ

Mad Bad Rabbit said:
No Vietnam War allows much higher NASA budget and weakens antinuclear protest movement. Tons of reactors are built, blunting the 1973 oil shocks and avoiding the decade of malaise.

A permanent Moon base is built by 1999 as a massive porkbarrel project for dumping nuclear waste (after Yucca Mountain is rejected). Unfortunately the waste explodes, flinging the Moon out of Earth's gravity well so now it counts.
Click to expand...
I can hear the theme song for Space 1999 very clearly in my head now.
 

Arkenfolm

Colonel Zoidberg said:
It probably starts with military bases in space, which turns into military bases on the moon. The questions, of course, come down to “can people make money doing this?” and “what strategic value do we have for this?” It probably comes down to resources, the ability to find water and grow food, and what businesses can make money.
Click to expand...
It's expensive, but there is strategic value. You can put nuclear weapons there which should make it very difficult to intercept and of course non-nuclear "rods from god". Rods from god could actually be a good excuse to research space mining/refining. If you can mine or better yet refine elements in space, then you can build rods from god at a much cheaper cost than building and launching them from Earth. At some point the cost should be competitive with a conventional cruise missile since a rods from god system is far more challenging to intercept (since it will have hypersonic velocities IIRC) and can strike anywhere on the planet albeit less accurate. It's likely if you're building them in space, you could build the frame of a guidance system and ship it up at a competitive cost for more guided strikes.

The other strategic value is resources. Countries like the United States have environmental laws making exploitation of rare-earths cost-prohibitive. We could go to the moon to mine these instead. A country which is a leader in space mining could manipulate the global price of whatever resources they're mining downward to impact the mining sector of other countries. This would be paid for by taxpayers and sold as patriotism ("this has OUR rare-earths in it, not the bad guy's/some child slaving warlord's and we don't trash our environment to get it"), job creation (in all likelihood only a few people would permanently live on the Moon, most of the operations would be done remotely from Earth-based offices), and support of the space sector which would include lots of flashy rockets and sciency stuff too making the nation look advanced (so people concerned about public funding for science could get behind it too).

Space solar power could have more investment in it. There's a lot you could do if you could manufacture solar panels in space. Right now, space solar power looks most promising in supplementing/replacing generators in remote communities. Because of this, the military might want it for portable power (when combined with a relatively easily transported rectenna) for their operations (in peacetime this includes disaster relief). All sorts of nations might want to invest in this particular use of mining the moon for the holy grail of space solar power becoming a major source of energy for their country.
 

Dr Dee

As I’m in the middle of watching For All Mankind, I’m wondering if the US would be as keen on pushing forward to a moonbase or further if the USSR made it to the moon after Apollo 11?
 

Peg Leg Pom

Mad Bad Rabbit said:
A permanent Moon base is built by 1999 as a massive porkbarrel project for dumping nuclear waste (after Yucca Mountain is rejected). Unfortunately the waste explodes, flinging the Moon out of Earth's gravity well so now it counts.
Click to expand...
This sounds strangely familiar and wouldn't an explosion that large crack the moon in two?
 
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