Eyes Turned Skywards

Truth is stranger than fiction

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e of pi responded on the Kerbal Space Program Realism Overhaul Discord server regarding the Apollo Mission Module mass estimates, thank you.

"I think we looked at what the mass of an MPLM and Soyuz OM was per cubic meter, and then what mass we had left on the rocket, and sized it to fit."
 
Ten years since Eyes Turned Skyward's original post! And it certainly holds up after all this time and been very influential in certain circles like the Kerbal Space Program community. A hearty congratulations to E of Pi and Workable Goblin as well as Nixonshead and all the other various art contributors to the timeline :)

To that end my little tribute to the 10 year anniversary of Eyes (ok a day early :p ), all new Spacelab parts I made for the Bluedog Design Bureau mod. BDB has had ETS based parts including advanced Apollo, multibody, AARDVARK, Spacelab for quite a while but these are fresh revamped parts currently in development. Since the new Block III parts by BDB lead author CobaltWolf are not yet ready I'm showing it with his revamped Block II instead.

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Ten years since Eyes Turned Skyward's original post! And it certainly holds up after all this time and been very influential in certain circles like the Kerbal Space Program community. A hearty congratulations to E of Pi and Workable Goblin as well as Nixonshead and all the other various art contributors to the timeline :)

To that end my little tribute to the 10 year anniversary of Eyes (ok a day early :p ), all new Spacelab parts I made for the Bluedog Design Bureau mod. BDB has had ETS based parts including advanced Apollo, multibody, AARDVARK, Spacelab for quite a while but these are fresh revamped parts currently in development. Since the new Block III parts by BDB lead author CobaltWolf are not yet ready I'm showing it with his revamped Block II instead.

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The renders are first rate. But the lack of tethers on your Kerbals makes me quite nervous!
 
Eyes Turned Skyward: 10 Year Retrospective
Good evening, everyone! It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Ten years ago, Workable Goblin and I first started posting Eyes Turned Skyward here on AlternateHistory.com, a project which we’d been working on since the spring of 2011. First tip for other writers: pre-writing and editing before posting is a really useful model for technical timelines. Four parts, several hundred thousand words, and 4 years later, we posted the finale on September 11, 2015. Today, I wanted to take a moment to look back on why we wrote this timeline, what the situation in spaceflight was at the time, how that situation has changed, what we learned from Eyes, and what we might do the same or different if we were starting it from scratch today. However, before all of that, I wanted to start by saying thank you--thank you to the people who worked with us as we wrote this project, from our art team like Michel Van and Nixonshead, to some of our subject matter consultants like Brainbin, and also to the readers and commentators who’ve shared insights, thoughts on the timeline, made KSP mods and LEGO models, and so much more. I don’t know that I can count how many people I’ve gotten to know because of Eyes and how much time I’ve spent with friends I made through it. It was an amazing experience and a great project. We learned a lot about space, but also a lot about writing.

What drove Eyes? Why did we decide to write a no-Shuttle timeline? I think we can agree, with hindsight, that 2011 represented a nadir in spaceflight. The cancellation of Constellation, while perhaps justifiable, at the time felt strikingly personal for me. Combined with the nearly simultaneous end of Shuttle, it felt like everything was coming down without much hope of something coming back. Although Workable Goblin had fewer personal problems with Constellation’s cancellation, he had a long interest in alternate Apollos and also felt that space had reached a dead end in the late 2000s, with human spaceflight seemingly on the verge of death. It felt like looking back to eliminate Shuttle was fixing the mistakes of the past. Basically no one in 2011 was seriously discussing reuse in public; not even SpaceX, which at the time was still talking about parachutes at most for Falcon 9. Reading Eyes and the author’s notes on posts, you can see how spaceflight has recovered and changed over the last decade--the rise of SpaceX, Dragon, Cygnus, recovery & reuse, the small launch market, the rebirth of LEO mega-constellations, and probes going to new destinations, proving each to be fascinating worlds to explore. In retrospect, though, we underestimated a bit how good the Shuttle could be. In writing Eyes and researching other projects since, it’s become easier to appreciate the benefits of the large crews Shuttle carried, and the economies it was capable of at higher flight rates when it achieved them. Today, we are once again looking at a bold new vehicle, SpaceX’s Starship, as well as other vehicles aiming for partial and full reusability, and wondering what the future of spaceflight may hold. I hope dearly it doesn’t blow up and fail in a way that causes a similar knee-jerk reaction in hindsight.

At the time when we wrote Eyes, the state of the art for researching space timelines on AH.com was often, at most, Astronautix, typically without much in the way of calculations of capabilities or checks of original NTRS studies. At the time one of our major advantages was Workable Goblin’s PhD-student-honed abilities to dive into NTRS for studies on probes, stations, and more, and my college-engineering-student willingness to tinker with spreadsheets to try and game out modifications of paper rocket studies to line up capabilities. In the last decade, the availability of that material through David Portree’s work, False Steps, KSP mod research, and other mechanisms has exploded, bringing some of those possibilities more into the light.

One notable result of that is highlighting perhaps one of the biggest weaknesses of the timeline: Saturn IC and Saturn Multibody. The flexibility of the system in the timeline was a big tool in the missions we called for, and some of the benefits of clusterable heavy lifters which have been realized in the real world. Still, in retrospect there are more than a few points of dissatisfaction with the rockets we laid out. The benefits of switching to the F-1 for Saturn IC, in planning, was that it made possible a 70-ton capable heavy lifter with only 3 engines, free from “N-1 syndrome”. On the other hand, as far as I’ve ever seen since, no historical sources ever really considered single-engine F-1-based core vehicles or liquid boosters, looking at a minimum at 6.6m twin-engine F-1 LRBs like Saturn MLV and the more modern Jarvis and Pyrios systems. Similarly, in the years since, the tremendous success of the Merlin and Falcon families shows perhaps N-1 Syndrome need not strike if you have better quality control and testing. Ironically, an early version of the thing which turned into Multibody in our planning would have had shared engines between an Atlas-sized, Saturn I-sized, and a roughly 70-ton LV, much like the historical H-1, so this was something we at least considered. Real aerospace engineers clearly saw a value in that which we overlooked in the drive for a single engine and saving the F-1. Additionally, while switching from the S-IB cluster tank to a monolithic 6.6m tank set might save weight, applying the Saturn V’s S-IC structural fraction to a stage a quarter the size was possibly unjustified, yielding a vehicle that performed just a bit too well. Wrapping it in SOFI orange on only the kerolox lower stage in one of the first early images of the Multibody family probably caps it off, as does never having a full answer for what roll control might have been like--turbopump tap off, secondary engines, or what--much to the frustration of KSP players replicating the vehicles.

Likely, the changes from Saturn IB to Saturn IC in timeline wouldn’t have actually been worth it, and an interim Saturn IB should have flown, or Multibody-style flexibility and performance somehow introduced and justified earlier, probably with Altas V-style copperish anodization or a colored paint/coating. Maybe SOFI on the upper stage, but possibly in the white color used on early Shuttle or Saturn V’s S-II. A Titan alternative of some sort also gets talked about a lot in Shuttle decision documents, though it’s arguable that it would have had some serious capability limits in diameter of fairings and payload mass, not to mention that the costs the Air Force reported may have been somewhat manipulated to look cheaper through spares production for the missile fleet and such. There was a large-diameter Titan we considered for a while, but we ultimately preferred Multibody’s capability and kerolox first stage instead of hypergols. The issue, of course, is that untangling changes like these would require a major re-write of the timeline as it exists to fix, changing many of the details we think hold up. As we’ve seen with some authors lately, sometimes going back to long-completed projects and trying to edit them to fit changing times can collapse the whole endeavour. Thus, while we have points we’re dissatisfied with, I’m inclined to say the work stands as it was. It’s better to leave Saturn IC and Multibody as it is, and try to use what we’ve learned since for other projects instead of trying to re-write alternate history. In the eyes of many people just finding the timeline through Nixonshead’s images, KSP mods, or other methods, Multibody is Eyes Turned Skyward as written. If you’re one of them...welcome.

Another issue in a similar vein was the success of Europa. This, we have to admit, was also very goal driven: keeping Britain as a major contributing member to ESA. But while Europa’s success was possible it wasn’t really likely, and this led to the development of a number of plot lines that were also unlikely and didn’t add very much to the timeline, like Lockheed’s success with the L-1011 and L-1012. This leads into another problem, which was the number of plot threads that ended up going nowhere or were tangential to the main thrust of the timeline. In some cases these could be somewhat justified--it was apparent pretty early on that we were going to have to tackle politics somehow just because of how the 2000 election hinged on Florida, one of the states most affected by the changes we had made. Overall, though, we probably spent too much time on subjects disconnected from the central space focus. I still recall going to a movie with my family the day we posted the politics update where Ann Richards became president...and got out an hour or two later to find a multi-post (multi-page?) argument about if she was a murderer for some case law around the death penalty in Texas while she was governor IOTL. Some of my later timelines have shied away from directly addressing or butterflying politics for reasons like these. While it can be interesting, it can stray from the core interest of playing with alternate rockets. We also abandoned certain interesting plot lines that probably deserved to get more focus than they actually did. For example, we spent a considerable amount of time in Part II discussing the rise of space advocacy organizations and then...did very little with them through the rest of the timeline, even though they should probably have had some impact on later decisions and definitely would have been strongly affected by the Artemis and later lunar exploration programs. But again, re-writing the timeline to fix these issues would take a large amount of work and risks ruining the appeal for both our readers and ourselves.

The ideas that drove me in particular to write Eyes--wanting to imagine a better future for spaceflight--haven’t gone away, though. Similar drives have been behind most of the timelines I’ve written since, very much in an ongoing dialog with what we wrote in Eyes and in what I’ve learned since through research and watching developments in reality. Over the time we were Eyes, recovery & reuse of rockets emerged back onto the scene and have become something of a new default for LV proposals, which spurred me to look back through some of the history of Shuttle and reusable vehicle concepts. When you look at data like the history of the Shuttle program cost and particularly the 1994 Space Shuttle Zero-Base Cost study, it’s difficult to not feel a bit that what was more important about Shuttle being good or bad was not if it was reusable, but if it could truly fly 10-20 times a year. If Multibody really existed, it would likely be cheaper more thanks to flying something like ten times a year through the timeline than much about having only a single engine or only a single tank set on the first stage. This was an idea explored more fully in Right Side Up, looking at what a Shuttle program might have needed to routinely and safely that kind of flight rate, and then in Boldly Going this year trying to imagine what more might have been done starting with the Shuttle we got, with a station to drive flight rate like the 1998 peak earlier in the program’s history. I think my current largest unwritten idea, “Fires of Mercury,” would explore some of this with a radically overhauled early 1970s, in dialog with the assumption from Eyes of a convergent drawdown in Apollo, but also the benefits of flight frequency and continuing some use of Apollo hardware...but in a reusable way. The application of the moon in driving this flight rate, and as a natural place to return in exploration is now potentially being borne out in reality, as in Eyes and so many other of my timelines since. Even Dawn of the Dragon got in on the act, being the first of my timelines to feature multiple-launch EOR-LOR lunar flights using Shuttle-C as we’d used Saturn Multibody H03 in Eyes and also in a deliberate attempt to stay away from serious political discussion.

In addition to concepts I continue to mine in other works to this day, Eyes also had some structural elements applied to other timelines. Some of these are lessons learned, like having more of a defined goal of when (if not necessarily where) to end a timeline from the beginning, and of defining what details were within the scope and detail of the timeline and which weren’t. While we enjoyed making Eyes’ culture posts and political butterflies, they also took up a lot of focus, and most of my later works have been much more tightly focused as a result. (Indeed, in editing a draft of this TimothyC reminded me that the first draft of Boldly Going eschewed discussing politics entirely.) Another lesson we learned was the benefit of pre-writing. We generally had a Part of Eyes about half written before going to post to enable a weekly schedule. On at least one occasion, this wasn’t enough, and edits & schoolwork bogged us down, leading to a hiatus mid-part to enable rebuilding a longer buffer. The buffer not only protected the schedule, it gave time for some of the “gaming out” and edits which I think helped build Eyes’ technical verisimilitude. That gaming-out of technical decisions, researching historical alternatives considered, brainstorming how these alternatives might change in the timeline, and then casting ourselves as program leaders making decisions year by year or even month by month in selecting launch order, landing sites, program priorities, and political objectives I think helped Eyes feel more real and grounded our technical justifications...even if some of the stuff we were justifying wasn’t always fully baked. That’s a method I’ve tried to take to my later works. I think it’s notable the only timeline I gave up on before finishing, Kistling a Different Tune, is one where I deliberately tried not pre-writing and didn’t game things out as much in advance of writing sections. Twists like the continued survival of Apollo, the approval of the Orion “Soonbase,” and the flight history of the Grumman X-40 in Eyes came from this process, and helped make the story more than the sum of its outline elements by linking across programs and nations. Letting the gaming-out drive the writing of the story outline, bounding what we could do with internally plausible limits, was I think a major element to making Eyes feel real, and I’ve tried to use it as much as possible in later timelines. Certainly the biggest impact of that was Boldly Going, where gaming out an April Fools joke timeline from 2020 intended to be five to seven thousand words inflated it to closer to seventy thousand words.

Or course, the words of the timeline and the technical research behind its creation was only part of the timeline’s success. The art team we were able to work with was a major contribution to the spread of the timeline, I think. Every image from Eyes shared with a link to the thread was an advertisement for what was contained within, and there’s a reason I think Multibody, the surviving Apollo blocks, and the Space Station Freedom we imagined are some of the more public-facing elements of the timeline: they’re the easiest to show a quick link to promote. It invites explanation, questions, and I hope, reading and enjoying the timeline. Workable Goblin and I very much appreciate the effort of Nixonshead, Michel, and others who contributed to illustrating the world we created and helping to fill in details beyond the early Autodesk Inventor models I started the timeline with. I’ve tried to learn the lesson of the value of art in illustrating an AH premise in an enticing way for my other timelines, and consider myself fortunate to have continued to get to work with great art teams on other projects.

Sometimes, the illustrations of the timeline’s events, like Apollo’s continuation, Space Station Freedom, the lunar return, and Multibody itself seem to be the most lasting impacts from Eyes more than the words we wrote. However, I’m proud of several things in Eyes that didn’t make it fully into the art, and which I’d suggest people look for if this drives them to re-read, or read in full for the first time! Workable Goblin dug up fantastic data about alternate probe missions, and took us on journeys to many new places, from the cryovolcanoes of Pluto before New Horizons helped prove they existed, to dusty little Phobos (still unexplored in the real world), to the scorched surface of Venus. Each was revealed in his writing to, as we have found in reality since, its own wonderful new world to explore, no matter how apparently barren they may appear at the start. He also managed to fully immerse himself in that school of acronyms that produced OTL’s GRAIL, and still cackles whenever he remembers GRIMALDI. I enjoy Kirchoff (an ion propelled multi-target probe we included with a name inspired both by a historical figure related to electricity but also derived from the real study name Comet Rendezvous/Comet Flyby: CR/CF). I’m pleased with bringing some human elements to our stories of the return to the moon, with some of the characters we introduced, and the scenes we set in Part III and Part IV. I’m also pleased with how we let the evolution of the story drive some decisions. Originally, Apollo was supposed to be replaced much earlier in the timeline, but it kept not becoming our NASA’s priority in a way which felt very real. Its final replacements then ended up making a nice bookend to the timeline with its return to the moon. The plans we developed for the evolution of the lunar return from week-long stays into bases consolidated at a specific site still feels like a solid plan. I’ll be interested to see with Artemis how much of any of this holds up. No Earth-Moon L2 staging, but an NRHO Gateway station, for one, and perhaps propellant transfer and reuse intended from the start instead of introduced in operations partway through? We shall see. It’s been an exciting decade, and there’s yet more to come. We are walking the earth with our Eyes Turned Skyward, hoping to look up and see a past that never was, or perhaps a future yet to be.
 
Happy 10th anniversary Eyes Turned Skyward! This timeline has affected and inspired me like almost nothing else I've ever read on this website. I wouldn't have discovered my love of alternate history without it!
 
Happy Anniversary! Eyes remains an amazing achievement, and I'm thinking I'm about due for a 10th anniversary reread.

On a personal note, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have fallen into Kerbal as hard as I did if I had not been avidly following Eyes at the time--and that means (given how it led to a job there, and then a dream job and move to Seattle) literally my entire life would be different now. So thank you for that as well.
 
Congratulations on this tl, I can't believe it's been ten years. While I think both Right Side Up and especially Boldly Going are much better tl's, you can really see your evolution as authors and researchers, this was the tl that started my interest in AH Space programs. Bravo!
 
Happy 10-year anniversary to this project! It set a new standard for space-alt-history, between the scope, the detail, and the art, and was a privilege to read in the first place. Sure, some parts have been marched past by technology--such is the case in all speculative fiction. It's not like, e.g., SpaceX wasn't at least publicly talking about going to a high-thrust Merlin 2 engine to reduce its engine count in those days--they too were at least publicly concerned about "N1 syndrome."

Regarding the single-engine Saturn IC core stage and the fact that OTL proposals hinged on two engines--why is that? Added thrust, or were 1960s-era designers concerned about engine-out capability?
 
It does solve the roll issue and allows payload of about 40-45 mT instead of 20-25, which I think give sufficient reason for planners to prove it (the C-3 also should have been able to put an Apollo onto a free return trajectory without any rendezvous operations, which was probably another attraction). I don’t think you would have gotten much engine-out capability, maybe at the end of the first-stage burn…
 
Already 10 years have passt ?!
man, time goes fast !
it was incredibly fun, and we the Space Jockey really have a good romp here :biggrin:

During run of Eye Turned Skywards happen on earth a revolution in Spaceflight
SpaceX transformed the business with reuse of Falcon9 rocket and Falcon heavy
Now they build biggest rocket ever: Starship-Superheavy

E9tx-LRWUAIDaXW
 
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