alternatehistory.com

This a little alternate history sci-fi I've found browsing Google newspapers (before the service was shut down in 2012).
It's a little gem I'd liked very much.
The author is Gordon Dickson, a least-known sci-fi writer
It seems that Dickson covered the Apollo 14 launch in February 1971 and that was a life-changing experience for him. The result was this nice little piece of alt space history.
Dickson also wrote a Mars story not unlike Stephen Baxter Voyage, except it was published two decades before, in the mid-70's.

Enjoy !


CAPE KENNEDY – Florida - February 5, 1991

“Today, looking back 20 years on the flight of the Apollo 14 spacecraft with astronauts Alan Shepard, Stuart Roosa and Edgar Mitchell, it is easier to understand the public confusion about the space program which seemed to threaten to make this flight one of the last of the United States manned research programs into space.

“If Apollo 14 had turned out to be one of the last such flights it is hard to see how the present firm balance of power in the world could have been achieved so quickly and harder yet to guess how our social and economic ills could be so far along the road to being cured as they are.

“Almost certainly with the closing down of the space program that was advocated by some people in the early 1970s the space research programs of the Russians, the Chinese and Europe would have forged ahead. Other countries would have gained an advantage of information from basic scientific research too large for this country to overcome.

The result could have been a lagging of US technology, a loss of profits from international trade and a sharp devaluation of the dollar. Inflation, poverty and resultant trouble would have intensified those very ills that opponents of the space program dreamed of mending by diverting funds from it to the attacks even then beginning to be made on our social problems.

“Luckily, none of this was allowed to happen.

“It is easy nowadays in 1991 to forget how it was back then. The Apollo launch drew over a million watchers into Cape Kennedy, the largest attended launch in history. But in spite of the numbers of the watchers and their visible enthusiasm for the space program, many of them had much less understanding of the benefits of what they were observing than we do. In those pre-global communication days much necessary technical information had which to reach the general public swiftly and in interesting easily understood language.

“Like her immediate predecessor Apollo 14 carried a laser experiment as part of her experiment package. Yet probably not one person in a hundred watching the liftoff of the Saturn with its white capsule on top was aware that already even then the laser, that coherent beam of light we all make use of daily in 1991, had already become not only a practical weapon but an industrial tool of so many applications that it was to revolutionize not only manufacturing but the simple process of living.

[It is no surprise than laser inventor Charles Townes – a man who in 1964 was rewarded by the Nobel Prize for that fantastic invention – is also a staunch supporter of the manned space program.] note: this is mine. The laser / Townes connection was too good to be lost.

“Full appreciation of what research like this could mean to problems outside the space program itself only began to be felt by the public with the recognition of the achievements of the research in electronics carried on by research stations later established in Earth orbit and on the Moon to take advantage of the natural hard vacuum of space.

“It was achievements like this that gave the US its later overwhelming superiority in electronics that led to the present new era in world trade and a standard of living for all our citizens that allows the least incomed of us more in the way of comfort and conveniences than the richest of us could dream of back in 1971.

“When we go away for four and five days weekends we assume that our household computer will oversee the mechanical housekeeping, shopping maintenance and even repair tasks to be carried on while we are gone. We do not ordinarily stop to think that we and the space-based electronic laboratories that designed such equipment owe it ultimately to experiments like that of the Apollo 14 astronauts with the suprathermal ion detector and cold cathode ion gauge for measuring ion flux density and charge in the lunar environment that was part of their experiment package.

“Similarly we do not think of the fact that the Apollos water consumption measurement test was one of the steps in bringing us a technology of lifesupport systems that enabled us to mend and control a planet-wide ecology that had been ravaged and allowed to fall into disarray.

“Of the $21.75 billion that had been spent up through the flight of Apollo 14 by the space program, fully three quarters, or more than $15 billion had been spent in basic research that was to help make possible cures for the very ills the program’s critics would have taken program funds to attack by more primitive 1971 methods. It was that these critics were wrong as much they suffered from a lack of information about the application of space program research to the very areas with which they themselves were concerned !

“Curiously it was Apollo 14 itself which marked the turning point. It was the greatest attendance over at a space launching, 1700 men and women at the press site, 7000 at the VIP site, and more than a million others watching in boats, on land, lined up elbow to elbow along causeways and beaches to observe the massive white tower spurt orange flames the distance of its own height along the ground then lift brilliantly from the pad and vanish into the cloud cover.

“After the launch the word began to spread. No one knew how. Word about the real values of man’s reaching into the hard vacuum of space for new laboratory tools to carve out the answers to problems that had already threatened to grow too big to be solved on earth itself.
That was the word that spread: and with it information of what the work of the astronauts and others meant or promised. So that today in 1991 we are not only all well-fed, housed and finally at peace with each other, but also face to face with the greatest future ever envisioned by man…”