But this would be very hard to justify. Orbital weapons have been banned for a good reason.
Largely because they are extortionately expensive, extremely limited, stupidly vulnerable, easy to counter, but there's the risk the other side might find a way to make them work and orbital weapons in space reduces the "time before you must completely commit to mass genocide" from 30 minutes to around 8 minutes, which is far less time to figure out if you are seeing an actual enemy attack or another computer glitch... (Well, I wouldn't trust my stated times too much, butorbital weapons do really cut down the time you have to figure out if it was all a misunderstanding or the enemy really have decided to kill everyone.)
political impulse like the interdictions of treaty of versailles, that push Germany into development of Rocket technology.
Only German rocket technology wasn't much different to American, British or Soviet rocket technology. They were just desperate enough to commit serious resources to actually building rockets.
People already had a little interest in rockets before WW2, not much, but enough to keep development inching forwards and it was pretty clear that if people wanted to go into space, this was the way to do it.
And without WW2 pushing the development of the long-range bomber to absurd lengths, when nukes are inevitably developed (though likely this happens later without WW2), the IRBM and ICBM likely emerge much faster since there's less of a bomber faction to oppose it. Indeed, in the US there is likely no separate air force without WW2, removing 99% of the political opposition IRBMs and ICMBs faced.
See the World Wars were technological catalyst needed for Space flight
I do not see evidence for this. The technologies needed for space flight are more broad than only rocket technology and metallurgy. And for every technology that developed faster during the wars, there are many more that were held back. Or were held back by over-developed technologies that emerged from the wartime R&D programs, like internal combustion engine-driven aircraft after WW2. Even the push WW2 gave to the genuinely ground-breaking nuclear field arguably has led to the retardation of nuclear engineering overall since the war has ended, since the war led to a heavy focus on the weapon side of the field and early reactors were designed to develop plutonium for cheap, which were then scaled up too quickly to designs like the flammable Windscale piles in the UK and the positive void coefficient Soviet RMBK reactors which had obvious political results when they inevitably went wrong.
Britain might have put more R&D into computers than they otherwise would have, but the Soviets were definitely held back. The Germans may have edged a head in rocketry, but I don't see anything in a V2 that US or Soviet engineers couldn't have figured out in a few years, and it's entirely possible that without the focus on copying the V2 and doing what the Germans advised, both countries engineers might have advanced faster. And that's without touching on the colossal damage both world wars did to the populations of Eurasia. How many key scientists and engineers dies in the death camps? How many starved in Soviet villages? Or were shot fighting for one side or another? How many starved with as half of the Iranian population during the famine caused in that country by WW1? How many died in Poland during the millions that country would lose in WW1 and the millions more that country would lose in WW2?
I say again, there is no evidence. Western Europe recovered economically from WW2 in the 1980s. The FSU still hasn't recovered from the war economically. Germany, Eastern Europe, the ex-Soviet populations, Japan and the world Jewish population all still bear visible demographic wounds. In the Jewish case, that wound is there being 40-60 million fewer Jews in the world than we estimate there would have been without WW2. Given that these are all populations and economies that we would expect to be at the forefront of science and engineering during the 20th Century (as indeed they all were even with WW2), it's hard to imagine how we haven't lost out enormously.
At the very best, all we can say is that the World Wars
may have advanced technology (because it's rather hard to prove what would have happened without them, human technological advancement being the product of a number of very complex processes interacting and the sheer damage the wars inflicted being well beyond the capacity of any human mind to imagine). That the wars definitely did lead to technology advancing faster is the sort of wishful thinking that I really think we all need to wean ourselves off of.
For all we know, we missed out on a timeline where Weimar Germany continued being a fairly normal country, rocketry was less advanced in the 40s, a bit less advanced in the 50s, equal to OTL's rocket tech in the 60s, more advanced by the 70s and by the 80s humans started to seriously explore the deep solar system with probes with far superior electronics and nuclear Earth Orbit-to-Luna shuttles have made mining our nearest neighbour practical enough that by the 90s there were a couple major powers with moon bases mining there.
fasquardon
