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Even if the US doesn't enter the war, they'll still be exporting aircraft. And an isolationist US is an easy place to sell a long range bomber. So, it's not impossible that Boeing would still be funded to develop the B-29, and export it right away.

The JPL solar sail was probably a no-go as it was just too expensive. Also, in the late 1970s/early 1980s, NASA wanted to launch literally everything on Shuttle, so something using the Shuttle is pretty much a requirement. The best bet would probably be something similar to Pioneer Venus, a...

And IIRC, treaties currently limit Russia to 500 ICBMs, many of which date back to Brezhnev and probably won't work anyway if fired. By the end of the 21st century, ICBMs will probably be obsolete to distributed defense networks. To have that happen in the 20th century is difficult, not least...

Von Karman's JPL was already working on a large liquid rocket (contract let in 1944): http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/corporal.htm And Convair started on what would become the Atlas ICBM contract in 1946: http://www.astronautix.com/fam/atlas.htm So ICBMs will continue apace without...

Well then, that's it. How do you leverage the silver mines to turn Bolivia into a financial hub? One answer might be that you make it tax haven in the 1930s, initially for the (foreign) owners of the the silver mines. When the war starts, money flees Switzerland (fearing invasion), and much...

pdf27, I forget, is Martin Baker still muddling along with the MB-2?

There is a difference between wartime ASAP engineering (where the plane would probably get shot down before having a fatigue failure) and postwar civilian engineering (where a single crash could doom a company). The Comet was designed by engineers who still had the former mentality, but by the...

That sounds like it would make a great TL, and a horrifying reality, both probably ending in an extremely violent communist coup in the 1960s...

I think you are not quite grasping the post-German defeat situation. The Entente will probably end up occupying all of Germany and Austria, and whatever rump Poland they can (and doing their best to stir up Polish nationalism in Soviet Poland). Both the Romania-Italy-Yugoslavia block and the...

Was there anyone else on the left who could have pulled a reverse Hitler, that is unite (briefly) most of the left parties (SDP, Communists, etc) behind him?

Well, they had something close enough: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Crew_Escape_Suit The real trick is getting out of the Shuttle. That's where the pole comes in: http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/shuttle/reference/shutref/escape/inflight.html For a nominal deployment of the pole, they...

IIRC, Magnificent was getting ready to be depolyed to Korea right when the armistice was signed. That probably the easiest without a major PoD.

In the broader context, this was near the height of USSR-PRC tensions, and while DPRK was definately on the PRC side, PRC was not nessisarily on theirs. So, you could have a case where the PRC give massive support to the DPRK, and Korea looks like Vietnam. IMHO, more interesting would be...

Cold Star: Part 1 September 1964 Baikonur, Kazakh SSR, USSR "What? Why?" Chelomei looked with with desperation at Korolev, clearly wondering if his rival had gotten the meeting canceled behind his back. "Khrushchev is just too busy, and I wouldn't worry too much. Word is, he's not...

There wouldn't be shuttles as we know them in a Mars landing TL, nor stations (e.g. Salyuts/Almaz and MOL). They cost too way much in addition to the Mars project. The US would probably develop a lower-cost version of Saturn V. That would probably mean a parachute-recovered first stage, and a...

Von Braun's circa-1969 plan was for a Mars landing in 1986, so that's the hard No-Earlier-Than date. That would be achievable, if (and probably only if) they used nuclear thermal rockets. So, there is a small-but-nonzero chance that the technology could pull it off before 1990. Politically, a...

The fact that previous earthquakes happened says nothing about preparedness. Most of the really high-risk buildings have been built since the quakes you mentioned, and the lull in activity means that we really don't know how they will respond. There are suffcient stresses in the San Andreas for...

There were a lot of movie-type people going through Flagstaff at the time, as it was the last overnight stop on the ATSF rail line before Los Angles. In the Lowell Observatory guest book, Albert Einstein and Carry Grant are a few pages from each other. Flagstaff would be a great place to shoot...

You'd have the frozen corpse of a dead cartoonist. Not terribly useful.

And that's the real root of th problem: the famine was so bad because Ireland was so poor and much of the economy was still sustance farming, mostly of potatoes. The real solution would be to industrialize the Irish economy, something which is still only gradually happening today. I'm not sure...