spaaaaace

The Dream Survives A Space Alternate History by @e of pi, @TimothyC, & @Usili Original Image from Advertisement from Rockwell. OMNI October 1978, p 26 Highest Resolution version from Dave Cross's Flickr "A Spaceship Has Landed On Earth", 2011-07-08 Archived Copy here.

While I am aware that the Soviet military considered the R-7 unfit as an ICBM, it nonetheless shined as a space launcher, however, was it a good, upgradeable design compared to what other alternatives were available during the 50s? I do get the impression that Korolev from the start designed...

I am not sure if this was asked before as I couldn't find any thread about it, but, what if there was no Saturn rocket family? Yes, I know the easy option, call it something else and done, no Saturn family of rockets. Which is not what I am looking for, I've seen some threads talking about no...

What if the Space Race never ended? What if the Space Race continued? What if NASA didn't land a man on the Moon first? What if Soviet Russia did? What if Sergei Korolev never died, causing Russia to land on the Moon, which in turn causes the United States to try and out compete Russia, in turn...

So, lately I have been thinking about the potential for a timeline following a different path for the US aerospace where ULA isn't formed in 2005 and thought I'd see what folk thought about my ideas. Some background: in OTL, after Boeing was caught committing corporate espionage to win the...

Post 0: Introduction Reading about the history of spaceflight, Gemini stands out as an odd duck. It is a program which post-dates the approval of Apollo as a three-person capsule, and was initially supposed to be a minor upgrade to Mercury. Even the addition of a second seat was something its...

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...

So, as I understand it, the 1968 was a pretty close election. If Johnson had handled Vietnam better, it seems to me that he could have won it. And even if he hadn't, had he let Humphrey be his own man, it seems to me that the VP could have gotten the votes to secure the presidency. So what...

With a PoD after 1900, how early could we get large-scale interplanetary spaceflight? Supposing people generally supported it, what sort of scientific discoveries and technological development are necessary for it to be technologically and economically doable? And how can we get that public...

With no PoDs prior to the Apollo 11 mission in 1969, how can we have a manned base on the moon, or the start of one, within the next 50 years or as soon as possible?

What happened to Bold They Rise? My ideas for that ran out for now. But it isn’t dead. What’s this one about? OBL gets killed in ‘85. A host of changes follows,because butterflies. Buran,eh? This TL is inspired by The Snow Flies, and I had a PM conversation with Nixonshead about...

Hello, everyone! Welcome to yet-another @e of pi spaceflight thread. This one is going to be a bit of an experiment for me--a bit more personal, and focused on a much most recent point of departure. In fact, as everything in this timeline will be happening within the era of the "modern"...

Rockwell Flyer: The Story of the X-33 and Beyond American Rocket News January 2, 2006 Written by Arnold Holmes With the start of Congressional hearings on the factors relating to the decisions involved in the Exploration Systems Architecture, we here at American Rocket News feel it is...

Good evening, everyone! I know it's been a little while since @Polish Eagle and I finished writing Right Side Up (and we're both pleased to thank everyone who offered their votes at the Turtledoves this year). That said, I'm proud to present the following, which is something of a spiritual...

Over in the "Carter lets the Space Shuttle die" thread the conversation has been drifting towards a more general discussion on alternate space shuttles. So here's a new thread for alternate space shuttles, I'm especially interested in what kind of alternatives would be possible with a PoD AFTER...

For those who don't know what the HL-20 is, some links: http://www.astronautix.com/h/hl-20.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HL-20_Personnel_Launch_System https://falsesteps.wordpress.com/2012/12/09/hl-20hl-42-the-personnel-launch-system/ It seems this small spaceplane from the 80s had a...

In the early years of transitioning from a military-led space program to a NASA led space program, as NASA was collecting pieces of the military space programs (such as Von Braun's team from the Army and the F-1 engine from the USAF), the USAF apparently considered giving NASA the Dynasoar space...

In February 1962 Nikita Khrushchev organized a meeting of the USSR’s Defense Council with the main missile designers in the Soviet Union. In attendance were Chelomei, Korolev and, courtesy of Glushko's maneuverings, Mikhail Yangel. At stake was who would get to design the USSR's heavy lift...

The HL-10 was one of the lifting bodies NASA investigated during the 60s, and apparently, it almost flew as a spacecraft. So what if Reed and von Braun had gotten their way, and the HL-10 got a layer of ablative heat-shield and flew on at least one of the Saturn V rockets in the 70s? fasquardon

So according to this article on Ars Technica, in June of 1979, the Space Shuttle was in serious trouble. The program was suffering from serious budget over-runs and, if NASA funding were to remain the same or fall in line with the contraction of government spending that was on its way in 1980...