1970s Space War

A lot of military space projects were canceled on both sides of the Cold War. What POD would be necessary for this to not be the case, and if so how would a fully-loaded space war between the superpowers really go down? Let's assume nukes are on the table. For the timeframe I am thinking somewhere between 1973 and '77.
 
Any space warfare in a cold war gone hot would likely be ABM operations as well as downing of spy satellites. Though I'd imagine this would still result in MAD, as both the comblock and NATO have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the planet, and even if a large chunk of those were intercepted beforehand, you can expect the earth to become an irradiated hellhole.
 
Anti-satellite weapons everywhere. All of those communications, weather, and especially spy satellites are targets which are best to take out as soon as possible. Space stations will also be destroyed, so Skylab and any Salyut stations are gone. Since either side will want satellites for strategic purposes, they'll need to replace the ones being shot down, so I could see some very large rockets (like Sea Dragon) being used to replace all the satellites being shot down. The trickier satellites to shoot down are the ones at geostationary orbits like GPS satellites. Those would require more advanced ASAT systems, but is still something that could be done. Maybe to avoid even these, you could put some equipment on the Moon that would perform the same role as these satellites.

I don't see any other operations in space besides those related to launching and downing satellites. Space planes or other space weaponry has no value outside of destroying or protecting satellites, not when you have endless amounts of nuclear missiles.

Biggest problem is all the satellite debris might cause Kessler syndrome to deny space to everyone.
 
Anti-satellite weapons everywhere. All of those communications, weather, and especially spy satellites are targets which are best to take out as soon as possible. Space stations will also be destroyed, so Skylab and any Salyut stations are gone. Since either side will want satellites for strategic purposes, they'll need to replace the ones being shot down, so I could see some very large rockets (like Sea Dragon) being used to replace all the satellites being shot down. The trickier satellites to shoot down are the ones at geostationary orbits like GPS satellites. Those would require more advanced ASAT systems, but is still something that could be done. Maybe to avoid even these, you could put some equipment on the Moon that would perform the same role as these satellites.

I don't see any other operations in space besides those related to launching and downing satellites. Space planes or other space weaponry has no value outside of destroying or protecting satellites, not when you have endless amounts of nuclear missiles.

Biggest problem is all the satellite debris might cause Kessler syndrome to deny space to everyone.

Am I the only one that sees the irony that the hardest satellite to shoot down is the GPS?
 
Am I the only one that sees the irony that the hardest satellite to shoot down is the GPS?

The hardest would actually be the ones at geosynchronous orbit (I made a mistake in my previous post), but a lot of spy satellites orbited and orbit much lower than the GPS satellites.

In any case, there aren't a lot of satellites you wouldn't want to shoot down.
 
POD necessary? Hm. At the minimum no Cuban missile crisis, no Vietnam, no Six Days' War, no Prague Spring- you need a less than bi- polar cold war, you need some factor to stop the superpowers engaging in proxy wars and continuing to challenge each other directly on the high frontier.

Given the enormous- nigh incalculable- costs of direct conflict, as long as both sides had sane leadership it was never going to end in kaboom; considering intelligence, propaganda and disinformation efforts on both sides, they were both trying to make it end politically- first side to have the people lose confidence in the government, or first government to lose confidence in itself, loses the Cold War.

Prestige was such an important tool- again, I think you need both superpowers to have open flanks; someone who can expose, be offended by, and do something effectual about both sides' habit of using third world countries as pawns, to their almost invariable great misery and distress. If the UN actually had teeth, maybe. A multipolar world, maybe.

Give them no choice but to confront directly with open, direct war basically suicidal, make earthbound conflicts harder to get away with, and national achievement the measure, and you might see a lot more happening in space. Somehow blunder into war despite that, and there you go.

Now what sort of space program and presence you have under those conditions, may easily differ drastically- and don't forget some of those projects like ROMBUS were wibblingly bonkers- then you, actually some of those cancellations made perfect sense from the "let's not all explode" point of view, because they included systems that would have been phenomenally destabilising.

Things that were designed to be used in nuclear surprise attack and decapitation, like the Soviet fractional- orbital bombardment system and the American Dyna- Soar. No- one in a multipolar world would have let them fly. No- one in our bipolar world did.

They would spawn a situation where both sides could have reason to believe they could actually win a nuclear war- if they get their shots off first. This is not a happy situation, or a stable one.
 
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