SDI is likely to be cut back more from the increasing cost more than anything else. I'd expect it to transition as it historically did to a much more limited, ground based system. The Peacekeeper rail garrison was always a bad idea, and if deployed would have locked up the US rail network inside of about 48 hours, and done so in such a way that it would take weeks to get trains moving again, which is bad for everyone. The A-12 has its own programmatic issues, and I don't disagree that it goes away. Where I disagree with you is on the B-2 program. I think that with an opposition that isn't imploding as hard or as fast as OTL, the 1992 reduction from 75 to 20/21 airframes doesn't happen, leaving the USAF with a larger than OTL, but still relatively small force. I have very little reason to assume that other military R&D programs would not proceed as they did in OTL, but numbers of aircraft purchased are likely to be higher (370 F-22s instead of 177 for example).
The exact path of the space program is going to be entirely dependent on who wins in 1992, as the Clinton administration undertook a major review of the station program that resulted in the ISS we have today.
The tech wasn’t there, SDI was a 30 billion dollar boondoggle. The tech that worked was already in use. It was a fantasy. Like ABL later on as much as I loved the plane with only one it is pointless.
Reagan said he wanted to avoid nuclear Armageddon, critics called the Strategic Defense Initiative far-fetched and expensive.
www.history.com
From the History Channel on SDI
Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War,Frances Fitzgerald writes that “a perfect antiballistic missile defense was beyond the reach of technology. It was just a story, and yet to trust the polls, the idea had great popular appeal in the mid-’80s, and many Americans believed such a thing could be built. In that sense the Strategic Defense Initiative was Reagan’s greatest triumph as an actor-storyteller.”
The main issue I have with the B2 is with the Russians selling much of their military, is a 700 million dollars per unit, and that flyaway cost, not with upgrades and such. I mean the only program that dwarfs the B2 program now is the F35...
What would be the justification for more stealth bombers? I just don’t see it with a weakened Russia and China still relatively weak.
But an area I will say budgets should be cut heavily is the intelligence budget, with the Russians licking their wounds why keep intelligence budgets at the same levels? I mean we can cutback in budgets in intel like Central and South America, Africa, and so forth.
