AH Challenge: Competitive Space Race, Post Apollo

Following the Apollo landings, the space race and interest in space itself died off heavily. Plans for a second run of the Saturn rockets (albeit modified as they'd be) were canceled, there were to be no massive space stations or networks of space stations (focus was limited to Skylab -which was originally planned to be multiple stations before being cut to one and was itself abandoned-, and Mir, which would come almost two decades after Apollo), no moon bases, no Mars landings, nor anything further out as may have been possible, and instead focus was turned on a limited sphere with the utilization of the spaceshuttle.

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to have space race competition between the super powers and a strong presence in space exploration continue past Apollo, preferably with a POD either post 1965 or post 1969.
 

Thande

Donor
Strictly speaking, it did carry on, in terms of competing space stations and space shuttles. Only the Soviets worked mostly on stations and the US worked mostly on the shuttle before they decided to trade places at the last minute. If the US had gone for Saturn-2, Apollo Applications, and so on instead of the shuttle and had directly competed with the Soviets for space stations...we'd still be stuck in LEO but there would be a lot more space stations.
 
Following the Apollo landings, the space race and interest in space itself died off heavily. Plans for a second run of the Saturn rockets (albeit modified as they'd be) were canceled, there were to be no massive space stations or networks of space stations (focus was limited to Skylab -which was originally planned to be multiple stations before being cut to one and was itself abandoned-, and Mir, which would come almost two decades after Apollo), no moon bases, no Mars landings, nor anything further out as may have been possible, and instead focus was turned on a limited sphere with the utilization of the spaceshuttle.

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to have space race competition between the super powers and a strong presence in space exploration continue past Apollo, preferably with a POD either post 1965 or post 1969.

No 90-day study in 1989, for one. Its price tag of $450 Billion turned congress off funding for a long time.

Perhaps you can have the Russians declare, "OK, you put man on moon, we put man on Mars!", fueling a race for Mars during the 1970s.
 

Archibald

Banned
Space Shuttle butterflied away ? Ok, but before 1972. After that, even VP Walter Mondale failed to stop it.

I think the LEO space station was quite unavoidable as the next step after Apollo.
Mir: 1976-2001. Freedom-Alpha-ISS: 1984-2020 !

You need ten years to design a space station, plus a useful life of 15 years. Total= + 25 years !

Here's a tentative timeline based on these numbers.

Mir sounds ok; but one can certainly compress the US space station shedule a lot !

Go the capsule way (instead of shuttle) in 1971.
The capsule is cheap enough so that NASA can build its own Mir. Let's say "eight years to design it" and there you are, 1980.

Useful life: 15 years. NASA's Mir is desorbited around 1995.

So, what's next ? Big problem: 1995 is right in the middle of Clinton presidency.
Well, uncle Bill was not exactly a space enthusiast, and Dan Goldin, a pain in the... as* to deal with.

So one has to wait until 2001 and George W. Bush election and pray for an early VSE - Vision for Space Exploration.

The good thing: your capsule already exist, no need to reinvent the wheel with Orion.

A good way to proceed toward a viable architecture: the NEXT studies
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/521/1

What makes the DPT different than previous NASA studies of lunar and Mars exploration conducted in the 1990s is that the operation was initiated by the NASA administrator and based primarily in NASA Headquarters.

As Polish Eagle noted, the SEI was a disaster. The main reason was it was imagined at the Johnson Space Center - not the most innovative NASA center.

Second difference
Science-driven

The charter of the DPT stressed that their project would be “science-driven and technology-enabled.” (...) this concept for human spaceflight, which was a major philosophical shift in the way that NASA justified flying humans in space.

(...) As NASA evolved, engineering achievement became the primary goal of human spaceflight, and scientific research became the primary goal of robotic spaceflight.

This is not to say that human spaceflight did not have a scientific component—the Apollo lunar landings, although pursued for prestige goals, nevertheless returned substantial scientific information about the Earth’s moon.

Similarly, robot probes could fulfill propaganda and engineering goals.

By the shuttle era human spaceflight had only a small scientific component. The shuttle itself was developed as a space truck, to haul payloads in and out of Earth orbit. These included scientific payloads, some of which were operated in the shuttle’s payload bay, such as dedicated life sciences missions. But science did not justify the shuttle.

The space station was started in the first Reagan administration for numerous reasons, including demonstrating that the West was united against the Soviet Union.
Scientific discovery was certainly one component of the space station’s justification, but it was only one among several.
Later, as the space station evolved, scientific research became a more public—and political—justification for the station, but it was not the primary reason for the project. Science initially influenced, but certainly did not drive the station design, and it was quickly discarded when costs became too high. Despite years of operation, almost no science has been conducted on the space station.


When science was associated with human spaceflight, it was narrowly applied to mean primarily the study of human biology in space, and to a lesser extent the study of microgravity and materials, such as crystal growth experiments, combustion, or fluid transfer.

As a result, the primary justification for human spaceflight through the 1960s and up to the creation of the Decadal Planning Team had been prestige. The United States flew astronauts in space primarily to demonstrate American technological capability, not to achieve scientific results.

The two elements makes the NEXT studies the anti-Apollo / Shuttle /ISS program.
Cheap, interesting, with a good rationale behind it.
 
Last edited:
Space Shuttle butterflied away ? Ok, but before 1972. After that, even VP Walter Mondale failed to stop it.

I think the LEO space station was quite unavoidable as the next step after Apollo.
Mir: 1976-2001. Freedom-Alpha-ISS: 1984-2020 !

You need ten years to design a space station, plus a useful life of 15 years. Total= + 25 years !

Here's a tentative timeline based on these numbers.

Mir sounds ok; but one can certainly compress the US space station shedule a lot !

Go the capsule way (instead of shuttle) in 1971.
The capsule is cheap enough so that NASA can build its own Mir. Let's say "eight years to design it" and there you are, 1980.

Useful life: 15 years. NASA's Mir is desorbited around 1995.

So, what's next ? Big problem: 1995 is right in the middle of Clinton presidency.
Well, uncle Bill was not exactly a space enthusiast, and Dan Goldin, a pain in the... as* to deal with.

So one has to wait until 2001 and George W. Bush election and pray for an early VSE - Vision for Space Exploration.

The good thing: your capsule already exist, no need to reinvent the wheel with Orion.

A good way to proceed toward a viable architecture: the NEXT studies
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/521/1



As Polish Eagle noted, the SEI was a disaster. The main reason was it was imagined at the Johnson Space Center - not the most innovative NASA center.

Second difference


The two elements makes the NEXT studies the anti-Apollo / Shuttle /ISS program.
Cheap, interesting, with a good rationale behind it.

North American did delevop a reuseable Apollo capsule concept, which basically had the Command/Service module becoming one unit, which had a retractable wing system, skids, a partionally jettisonable rocket nozzle, & a rogallo wing/parafoil to enable the entire unit to land on prepared runways...
However it was rejected for cost reasons...
 
I really think you have to do something about Vietnam;) Nort, because from 69-73 The Money to propel the manned Space Exploration Project was pretty much nulified by the billions of Dollars being pumped into the War. If we keep forces at the Advisory Level, and there is no Invasion into North Vietnam, I think you could get it accomplished. Also having the Race to the Moon, actually be competetitve would be nice. You know how scared shitless most American's would be if they found out the Russians or the Chinese landed on the moon right after or before us? Just a few thoughts...
 
Following the Apollo landings, the space race and interest in space itself died off heavily. Plans for a second run of the Saturn rockets (albeit modified as they'd be) were canceled, there were to be no massive space stations or networks of space stations (focus was limited to Skylab -which was originally planned to be multiple stations before being cut to one and was itself abandoned-, and Mir, which would come almost two decades after Apollo), no moon bases, no Mars landings, nor anything further out as may have been possible, and instead focus was turned on a limited sphere with the utilization of the spaceshuttle.

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to have space race competition between the super powers and a strong presence in space exploration continue past Apollo, preferably with a POD either post 1965 or post 1969.

The obvious way would be to have the fourth N1 test succeed, as it was literally seconds away from MECO and second-stage ignition. That means the Soviets keep going with that and launch much bigger and better stations sooner than OTL, not to mention possibly launching a lunar mission, though hopefully the engineers will manage to convince the bureaucrats to use a two-launch mission plan. Plus, they won't be wasting HUGE amounts of money on Buran, which they were actually spending the majority of their space program's funding on! With Reagen around, perhaps Saturn V gets revitalized/new Shuttle-Derived Heavy Lift Vehicle in the '80s. This is about the latest you could plausibly revive the Saturn V, after this too many guys are dead and too many of the parts are too obsolete/not manufactured to get anywhere.

Of course, the ideas other people proposed about having Shuttle die early are quite good and in fact what I adopted for my TL about this exact subject :) Historico's idea about preventing the OTL Vietnam War is also good, particularly as without it the major manufacturers are going to be more focused on Apollo (fewer military contracts, you see). As far as resources are concerned, it is always good to remember that Johnson tried to do three super projects in office: Apollo, Vietnam, and Great Society. There weren't really enough resources to do all three, so if you want one to succeed more thoroughly, you need to knock out one of the other two. And the Vietnam War is the easiest and the most obvious of the three.
 

thorr97

Banned
Folks,

As originally planned NASA was aiming for Mars and would get there with three things;

1.) The Space Shuttle

2.) The Space Station

3.) The Mars Mission spacecraft

The Mars Mission spacecraft was envisioned as being to big and complex to economically launch from Earth in one go. Thus it had to be assembled in orbit. Thus the need for a space station from which the construction crews would do their construction and assembly work on the Mars spacecraft. Thus the need for a space shuttle to economically loft both the materials and personnel needed for both the space station and the Mars Mission spacecraft.

The end result would be a more or less permanent manned presence in space and the infrastructure necessary to support it.

Also at this time the space shuttle was envisioned as being 100% reusable and also being a very simple and efficient system. It'd launch from Kennedy and Kennedy alone and would even have jets to provide power on landing.

When presented with the bill for all this, the Nixon administration said "Nope, can't afford it. At least not all of it - pick one part of it and we'll give it a go."

Thus, NASA picked the space shuttle as it knew getting that in place would enable the rest.

Then NASA's funding got cut, and cut, and cut. It got to the point that it could not afford to develop even just the space shuttle. At least not on its own so it had to find some other "customer" to share the cost. Of course, that customer (the US Air Force / DoD) had its own set of requirements for the system it was paying to build. This soon meant that the shuttle had to have a "cross-range" capability (i.e. to change orbits while in orbit) and be launchable from other places than just the Cape. That meant the shuttle became much more complex and heavier and away went the powered landings and such.

So, if you're gonna keep the space race going you gotta get around all of this.

Madoc
 
Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to have space race competition between the super powers and a strong presence in space exploration continue past Apollo, preferably with a POD either post 1965 or post 1969.

If you want the space race to continue, the Soviets have to still be in the race come 1969. There's no way to do that post 1969, but you can make it happen post '65. It requires a successful manned Zond mission and, perhaps, a successful demonstration of the N1 and/or the UR-700. Of course, I don't think the latter is possible, cool as it would be.

Basically, the Soviets have to do well enough that they can't pretend they never intended to go to the moon, which is basically what happened after Apollo 8.

A smoother transition between Khruschev and Breshnev would help. It would keep the focus and resources on space travel.
 
Top