Well it'd be a very small front in a much larger war.
I stand by my comment since it would not be a "front" at all
Thanks for showing me that! I'd never heard of it before.
No problem
Suppose WWII ends differently, where no nukes are ever used. Butterfly away the Rosenbergs so that their is no nuclear arms race. Is Orion now politically feasible, or is any large space program out of the question now that there's no soviet nuclear threat?
Well arguably you need the advanced work on nuclear weapons to get the capability of making pulse units and then once 'someone' has nukes the race is on but lets also point out that Truman TOLD Stalin the US was developing nuclear weapons which made it a priority for Stalin whether we actually used them or not. Lastly while not necessarily 'inevitable' the understanding of the basics of making a 'simple' (gun-type) nuclear weapon were clear by the late 1930 in the physics community. The sticking point was the calculations for critical mass, (the Germans got that one wrong) and the industrial and economic capacity to build and support the infrastructure to make such weapons, (both Germany and Japan lost that capability early on while Russia had to wait till the war was over to recover and rebuild to that capacity) so it ends up coming down to the will to do so. And once you actually dig in and begin to study the process the implosion type bomb quickly comes to the fore as the most efficient and practical type to build. And you pretty much need an implosion type to get a decent pulse unit.
Given all that you still face the problem that building an Orion is essentially giving up on any possibility of controlling nuclear proliferation and dissemination, something that even today is politically unacceptable. Now don't get me wrong as I feel it is VERY much something that could happen. Imagine if the Tunguska meteor had been a few minutes off back in 1908 and Saint Petersburg had been wiped off the face of the Earth by a 'stray' rock from space...
As for a space program in and of itself that's something that follows heavy development of ballistic missile technology. As it was in OTL no one really saw a pressing need for such development even though the basic technology was maturing in the 1920s. Other than Germany that is and they specifically did so in an attempt to overcome the limits of the Versailles Treaty articles on artillery. They spent the current equivalent of a couple of billion dollars even though it was clear the actual utility was questionable and then reduced support for the project once war began and the treaty no longer mattered. Now no matter how one feels about Space Travel it is pretty clear that the really effective weapons that came out of Peenemunde was NOT the V2 or related rocket technology itself but the transference from amateurs in a garage hand building individual rockets to the beginnings of industrialization and mass production of missile and rocket technology.
That can't be overstated, it was a literal paradigm shift in both the public and political acceptance of missiles, rockets and space travel. Even after WWII for the most part while 'accepted' in general the utility and development of missiles beyond a tactical level still lagged. Meanwhile the US was producing intercontinental bombers in large numbers and the leadership of the USSR were aware they could not reasonably hope to meet that challenge head to head. So they went for ballistic missiles instead. And as they say...
So in essence without WWI and it's aftermath it is likely that missile and rocket technology would have remained much longer at a lower level of development with all that implies for space travel itself.
(Ironically the DAY before Sputnik went up the US Department of Defense by Presidential order directed ALL Senior officers and officials to STOP mentioning space travel and satellites in public speeches or face penalty
Space travel could have been much slower than OTL's development, (my favorite example is Alan Sheppard flying suborbital before Gagarin's orbital flight which would have had a major effect on the US effort) or it could have developed faster if the need was clear. (See above about Tunguska
Probably a more pointed bit though is having a 'battle' in space is VERY hard as "killing" something that can actually be launched from the surface of the Earth into space is relatively easy. (Even Orion as I shouldn't need to point out your also tossing shape-charge nuclear weapons around willy-nilly
Love that video, I was wondering if someone would post it!
I would imagine that a shuttle could be used for troop transport, or for raiding a station with a boarding party. That's a little ASB though, I'll admit!
The Shuttle's not really a good drop ship though. (http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/astromilitary.php)
Randy