AHC: Poland can into space.

My hunch is that it would be very difficult without Russian support - the United States can't send people into space without Russian support today, Poland would find it harder to go it alone. I assume you're talking about sending people into space rather than just satellites.

My understanding is that unlike Ukraine, the Soviets didn't station substantial nuclear forces in Poland during the Cold War. If they had done so you could imagine a modest Polish satellite launch programme growing from the remnants of the Soviet Union's missile force left behind in Poland after they withdrew in 1992.

Perhaps Lech Walesa agrees to let Russia build a substantial satellite launch facility in Poland - I have no idea why the Russians would do this, let's imagine that the soil in Poland has special magnetic properties that make it easier to launch satellites. Or that the Russian rockets are incredibly unsafe, so the Russians want to get them off Russian soil. It would be staffed with Polish workers, equals lots of jobs, in exchange for agreeing not to join NATO for twenty-five years, or for allowing Soviet troops in East Germany free passage through Poland back to the crumbling USSR.

In which case it would be a Russian/Polish facility, unless the final collapse of the USSR leaves the plant abandoned to Poland. Fast-forward to today and Poland is now a major component of the European Space Agency (in our world they joined in 2012).

As with everything the key problem is the economy. If Poland found a massive oil reservoir under Poland, or incontrovertible evidence of massive oil deposits on the Moon - that no-one else was aware of - Poland may well now into space.

Or perhaps while growing up Lech Walesa is a massive fan of science fiction, and decides that Poland needs to make its mark on the world with satellites. The problem with this idea is that Walesa would have grown up with Eastern European science fiction, which was grim and existential, so as an adult he would probably be terrified of the unknowable mysteries of space and would hate the thought of going there.

I've just discovered that there really is a Polish space agency. It's called POLSA. It was founded in 2014. "Aspiration of the Agency is that in 2030 Polish space sector will be in selected areas fully competitive on a global scale. We should be able to ensure the independence of Poland in the access and use of satellite data", which almost implies that they want to launch a Polish rival of GPS. In case the Polish army gets lost in Poland, I don't know.

I learn from Wikipedia that Mirosław Hermaszewski is the only Polish person to have gone into space. He spent seven days in space on board Soyuz 30 in 1979. He shared the station with Pyotr Klimuk of Belarus. Imagine if the pair of them had declared independence from the Soviet Union, with Soyuz 30 becoming a new independent state. Resupply would be hard and of course replenishing the population would be extremely difficult, but assuming Klimuk agrees to become a Polish national - and I see no reason why he shouldn't - Poland might already have been in space since 1979. Just one tiny decision prevented that from happening.
 
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WI the POD is in 1945, when the Allies include some Baltic Islands in post-War Poland?
One of those - newly Polish - islands is pennemunde.
In this ATL Russia and WALLIES are too exhausted to care about developing any new weapons, so leave Polish and German scientists alone while the putter away on an obscure island. Since neither side invests much money in nuclear weapons, the Cold War becomes more of a Cool War that warms up to a Luke Warm War as economies recover decades later than OTL.
 
Germany triggers war much earlier. France, UK, Czechoslovakia, Poland, etc curb stomp the Nazis. Poland gets territorial concessions. Poland sides with France, Italy, UK against the USSR in a series of conflicts later.
Poland becomes much larger and more powerful state than OTL with considerable influence over independent Baltic States and the Ukraine.
 
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Poland is at the same latitude as Baikonur in Kazakhstan, so there's no benefit to building the Eastern Bloks space launch capability there. Poland has to do it on its own.

My idea would be... Hitler takes power, does the Anschluss/Munich thing and stop, funnels money to prestige projects, one which happens to be von Brauns rocket team. This kickstarts an European wide rocket race because "rockets are the next artillery" or someting like that, and in the course of the development the differnt countries also start shooting people high up into the air (space if high enough). The British had that idea as soon as they looted some V2 rockets in 45.
 
Kinda OR but in the EDC Poland was the first country to manage s suborbital rocket, in the late '40s, with a device rather like Megaroc but based on Russian military rockets of the Eastern War.
 

Ramontxo

Donor
I like the Munich goes wrong POD (that is, right) and there is war. Poland instead of looking for gains from Checoslovaquia thinks in a strategical way and allies itself with Yugoslavia and Rumania to help Praga (sadly improbable up to near ASB I know). Confronting Half of Europe is to much for the Nazis. After a short war the Wermacht deposes Hitler. A proto EU/NATO (without the USA of course) is formed with mutual guaranteed security and economical integration. In the following years a quasi cold war develops between this proto EU and the Soviets. Precluded by treaty to develop advanced rockets the Germans send Von Braun and company to Poland where in the Baltic a dream is born. After sixty years the ESA (European Space Agency) is at the forefront of the exploration of this new frontier. And Polish made rockets serve, between many other uses, to supply the European Lunar Base.
 
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Maybe a successful fall Blau, the eastern front takes much longer, the WAllies land in Normandy as planned and nuke Berlin, the post war iron curtain is much more to the east maybe around poland’s Irl eastern border, being at the front of the curtain the US invest massively in Poland, which manages to have an economic miracle, when/if the USSR falls they soak up Eastern European emigration. They were a major contributor of the European space program initially. By the 2000s+ some space start up in Poland decides to launch a smallsat launcher, Poland, with an economic weight similar to west Germany, would be a decent enough place to undertake such endeavour. It eventually launches from another European spaceport but with entirely polish hardware
 
Poland gets a rough start with the Polish-Soviet war, but the twentieth century slowly gets better from there. Pilsudski managed to annex Danzig during the messy German civil war after Hindenburg was assassinated by a Hitlerite, leaving no clear successor and a decade of "emergency rule" under General Groening.

Between the Austro-fascist "Christianization" of the economy and the professions and the German civil war, Poland returns to its historical role as a safe haven for Jewish refugees like Albert Einstein and Lise Meitner. After increased rearmament and Polish cryptographers' decoding of German and Soviet communiques about increased intra-military cooperation, the government founds the Sklodowska Institute for Physics in Krakow, funding research on a top secret fission weapon that could deter German and Soviet revanchism.

Eventually Polish general staff are faced with the challenges of a delivery system for the results of Project Silesian Steel Alloys, eventually settling for missile bases in the Krakow-Warsaw-Lvov triangle and submarine-based missiles in the Baltic. Thanks to the normalization of relations with Germany after the Kissinger-Brzezinski accords, the end of the Quiet War and the outbreak of the Second Russian revolution, Poland is able to shift military spending towards a "peace dividend" of peaceful scientific research.

After a successful satellite launch by the Copernicus-3 rockets, astronauts Miroslaw Hermaszewski and Zenon Jankowski conduct a successful roundtrip journey to the moon during the Heweliusz 11 mission, collecting samples on a rover designed by Mieczyslaw Bekker.
 
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