AHC: Spaceflight Screw

What it says on the tin. However, there has to be some spaceflight existant, so you can't have a nuclear war.

Your POD is after the landing of Vostok 1.
 
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Saphroneth

Banned
Hmmm...
What about a Kessler event early on? Say, someone builds a big brute-force launch system, and half a dozen big satellites get put up there before a Kessler event kicks off and fills the lower orbitals for over half a century...
 
A bit ASB, but an unknown and unbeatable band of radiation akin to the Van Allen belt that sickens or kills astronauts and cosmonauts alike would do it.
 
I don't think it can be done. The potential applications of spaceflight are too obvious, so unless the overall technological level is kept at 1930s levels, countries and corporations will want stuff in orbit.
 
It depends.

There really is far too much economic advantage in ComSats, weather sats, etc., etc., for those not to happen. At least with a PoD that late.

However MANNED (crewed, if you will) spaceflight is almost purely a prestige project, and produces little science and most of that is related to Man-in-space (effects of zero g on health, and so on - which has little application if you don't have crewed spaceflight.)

Have Kennedy not issue the lunar landing challenge, and (crewed) spaceflight is reduced to intermittently staffed space stations that don't justify the expense invested, so both sides eventually just drop them.

And, if anyone points out the shuttle servicing of Hubble as a counter example, well, you could have launched a SECOND Hubble for the cost of those servicing missions.
 
In before someone says OTL ... :rolleyes:

Seriously though, it seems like changing the geopolitical circumstances would mean more than any sort of scientific setback. Ratchet down the tension between the USA and the USSR (or have a Soviet Civil War) and you kill public support for Gemini and Apollo as a way to Beat the Evil Commies™.

Low earth orbit unmanned equipment is pretty well inevitable, because it's profitable for businesses, but the rest of it could easily be seen as a vanity project.
 
I think we could combine Saphroneth's and irishparadox's ideas.

Change the geopolitical situation, but in the opposite direction, so that the world's strongest nations are more hostile towards each other than OTL's USA and USSR. In that case, if both sides are using satellites to attempt to spy on each other without each other knowing (that part is crucial), there could be sufficiently poor communication between the two sides as to whose satellites have which particular orbital paths (because they wouldn't want to reveal it) that one satellite is sent up which collides with another from a different nation, and then, if this happens sufficiently late in time that there are plenty of other satellites up already, more and more satellites are wrecked by the pieces of the ones that have already collided, giving a positive feedback loop which prohibits almost any further satellites or even shuttles, for fear of them being destroyed by fast-moving debris from previously destroyed satellites that is still in orbit. That has the advantage over merely making space exploration less well-funded because in the latter case space exploration might be better-funded in later years, whereas in this case even if it's better-funded it becomes extremely difficult.
 

shiftygiant

Gone Fishin'
Johnson isn't able to save NASA from Congressional Investigation following Apollo 1, and it's budget is crippled to the point where it is unable to accomplish even a fraction of what it did IOTL, eventually merging it with DARPA. The ESRO and ELDO merge earlier into a more insecure ESA, with a tighter budget. All you need is one chairman to gamble everything on a manned mission, and have that mission fail to cripple the ESA. The Russian's continue to have failures with the N-1, but when it comes to the collapses, it goes down harder, destroying any economic foundation needed for space travels. China also slides into a costly internal conflict, and India enters a full scale war with Marxist rebels.
 
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