AHC/WI: Permanent Moonbase by the Year 2000

Korolev is key

Delay his death long enough to allow the N-1 to succeed at least somewhat, giving the USSR a usable launch vehicle for lunar flights and landings. If the USSR gets to the moon sooner (maybe on the 10th anniversary of the Sputnik launch?) then the US will have no choice but to catch up. Even if a Soviet lunar landing comes after Apollo 11 the race is still on and the chance to head for Mars is certainly up for grabs. Under just the wrong scenario maybe there are delays or even a failed landing or two culminating in a surprise live film of a Red man with a Red flag on the Red planet in 1999? Maybe playing Prince's 1999 during the landing process for extra taunting of the West?
 
The obvious answer to the question why we would have a moon base would be that we found something on the moon that made it worth returning, even staying. In our time line, the Mai reason we didn't go back to the moon after the Apollo project was that we were there, looked around and found nothing worthwhile. But what if we found some moon rocks or minerals with surprising properties? Or we found a way to use the moon As a radio beacon or for a 1970's version of GPS. (we would need a manned base because with the technology available it would still be easier to make a human habitat in zero atmosphere than to make a self-calibrating radio.) Not to mention a moon-based radio telescope...

The cost of returning just about any mineral to Earth would be prohibitive. You'd ALMOST need an alien space ship or something....

The cost of providing material for SPACE use (e.g. O'Neill's PowerSats/L5 colony) is far more viable - compared to launching those materials from Earth.
You do, then, need to have a need for megatonnes of material to be delivered to high orbit. Which is difficult.
 

TFSmith121

Banned
Analogue to McMurdo or Amundsen-Scott requires

Analogue to McMurdo or Amundsen-Scott requires a couple of things:

1) Early detente - if the timeframe is post-1957, Krushchev being deposed early gives JFK an opening in the 1960 presidential to paint Nixon as the cold warrior, as opposed to the Eisenhower Administration being ineffective on national security;

2) Early break between the Soviets and Chinese - again, if the rupture occurs earlier than historically, suddenly rather than only Nixon can go to China, it's only Kennedy can go to Moscow;

3) US goes forward with MISS, Adam, or something similar and beats Vostok; even if suborbital, it takes the "race" element out, as suggested above;

4) As part of the "early" detente, the US and USSR agree to cooperate in LEO and beyond; some sort of Skylab-Soyuz Test Project in the 1970s leads to a joint FLO type project in the 1980s.

5) Glenn-Gagarin Base opens as such in 1989 or so...

6) By 2000, joint occupancy has been going on for more than a decade, and a EOR/Station-earth-moon-transit-LOR/Station architecture is in place; crew at the EOR station is ~6 permanent, ~6 transient; E-M shuttle is 2/6; LO-Station is 3/9; and lunar base is 6/12.

7) Coed crews from the 1980s means little Virginia Aelita Ivanov-Jones is born as the first native "Lunatic" sometime early in the 21st Century.;)

Best,
 
Last edited:
JFK is not assassinated, and serves a second term

JFK was not actually very pro-space. He saw the moon-race as a cheap way to score points off the USSR, and is on record as seeing little utility in anything beyond sending a few guys up to the moon and planting a flag.

In any case, a living (and re-elected) JFK would finish his second term in 1969. How does he stop the space program being cut after he's out of office?

the collapse of the Union (which was probably overdetermined and hence difficult to avoid).

We're still not sure why the Soviet Union did collapse, so it's not really clear how determined its collapse was. I would say "not very determined, requires Gorbachev in power" and Gorbachev getting power was a very low-probability event - Andropov chose him on what seems to have been a chance encounter in the early 80s.

Using a PoD after the launch of Sputnik what is the best way to get a permanent moonbase established by any spacefaring power by the year 2000 that remains in operation to present day OTL? What would its most likely uses be and what would be the impact of having a permanent human presence on the moon?

I think the simplest PoD is for the USSR to make the moon the goal of their space push (rather than Mars) so instead of joining the moon race in 1967 or 1968, they are in the race before the US is. They then have a fighting chance of putting the first men on the moon. If they manage that and if Kennedy has declared his goal of putting an American on the moon first, I think the US is forced to up the ante and say "your stay was too short, it didn't count, we beat you because we got the first man to the moon to stay for a couple months in our moonbase".

Alternatively: Chernenko is succeeded by a less radical person, the Soviet Union reforms, but goes through tough times. They also have an Energia rocket, which is useless for fighting space-war, since neither the US nor the USSR are able to afford space-war. They also can't afford a Mars program, but the leadership decides that using it for a cheap and cheerful moonbase is sufficiently low cost and can be used to pull stunts to distract the people from hardship on the Earth and convince them that even though the Soviets are withdrawing from their Earthly puppet states, they are still a superpower, because look, moonbase.

fasquardon
 
Last edited:
Since the major impetus for the Apollo Program was competition with the USSR, have the Soviets continue the race even after Apollo 11 lands, making their own landings on the Moon.

There would be tremendous political pressure in Congress to continue the race. The likely new goal of this race, a permanent manned base.

This is probably the way forward.

Especially if Korolev get a green light sooner such that the Soviets beat the U.S. to cislunar space, or to the lunar surface.

There's simply no sufficient domestic driver sufficient to get a moonbase. You need some external cause.
 
What lead to the cutbacks and what could provide a persuasive argument for expanding and improving on what AAP was already doing?

The most immediate cause was the Apollo 1 fire. As David Portree of Beyond Apollo has pointed out:

After the fire, NASA came under close scrutiny and was found wanting. Congress could not “punish” the agency by cutting the Apollo Program budget – to do so would have endangered achievement of President Kennedy’s geopolitical goal of a man on the moon by 1970, the goal for which the AS-204 astronauts had given their lives – but it could express its displeasure by cutting programs meant to give NASA a post-Apollo future. The agency’s FY 1968 appropriation was slashed to $4.59 billion, with AAP receiving only $122 million.

But Congress was already starting to slice at the NASA budget even before the fire, and was likely to continue to have done so even without the fire, even aside from the skepticism of Mondale, et al. It was hard to stop the Moon Race, since Cold War politics demanded it; but there was no such support for anything beyond beating the Soviets to the Moon. And as LBJ became more and more distracted with competing domestic priorities and Vietnam (and sliding political support resulting from these things), he was in less and less of a position to fight for Apollo Applications.
 
Last edited:
Starting with a PoD at Sputnik makes things a little tricky, but not impossible. Probably the best way to do this is to prevent the space race, because by the time Nixon gets into office and post-Apollo decisions are being made there just isn't the budget or will to make big space expenditures, and it is difficult to find a path to a permanent moonbase by 2000. Besides that, NASA's internal management culture and external sales culture have been badly damaged by their fixation on the Moon race and an unrealistic perception of the resources they can obtain, which further damages the ability to establish a permanent base or even return to the Moon.

So, avoid the space race.

I think you're right in how you can defuse the Space Race. I think it's also inarguable that the Space Race - Apollo, more precisely - did lasting harm to NASA's culture in the long run, creating mindsets that could not cope well with the low funding levels they were going to get once the Moon Landing was in the bag.

That said, I don't know that a Moon base, or even a Moon Landing, by 2000 necessarily follows from such a point of departure. In the 80's, the economy is bigger, and the technology more mature, but a lunar program is still going to be very expensive, and it's not clear where you get the political support for such a thing during what I presume would still be the Reagan Administration (space butterflies being unlikely to produce different political outcomes at that stage of history). I think it is *possible*, but I don't see it as *necessary*. It's just as likely that both superpowers (if they have gotten this far without a sustained Space Race) content themselves with robotic exploration of the Moon and continued manned LEO development.

No, I still think the most *sure-fire* driver for a Moonbase here is a more vigorous and sustained Soviet lunar effort. So you need some change in Soviet political leadership.
 
Since the major impetus for the Apollo Program was competition with the USSR, have the Soviets continue the race even after Apollo 11 lands, making their own landings on the Moon.

There would be tremendous political pressure in Congress to continue the race. The likely new goal of this race, a permanent manned base.

Hmm. That gives me an interesting idea.

So the Soviets were not all that interested in the moon in the early 60s - they seem to have been much more interested in orbital stations and (eventually) Mars. One of the reasons why their OTL moon-shot was such a slip-shod effort is because they started late and cut corners in order to catch up with the US program when the politicians decided that they didn't want the US to win the race.

So how about this: as OTL, the Soviet leadership starts to worry about the American lunar program in about 1966, but unlike OTL, the engineers convince the leadership that there is no way to actually get men on the moon before the Americans can get some men and a flag there first. So the engineers convince the leadership that the way to "beat" the Americans is to have a slower, cheaper program to establish a small moonbase. This moonbase gets established around '71 or '72, and the Americans figure that they need to compete. This results in a race that sees a permanent moonbase by the mid '80s or '90s.

fasquardon
 
A small asteroid is detected by scientists to heading towards the Earth. Soviet and American scientists must band together to build a device on the darkside of the moon to launch a probe far enough out in space to destroy it or repel it away.
 
Top