An enhanced NASA/space race

The Soviets getting to the Moon, which is hard to do because their lunar program sucked in OTL.

Besides that and ASBs controlling American politicians, I can't think of anything.
 
The Soviets getting to the Moon, which is hard to do because their lunar program sucked in OTL.

Besides that and ASBs controlling American politicians, I can't think of anything.

the only way is a different soviet lunar program in 1960s
means not Sergey Korolyov but Vladimir Chelomey gets the order by Nikita Khrushchev
His OKB-52 bureau use UR-500 (Proton) rocket parts to build the UR-700 heavy booster.
in this TL has no Soyuz capsul but LK-1/LK-700/TKS/ALMAZ manned spacecraft
and later DLB lunar base with 9 man crew in begin

IMHO that push Nixon for more ambitious US space program in cold war.

https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=128811&highlight=UR-700
here picture of LK-700 returnstage
attachment.php
 
If they'd gotten a big booster to fly (and the N1 had lots of problems, not just the fact that its first stage had thirty engines), Soyuz could have gotten a cosmonaut to the moon. The lander was tested unmanned in orbit. They'd just have had to fly their equivalent of Apollos 9 and 10. They still probably wouldn't have gotten there first though.

The Russians could possibly have mounted a lunar project with long-term missions using Earth Orbit Rendezvous in the 70's, but by then it was already too late for NASA.

Unfortunately, by 1970 it was aready too late-most Americans were convinced the whole thing had been a waste of money and I think Apollo could easily been cancelled before the lunar landing:mad:.
 
The problem with colonies' that launch costs are too high to make colonies practical

The only serious improvement you could have is to have the shuttle properly be an X-project so spaceplanes inherent hard heating troubles could be seen. That'd get you rather cheaper American big-scale exploration, letting us do more for the same $$.
 
An earlier POD...

I tend to think that the real problem was NASA, and the whole approach to human spaceflight in general. There was a wealth of activity in the 1950s regarding space exploration, with a variety of approaches under examination. Eisenhower, however, was deeply committed to a civilian space program and saw very little value in military involvement beyond recon and spy sats (the Corona project). This, combined with the extremely poor political skills of the Redstone Arsenal team (the Germans), led to numerous promising ideas being discarded early on, and a 'doubling down' of bets on losing systems (Vanguard anyone?) with strong political backing. Ironically it was the duplicated effort, and multiple solutions to a single problem that were most needed at the time, as the necessary technologies had not (and probably still have not) yet matured.

Let us try something different then...Eisenhower dies/retires/loses interest/etc in 1955 or so, and the various services (and their many contractors, who were really driving things before about 1957) continue to compete to put satellites in orbit and launch manned spacecraft. There is very little doubt that some form of Man In Space Soonest would have put a human in space by 1960 (maybe a year earlier, but that is questionable), and if each service was free to pursue their own (perhaps multiple?) approach, we might have seen several different architectures in place. Clearly the Air Force wanted to continue their rocket planes (and the Dynasoar/MOL) for instance, and the emphasis on surveillence systems would have led the Navy and Army to continue their emphasis on ballistic launches. Various contractors at the same time had their own programs under examination, and while they might not have borne fruit initially, McDonnell Douglas, Convair, Boeing, and Northrop all had plans in place for the mid/late 1960s when it was expected that a civilian market would emerge.

Obviously some of these systems would fail, turn out to be dead ends, or just end up wasting resources, by it is hard to imagine a bigger dead end than Apollo, which consumed incredible quantities resources and brought back little more than rocks and (arguably) some technology. Without NASA having the only keys to the manned space bandwagon (i.e. several different space programs - civilian, military, commercial - all continue), it is likely that the differing needs of different customers would result in a considerable infrastructure being left in place. There would probably not have been a moon landing in 1969, but we probably would have a few small space stations (along the lines of MOL, maybe a few others), several different launch systems (Dynasoar was particularly promising, though others were certainly practical) and most of all a launch rate and diversity of booster types that would have given us a sustainable infrastructure to continue development.

OK, to summarize:

1955: Eisenhower (for whatever reason) drops his objections to a more diverse approach to space. The military (all branches), civilian govt, and commercial interests all continue to actively plan for real involvement in space over the next decade

1956-57: First satellite launch by US Army, followed (possibly) by Convair, the USSR, the USN, the USAF...

1960: First manned spaceflight (likely USAF, though US Army was a competitor), followed by several launches (including USSR) over the next year

1964: First long-term space flights, followed quickly by small space stations and associated resupply/cargo launch systems

1968: First permanent space stations, polar orbiters

1973-1974: First lunar expeditions

?

Sorry for an (even for me) unusually wordy post...
 
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