Apollo 11 suffers as 13

During its flight to the moon, Apollo 11 suffers a mechanical fault that renders the mission aborted. From there, what would happen if the astronauts came back safely, or otherwise did not?
 
NASA was prepared to abort up to two landings before a successful one, and in fact they expected a failure during Apollo 11 (that thankfully never materialized). So, they'd go through a grilling, a few Service Modules get moved about in the schedule in a desperate effort to have Apollo 12 ready for liftoff by December. That launches successfully, Pete Conrad is the first on the Moon rather than Neil Armstrong (who, together with Aldrin and Collins, might get bumped to Apollo 17). Hopefully, the first words on the moon are not "Yippee," Conrad's OTL first words on the Moon.

Assuming that Apollo 12 is similar to OTL Apollo 11 in terms of achievement (a few hours on the Moon, proving the LEM ready for surface operations) and 13 does not experience significant problems (given that the troubled Service Module is, TTL, used in Apollo 11), NASA still gets to fly 2 "H" missions to the Lunar surface, and most likely 2 "J" missions. If the congressional hearings that result from the Apollo 11 crisis are not as bad as I make them out to be, they fly just as many Lunar Surface missions as IOTL, with the only major changes being that Pete Conrad walks on the Moon first, Jim Lovell and Fred Haise walk on the Moon at all, and the Apollo 11 crew are split up and put back into rotation for Apollos 17-19, in which case they'd be lucky for one of them to walk on the Moon.

Then there's the pessimistic scenario: NASA and congress panic in 1969 and limit the remaining missions to a first landing, one H-class (1 day stay), and one J-class (3 days, plus lunar rover) mission, to reduce risks. Apollo 14 is the last manned lunar landing of Apollo, in 1971, with the crew of Apollo 14 bumped off and Apollo 15 replacing it entirely, with the exception of the number. Alan Shepard never walks on the Moon, nor do Gene Cernan or Harrison Schmidt or John Young.
 
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NASA was prepared to abort up to two landings before a successful one, and in fact they expected a failure during Apollo 11 (that thankfully never materialized). So, they'd go through a grilling, a few Service Modules get moved about in the schedule in a desperate effort to have Apollo 12 ready for liftoff by December. That launches successfully, Alan Bean is the first on the Moon rather than Neil Armstrong (who, together with Aldrin and Collins, might get bumped to Apollo 17). Hopefully, the first words on the moon are not "Yippee," Bean's OTL first words on the Moon.

Err, as might be said because of the OP: Eagle, you have a problem. Bean was the Apollo 12 LMP and thus like Aldrin on Apollo 11 exited after the CDR. Thus, Pete Conrad was the first on the ground from Apollo 12, and it was his "Yipeee" that you're referring to.
 
Err, as might be said because of the OP: Eagle, you have a problem. Bean was the Apollo 12 LMP and thus like Aldrin on Apollo 11 exited after the CDR. Thus, Pete Conrad was the first on the ground from Apollo 12, and it was his "Yipeee" that you're referring to.

Oof. How the hell did I miss that!? :eek:
 
Then there's the pessimistic scenario: NASA and congress panic in 1969 and limit the remaining missions to a first landing, one H-class (1 day stay), and one J-class (3 days, plus lunar rover) mission, to reduce risks. Apollo 14 is the last manned lunar landing of Apollo, in 1971, with the crew of Apollo 14 bumped off and Apollo 15 replacing it entirely, with the exception of the number. Alan Shepard never walks on the Moon, nor do Gene Cernan or Harrison Schmidt or John Young.

NASA actually had three different Apollo crews training at the same time, so that if Apollo 11 screwed the pooch in July, Apollo 12 would fly in October and Apollo 13 in December. So, potentially you could have nightmare scenario wherem Apollos 11 and 12 abort for technical reasons and Apollo 13 happens as per OTL.
 
Assuming an accident on the same sort of level as Apollo 13, I think the Apollo programme gets delayed by several months (up to a year) while NASA runs a thorough review of what went wrong and what they can put right. So Apollo 12 lands sometime in 1970, and Pete Conrad had better think of something inspiring to say. Other than that, I don't see any major effect on the American effort.

It may affect the Soviet programme indirectly. They were struggling to get their N1 superbooster working properly, but the Moon landing programme hadn't actually been cancelled yet. If Apollo 11 fails and this leads to a serious delay, then the Sovs might be encouraged to think that they're still in with a chance of getting there first, if they can successfully fly the N1 - everything else seems to have been ready, at least in prototype form. So they might divert what resources they can into the N1 programme in a last-ditch effort to get it working and man-rated. Personally, I don't think they had a prayer, but that wouldn't necessarily stop them from trying. One of the obvious programmes to divert resources from was Salyut, which had only been approved in January 1969 (according to Oberg) so would have been in the very early design stages.

Assuming that's the case, then Apollo 12 lands on the Moon, the N1 never does fly (due basic design flaws in the first stage) and the launch of Salyut 1 is delayed by maybe a year or two due to lack of funds. So basically everything still happens as in OTL, but delayed a bit. Butterflies? Are the crew of Soyuz 11 still killed? Do the Luna soil return missions still go ahead, along with the Lunokhods, or are those missions also delayed/cancelled to divert resources to N1?
 
Given that NASA is bogged down in the swamp known as politics, a disaster on Apollo XI could potentially kill the program, though they would try to use the power of JFK to fight any budget cuts. Personally, I think they'd try again, after spending ten years (exaggeration) chasing their tails around trying to figure out what happened
 
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