(On the gripping hand, it would be wild to get to a point where as the USAF realizes they have no justification or utility for the X-20 program and it's facing the same dire cuts it did OTL in THIS case when they turn to NASA it may not be too little/to late and a joint NASA/USAF budget worked out to get it actually flying)
That requires the USAF to actually use good judgment, which...well, I'll be generous and not say that they're lacking in it. But I will say they're very Churchillian towards it, only resorting to good judgment after having tried everything else first.
The thing is depending on the butterflies outside the space program the same budget problems that drove a 'concentration' effect to reduce the number of launch vehicle for the whole US effort may not be the same. Especially if you can avoid the over sized requirements and the ridiculously high launch rate assumptions.
Was the Shuttle's launch rate really ridiculously high? I mean,
yes, it was. But if you've got a scenario like David Portree's
Dreaming A Different Apollo where you've got a permanently inhabited Skylab-derived station and multimonth Lunar missions by the Bicentennial, you're probably looking at 50+ launches a year between all the Atlas, Titan, Delta, Saturn I, and Saturn V launches together. The key difference is that the
vast majority of them are right-sized for the smaller LVs and don't need an 78-tonne spaceplane within a mile of them.
So I'd concur the booster ecology looks much different in a post-Apollo world if the Shuttle's siren's song of really fast, really cheap flights could be avoided or butterflied. I think eventually you do get some concentration, standardizing on a single individual light-lift, medium-lift, and heavy-lift vehicle for a total of three "in service" rockets. But it'd be interesting to see who wins, as you lock Atlas, Delta, and Titan in a room with only one of them allowed to emerge. (Go Titan!)
Actually the Ferry Rocket parachuted two stages into the ocean for recovery with the third stage being the fly-back and horizontally landing stage
Not being nit-picky though as I was going to point out that it was the METEOR and METEOR Jr. from Goodyear that flew all three stages back to a horizontal landing and it was they who early on found that the costs of the METEOR LV were prohibitive enough to require (reluctantly) reduction to the METEOR Jr. and even then the cost-effectiveness of the such recovery for the two lower stages was questionable. (In fact the METEOR Jr. study bits I've seen "mention" in passing mounting the Mjr. third stage on a two stage "Atlas Derived" launch vehicle as a more 'cost-effective' alternative : ) And always keep in mind METEOR was NOT the "ferry" but the Space Station that was the end result)
I could swear Von Braun's Ferry Rocket had, at one or another, been proposed to have stage flyback. But given that it went through at least three major iterations in publication between
Mars Project and
Disneyland, to say nothing of its creator always tinkering with it, it's easy enough for me to be misremembering. Or for the Internet to be garbling the two proposals in the first place, as both are Fifties-era three-stage reusable rockets that're dedicated to building a large Earth-orbital station. Ignoring that the METEOR Station makes Von Braun's Wheel look like a toy in comparison. And even if the Goodyear three-stage system only got a name in Meteor Junior after the publication of the original unnamed rocket used to build METEOR Station.
The Meteor Junior spaceplane atop an Atlas would be neat, but the second word in "Atlas derived" is doing a
lot of the work there. As most of the proposed "Atlas derived" boosters were in actuality going to end up being new designs. (Oh, Winged Atlas. You torment me so with your beauty and glibness about "structural reinforcement".)
The Mission Module was an initial requirement WITHOUT the need to rendezvous and dock with said module which the 'plain' capsule could not do unless there was a hatch in the heat-shield. (Later to be proven possible but not something NASA was wanting to experiment with initially even though several contractors suggested it, including Martin)
In theory your Mission Module could be built like the one in the D-2 and you just pilot your capsule into its waiting socket, with your airlock sealing with the normal crew hatches of the capsule. Which is less bad than going in butt-first with a hole in the heatshield! But this requires either convoluted docking controls -- most especially optics -- for your capsule or better avionics than were being considered, to say nothing of needing an orbital rendezvous in the first place. Just because McDonnell got away with it doesn't mean it was a good idea.
Of a similar nature OTL once the Lunar goal was set the interest and incentive for a lot of work towards commercial and practical orbital satellite work was shunted to the side and pushed more on actual commercial interests with less government input or support. In some ways this helped push industry but with more government support the rate of growth and expansion would likely have been bigger but it also might be more restricted with a higher dependence on government support.
I tend to agree that the satellite market is certainly different with an Earth-orbital Apollo. But I think dependency is a wash, at absolute worst, and could be considerably less than comparable OTL. As OTL the primary area of governmental dependence in the eras we're talking was simply getting the payload into orbit at a commercially acceptable cost due booster limitations, either from the Shuttle's bloated costs or from the max throw-weight of the alternatives. In an Earth-orbital Apollo TL, with an emphasis on developing routine orbital flight and that large manned space station that will desperately want to justify its existence, the point of dependency shifts (most likely) to on-orbit servicing and maintenance for a decade or two until computers are good enough to support autonomous satellite refueling and inspection in GEO. And by that time, significant operational experience and economies will have (hopefully) been developed using the that large manned space station as a base for that kind of work.
Oh they did
After all, NASA paid Hughes to study catching (and returning) the entire S-1C stage in mid-air after all
That particular contract was basically the height of Apollo-era NASA's willingness to throw a few-hundred-thousand dollars of study contract money at any idea that could produce awesome concept art. Which is really hard to oppose, because that concept art is indeed awesome. But I'm trying to be serious. Mostly.
You can try to up-engine the CH-53 into the Super Stallion ahead of schedule and catch a falling S-IVB-sized stage with it. Even if the S-IVB won't get anywhere
near the size it did in an Earth-orbital Apollo TL. Still, makes for more interesting stage recovery that just boring old splashdown...
How high & fast up did the booster engines of Atlas drop off, could they not be recovered in later Atlas-Centaur developments?
I'm fairly sure recovery and reuse of the MA-2/-3/-5 was studied in some detail by Convair, if not also NASA. There's no reason it can't be pursued in an allohistorical context, as the primary reason OTL that it wasn't was that the development cost couldn't be justified in light of Atlas's flight-rate.
Would Houston be as big as it is without Apollo?
Houston is going to be a large and prominent metro area regardless of whether or not Apollo pours money into it by the bucketload. That said, LBJ remains a rainmaker in the Senate, and seems highly improbable that his support will not require putting a finger on the scales to site facilities within Texas, just as it did OTL.