Thanks! I've been steadily closing in on what that's likely to
be, but I think I'm narrowing down a couple ideas.
These do have the problem that the entire crew of the last Erebus and Terror
died. Like, that's the most famous thing about the Franklin expedition, that they all died and people spent 20 years mapping the north of Canada looking for them.
Is the idea of this timeline supposed to be Canada...like, buying out the program and all the production of the ET and the like and moving it all to Canada after 2010? The tick-over cost for zero flights of Shuttle was about $2.5 billion (USD, 1995 or so dollars), with the
averaged annual cost for a year in which they flew as many as 8 times was still $360m or so in 1997 dollars! The total budget of the Canadian Space Agency is about $388b today, so the entire agency today could cover about a quarter the cost of supporting Shuttle on an ongoing basis. The agency would probably have to rise to about 2% or so of the Canadian federal budget to both support Shuttle, and support the programs needed to actually develop payloads for it (
without which, just having it is useless).
I was figuring this was more like, "Canada somehow buying into the Space Shuttle program in the 70s or 80s" where they'd only need to cover a portion of the fixed costs as they would have the US flight rate to share annual costs with? OTOH, maybe I'm less confused than I think since you mention Canada flying payloads in the mid-to-late 80s (as a side note: if anyone has LRBs, probably all operators have LRBs--the cost base and benefits are too high, especially that early in the program, for me to imagine you see two entirely parallel totally different operational booster designs)?
Oh I know, my original wishlist had Northwest Passage and Sir John Franklin, the John Franklin, and then just Franklin (to be a double meaning of both him and his expedition
I'm doing both it started out as what if Canada had a space shuttle, then doing the math, realized that wow, it would only fly like twice a year say every 120 days (my rule is May 1st to September 7th) mostly due to winter, so it turned into two with four launches a year, and then considering ODMP, it would mean that for stretches of time there would be one orbiter flying, necessitating a third orbiter. And the only reason I have LRB's is because of how cold Nova Scotia gets, necessitating a less cold-sensitive rocket
And my setup for the two flights per shuttle has the unintended side effect of creating an easy Launch On Need mission, as the two launch pads (basically the Vandenburg SLC-6 setup [still figuring if having two of these, or a VAB with 3 bays being better]) will routinely have Shuttles occupy both pads, resulting in one shuttle being assembled at any given time, while the other is ready for launch
Then my dad suggested it be 2010 which is now my parallel timeline, which is the same idea different time
And yes basically Canada buys everything (Etobeko makes the ETs, some city in Quebec makes the LRBs, Cold Lake is mission control (i wanted to have something that's consistent with your Canada-Gemini timeline to make a kind of tribute to your work), Vancouver makes the TPS, Winnepeg makes the CSSME's, etc
And for my 80's TL I actually did think of the sharing launches, as the shuttle fleet for 86,87,88 was
wild, and with the US shuttles being grounded due to Altantis (OTL Challenger) I decided, why not have Canada pick up the slack, so Challenger becomes the on loan shuttle, I even have the negotiations address Hubble and Centaur-G, by having the scientists wanting those payloads to fly in 86, but Hubble isn't launched due to the high inclination and the fuel needed to get there from KSC, and Canada straight up refusing to launch Centaur-G.
(I have literally been scouring Wikipedia's canceled space shuttle mission list, along with others to get payloads)
As for the whole LRB dilemma, I will put it up to politics, let's say it comes up on a committee, "Canada building their own boosters with better lift, let's buy them" I can see it getting pushback from Utah-based congressmen, and nationally focused congressmen, "why buy from another country when we have perfectly good boosters". so the US keeps their fleet on SRBs due to not wanting to ground the shuttle fleet while the facilities at KSC get converted (the O-ring problem literally forced NASA to waive the "a part fails, stop, fix it, then continue flying" rule) as they didn't want to delay future flights.
SLS literally is congressionally mandated to keep the workers who worked on the shuttle employed, all the while nickel and diming everything, like the OTL Shuttle development, so it isn't far-fetched that the US congress will keep the SRBs (at least in my mind)
So Atlantis blows up carrying the teacher, Canada is proven right on their LRB decision and the US has to re-engineer their whole shuttle program to be like Canada, which pushes them until say 1990, where Canada is now the launch provider, and the decision is made to keep payloads on the shuttle instead of expendable launch vehicles like Titan or Delta.
I actually have them ditch the whole shuttle numbering scheme for the fiscal year and launch site, due to the confusion of the Canadian-launched missions
1 is a planned mission
2 its redesignated with another shuttle
3 its launching from Canada (who refused to be 3 on the launch site list, mostly because I thought it would be hilarious for the ultimate flight number)
creating
STS 6C-G-R
going by OTL post-challenger rules it would be STS 26R
As for the budget issues, ill say the 80s TL is mostly a commercial affair, and with the Shuttle still being brute forced by the US to be the only launch vehicle, Canada gains some lucrative contracts due to its Canso site being suited to polar orbit missions, (i actually had a whole BC based Shuttle, Launch Facility, and ET and LRB factories, then I realized it would be redundant.
(Basically kinda like your "Boldly Going" TL, but with an emphasis on commercial payloads instead of a space station)
aA for the 2010s I know it makes even less sense, the TL I have so far involves the shuttles launching more modules (node 1, Centrifuge, and US habitation module get built), and the NASA idea in the 90s of flying Soyuz to Space Station Freedom in the 90's kinda happens, so I basically turn the shuttle into a Crew/Soyuz transport between missions when an MPLM is flown, the same NASA/US politics still happen, but only more hilariously, as SLS still happens, but the promise of it being cheap to fly due to reusing shuttle hardware produces the opposite effect, as Canada owns the shuttle hardware, all those SSME's are gone, which requires new ones being built, pushing the development cost of SLS to 28 billion, and it not flying Artemis 1 until 2023 to 25
