Could the Air Force and NASA coexist in Space?

The early space race seems to have been a tug and pull between the Air Force and NASA in exploration of space. The Air Force, even into the 60's, thought it could still be a player in space and tried to be with projects like the Dyna-Soar and MOL (later to be canceled before production). NASA, if memory serves, felt threatened by this, and did it's damnedest, with the support of politicians as well I believe, to keep the military out of space and to make it only NASA's territory.

The question is, could both have coexisted in space? The problem I would see is one could overshadow and drown out the other, which I think was the fear of both parties in relation to one another.
 
Yes But Mission Creep/Tangle Threatens

NASA and the Air Force have always had a symbiotic, uneasy relationship.
In theory, NASA's all about furthering exploration and development of advanced technology that could be used for military or civilian purposes with the results available to all with international participation.
The USAF's focus is first and always keeping tabs on the world and power projection for US interests and pushed accordingly with a culture of secrecy.
If you're cynical, NASA got to be the blue-sky lab exploring bigger and better launch vehicles that may or may not be used by the Air Force to make sunshine happen across the globe and improve surveillance capabilities, that also got used for a series of propaganda stunts, Gemini, Apollo, et al.
I'm not discounting the planetary probes launched and the impact they've had in planetary science, but they've been the cheaper, less flashy way to collect data that didn't have a dedicated military purpose, and thus less funding, but they directly benefited from the military work in improving sensors and instruments as well as telemetry to transmit data vs being data sealed in a can for retrieval.
If it weren't for SDI, nobody in DC would've cared about the Space Shuttle except as a space truck to run the various ABM killsats into place, when it wasn't assembling a space station to serve various military and civilian purposes.
AFAIK the US didn't research FOBS, and the Soviets scrapped their program to comply with SALT II, so it wasn't to put offensive weaponry in place, but the Air Force would dearly like to have that capability if need be.
At any rate, NASA and the Air Force have different missions and reasons for being funded with lots of crossover. My thought is that NASA could serve as both blue-sky research group and merchant marine that could easily be detailed to military missions. Also, the Air Force could offer SAR and salvage assistance to crippled civilian spacecraft/crews, but that's assuming much more going on space. My 2c on the subject.
 
Yes they could have but in the end the demise of USAF's manned space programme was down to politics and economics. MOL was designed as a recon station but by the late 1960's unmanned spy satellites could provide most of the capability at a lower cost. Also the dedicated space based manned weapons systems like DynaSoar fell out of political favour as no one wanted to be seen to be militarising space. The USAF certainly hated losing it's space programme and being forced to rely on NASA's Shuttle to launch and refuel it's satellites, apparently one general likened it to "SAC having to use Pan Am to bomb Moscow!" Even before the Challenger Disaster it had been decided to build more Titan boosters for the Air Force to launch it's satellites as the Shuttle failed to live up to expectations.
 
The ability to maintain satellites in-orbit has advantages however. The USAF might have stayed in orbit for that reason.

Probable? I have no clue. Practical and economical? No, but since when has that ever mattered to the USAF? These are the people who think it requires a commission to fly an airplane, but have no problems with the pilot taking what are effectively orders from an enlisted controller. 8-(
 
USAF and NASA could coexist in space if the right people were in charge. Wrong people in charge, turf wars/not invented here folks, etc, etc, would mean lots of overlap and funding squables.

With the right people in charge with a proper sharing of assets, no turf wars, and other things not typically found in government it would work. Putting black programs under military programs and not having NASA even having anything to do with them, including even just launching them would help. Also don't forget the USN has a piece of the pie also. They don't have specific mission dealing with space but they do have a dog in the fight. Look at the satellite ship communication, GPS needs, ocean recon sats, and the ocean research sats.

Funding is where it all starts, don't forget the line from "The Right Stuff": "No bucks, No Buck Rogers"
 

Thande

Donor
NASA generally didn't want competing designs (for why, see Titan IV and later EELVs during shuttle period--they hate people being able to prove that their way isn't the only way of doing things). But I think they would be more than willing to have the USAF in space providing they were doing it with NASA hardware: Blue Gemini, Blue Apollo and so on.
 
They could. Technically they did, beyond the obvious satellites the AF did, with the classified Shuttle missions. The missions they have are different enough that they can get along (and that something like the OTL setup is most likely in the long run; everything the Air Force wants to do can be done better with robots than people).
 
The actual question should be "why is NASA in charge of all space operations?", NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) doesn't run all Ocean or Air based operations...

Really the problem is that NASA is not willing to share with anyone so to answer your question - it would take a major POD that makes NASA more of a research only operation not a general "run all the space operations" group.
 
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