DBAC: Kill the Lunar Base Missions

[Mr. Magi]

We've had a few too many positive "better space program" timelines recently, and I want to channel my inner Yippie just this once, so I decided to posit a challenge to you guys: what would kill off establishing the several bases we have on the moon? Bonus points if you also kill off the sky hook and nuclear tugboat programs too.

Triple points if you can explain to me the massive amounts of other programs this would kill too.

 

[farmerted555]

Picture this scenario in your mind: On April 12, 1961, the parachutes aboard Vostok 1 fail to deploy, sending Yuri Gagarin to his death. Then, on May 5, Freedom 7 explodes on the launch pad, the result of faulty fuel tanks. With these tragedies very much in the public eye, both Washington and Moscow indefinitely suspend all further manned spaceflight. By the end of 1961, both countries ask the question: Why spend billions to send people to orbit, the Moon and beyond, when that money could be better spent on national defense, infrastructure, etc,? And so, Congress pulls funding from NASA. The Soviets make a similar move within six months. For the next 50 years, space exploration is limited to unmanned probes. No Moon landing, no nuclear tugboats, no skyhooks, no lunar bases, no space stations, no asteroid mining, no plans for Mars colonies, no research into superluminal flight. A grim scenario indeed,

 

[Cryhavoc101]

The world has been relatively peaceful since the fall of the Berlin wall and all that followed and the 30 years of 'peace dividend' has allowed the international community to spend vast sums of monies on such projects as the moon base etc.

Just to give you an appreciation - the 5 year civil wars in East Africa in the noughties (which was one of the few major blights in the last 30 years) cost the USA alone in keeping 'peace keeping troops' enough money to maintain the moon base for 20 odd years.

And if you factor in the other nations also involved, the disruption to trade via the Suez, the international terrorist acts perpetuated and obviously the loss of life - that cost goes up massively.

So have a larger and longer drawn out war that involved some of the major players during the last 30 years resulting in a more destabilised world, with less international cooperation, needing far larger military budgets and costing far more money and effort and we could easily see the 'space programs' massively scaled back compared to the one we see today.

OOC: I based the above on a 'rant' by Sir Patrick "The Gamemaster" Moore CBE HonFRS FRAS, where he said the cost of the Afgan/Iraq war IOTL was costing 'each year' enough money to support a permeant manned base on Mars for 10 years.

 

[Mr. Magi]

Picture this scenario in your mind: On April 12, 1961, the parachutes aboard Vostok 1 fail to deploy, sending Yuri Gagarin to his death. Then, on May 5, Freedom 7 explodes on the launch pad, the result of faulty fuel tanks. With these tragedies very much in the public eye, both Washington and Moscow indefinitely suspend all further manned spaceflight. By the end of 1961, both countries ask the question: Why spend billions to send people to orbit, the Moon and beyond, when that money could be better spent on national defense, infrastructure, etc,? And so, Congress pulls funding from NASA. The Soviets make a similar move within six months. For the next 50 years, space exploration is limited to unmanned probes. No Moon landing, no nuclear tugboats, no skyhooks, no lunar bases, no space stations, no asteroid mining, no plans for Mars colonies, no research into superluminal flight. A grim scenario indeed,

Amusing, and a pretty good case for it given the relative lack of accidents that were released to the public at the time. I mean, we do eventually know that the US had to resolve some hab module problems when they tested one and it went up like a match box due to atmo composition. We also now know of the soviet test launch failures, particularly the incident in 1971 which blew up the testing facility. There were also a few ESA hiccups in their beginning, but that was mostly just modules not working due to Britan, France, and Germany not designing their parts together and trying to cludge together their collective programs under one banner. I do imagine those going public would've been pretty good cases to kill them from the cradle.

The world has been relatively peaceful since the fall of the Berlin wall and all that followed and the 30 years of 'peace dividend' has allowed the international community to spend vast sums of monies on such projects as the moon base etc.

Just to give you an appreciation - the 5 year civil wars in East Africa in the noughties (which was one of the few major blights in the last 30 years) cost the USA alone in keeping 'peace keeping troops' enough money to maintain the moon base for 20 odd years.

And if you factor in the other nations also involved, the disruption to trade via the Suez, the international terrorist acts perpetuated and obviously the loss of life - that cost goes up massively.

So have a larger and longer drawn out war that involved some of the major players during the last 30 years resulting in a more destabilised world, with less international cooperation, needing far larger military budgets and costing far more money and effort and we could easily see the 'space programs' massively scaled back compared to the one we see today.

OOC: I based the above on a 'rant' by Sir Patrick "The Gamemaster" Moore CBE HonFRS FRAS, where he said the cost of the Afgan/Iraq war IOTL was costing 'each year' enough money to support a permeant manned base on Mars for 10 years.

This one's pretty clever, especially since there were quite a few potential hotzones I could see sucking away money during the 1960s - 1970s, which could compound together to kill off some projects, which killed more projects.

One idea I had was that nuclear power gets the "evil energy" treatment fossil fuels get; there were a few accidents during the 1950s and 1960s, and a few crises that could've lead to meltdowns in the late 1970s. Those combined probably would've killed the nuclear tug rocket. That could easily have made building things like the skyhook too expensive to bother with, and would've meant you had to keep launching material without gravity assistance.

 

[Guestman]

Simple, elect someone who has an axe to grind with the prices involved with keeping a decent space program working.

 

[Cryhavoc101]

Another pod - and quite a low hanging fruit at that - is that the plan ultimately used for both the Moon base and the ongoing efforts to establish a permeant Mars base was the cost effective 'Moon Direct' and 'Mars Direct' strategy.

We know now that the largely NASA driven plan proposed in 1991 was in danger of not going ahead due to multiple elements of NASA and other agencies complicating things by demanding the inclusion of unnecessary aspects such as orbital 'space docks' and overly complex nuclear powered space ships with the various eclectic departments all trying to get a piece of the action.

Luckily included in the the proposals was the far simpler and almost 10 x far cheaper 'Direct' plans for both the Moon and Mars projects and Congress backed the Direct plans.

So had the Direct plans not been proposed as part of the original Space Exploration Initiative the cost of the plans which almost certainly would have been 10 x the cost of the subsequent Direct missions and I think almost certainly would have gone ahead with Congress never agreeing to such an expense and the whole thing killed off during Bush's 2nd term.

And without the USAs leadership (and financial backing) the other International Moon base and International Mars Base partners would not and indeed could not have gotten involved.

The whole idea of it not going ahead fills me with sadness.

 

[Mr. Magi]

Simple, elect someone who has an axe to grind with the prices involved with keeping a decent space program working.

William Proxmire as a Presidential candidate... I don't think people ever did him in a timeline yet, and he does have some good chops, killing NASA aside.

Another pod - and quite a low hanging fruit at that - is that the plan ultimately used for both the Moon base and the ongoing efforts to establish a permeant Mars base was the cost effective 'Moon Direct' and 'Mars Direct' strategy.

We know now that the largely NASA driven plan proposed in 1991 was in danger of not going ahead due to multiple elements of NASA and other agencies complicating things by demanding the inclusion of unnecessary aspects such as orbital 'space docks' and overly complex nuclear powered space ships with the various eclectic departments all trying to get a piece of the action.

Luckily included in the the proposals was the far simpler and almost 10 x far cheaper 'Direct' plans for both the Moon and Mars projects and Congress backed the Direct plans.

So had the Direct plans not been proposed as part of the original Space Exploration Initiative the cost of the plans which almost certainly would have been 10 x the cost of the subsequent Direct missions and I think almost certainly would have gone ahead with Congress never agreeing to such an expense and the whole thing killed off during Bush's 2nd term.

And without the USAs leadership (and financial backing) the other International Moon base and International Mars Base partners would not and indeed could not have gotten involved.

The whole idea of it not going ahead fills me with sadness.

Nice catch on killing the Direct Plan, later than some of the other ideas I heard, but a good one. They would've guaranteed that the crude lunar bases both the US and Soviets built in the 1970s and inhabited for a few years by on and off staff were the last time we pulled stuff like that. It also would've killed off any chance of building the ILB and the first skyhook too, as they were a part of the '91 plan after initial experiments like MIR and Skylab didn't pan out. Seriously, commercial companies going into space only did so when the infrastructure was there to make transport easier. We wouldn't have had SpaceX's first Asteroid Rodeo mission in 2015 without Direct.

That'd have killed the current first manned mars mission that was sent out last week almost certainly too.