DBAHC: U.S. Manned Mission to the Moon

[Sabot Cat]

Your challenge, should you chose to accept it, is to make it so that there's a U.S. manned mission to the Moon. Bonus points if you can make it happen before the Soviets make it there first, and even more credit if you can have it happen earlier than 1972. Common PODs like having Von Braun or other critical staff for the Soviets being run over by a car or something to that effect are discouraged.

 

[Divergent54]

OTL, bam I hit:
1) POD before 1972
2) US got there first before the Soviets

 

[Mad Bad Rabbit]

I've been working on and off on such a timeline ("To The Moon, Alice!").
I threw in a couple of POD's:

- Let Von Braun defect/be captured by the Americans instead of the Soviets
(bonus: he will probably lives longer/gets a lot more done if he's not in and
out of gulags depending on Stalin's digestion that day).

- Give the Soviets atomic weapons much earlier, before 1950 (for example,
have Klaus Fuchs escape with the stolen A-bomb plans, instead of being
caught and executed). If the U.S. cannot rely on its "nuclear monopoly",
both sides will have much larger defense budgets, and will spend a greater
proportion on air and space delivery systems for their bombs.

- Kill off Yangel (he was nearly killed in a missle test accident in 1960), so
without him or Von Braun, someone less competent ends up being
in charge of the Soviet moon program.

You'd also need to butterfly away the Nixon Recession, so the U.S. isn't too
broke during the 1960s to afford such a huge prestige project...

 

[Orville_third]

Some other possibilities:
-Get Wallace or Taft into the WH instead of Truman or Dewey. They'd aviod the witch hunts of McCarthy.
-Better treatment for Goddard, medically or politically or popularly. (Or all of them!)
-More JATOs in WWII, which leads to greater funding for GALCIT.
-Keep the Crowley books out of Jack Parsons's reach. Better keep L. Ron Hubbard away from him too.

 

[Sabot Cat]

I've been working on and off on such a timeline ("To The Moon, Alice!").

I like the name!

- Let Von Braun defect/be captured by the Americans instead of the Soviets
(bonus: he will probably lives longer/gets a lot more done if he's not in and
out of gulags depending on Stalin's digestion that day).

Would the Americans be willing to collaborate with a former Nazi scientist though? I can imagine the Soviets, but I don't know about us...

- Give the Soviets atomic weapons much earlier, before 1950 (for example,
have Klaus Fuchs escape with the stolen A-bomb plans, instead of being
caught and executed). If the U.S. cannot rely on its "nuclear monopoly",
both sides will have much larger defense budgets, and will spend a greater
proportion on air and space delivery systems for their bombs.

Hmm, I never considered this angle. What kind of butterflies do you expect if the U.S. doesn't have a nuclear monopoly for as long as it did OTL?

- Kill off Yangel (he was nearly killed in a missle test accident in 1960), so
without him or Von Braun, someone less competent ends up being
in charge of the Soviet moon program.

Any likely candidates? Maybe Vladimir Chelomei?

You'd also need to butterfly away the Nixon Recession, so the U.S. isn't too
broke during the 1960s to afford such a huge prestige project...

Hmm, maybe if Nixon didn't win in 1960, you would avoid the recession and give the space program legs? The jury is still out on whether Nixon was personally responsible for that recession though...

 

[Mike Stearns]

What about butterflying Robert Goddard's death in the Wallops Island fire, in 1955? Could the Air Force's Lunex Program have gotten off the ground?

 

[CalBear]

OTL, bam I hit:
1) POD before 1972
2) US got there first before the Soviets

Every time someone is a jerk in this Forum Snowy the baby sea lion cries.

Please don't make Snowy cry again.

 

[Just a Rube]

Would the Americans be willing to collaborate with a former Nazi scientist though? I can imagine the Soviets, but I don't know about us...

We collaborated with some really nasty former Imperial Japanese scientists, I don't see why we wouldn't be willing to collaborate with a Nazi if we wanted to.

Better question (besides how to get Von Braun et al. anywhere near enough the American beachheads to defect) is how to get the US interested before the Soviets have an insurmountable head start. OTL we never really saw much point in rocketry until the Soviets had already shown us up so badly that there didn't seem much point.

That said, I have high hopes for the new American Space Administration's program. Assuming Congress doesn't cut funding in another meaningless budget fight, I expect we'll probably get there by 2025, so in a way, OTL fulfills the challenge, if we wait long enough. And unlike the old Soviet landings, the focus will be on science instead of propaganda.

 

[MattII]

OOC: People keep saying what would happen if von Braun went to the Soviets, but the fact is, he did everything he could to avoid just such an outcome, both for himself personally, and for his staff. Now sure he could stuff it up, but I'm not sure he wouldn't just commit suicide if he thought the Soviets were going to bag him first.

 

[Maniakes]

How about a more successful Barbarossa? I know it'd be ASB for the Nazis to actually conquer the Soviets, but maybe they could have done better than OTL's utter failure and dragged the war out longer and done more damage to Soviet infrastructure in the process. Something along the lines of Michele's TL "A Better Show in 1941".

 

[Blue Max]

Well, it's really a question of priorities. The United States could have competed with the Soviet Union in terms of outer space, but the USA has always been pushing the envelope in terms of nuclear power.

Although the first Commerical Fusion Plant only came online in 2003, it followed decades of investments, enhancements and progress in terms of understanding the true implications of splitting the atom.

Compare a sterling silver safety rating and half of our domestic power drawn from these plants with tragedies like the Beloyarsk Nuclear Disaster (and the subsequent evacuation of Sverdlovsk); the United States might not be winning in space, but we're world leaders in energy.

So the Russians made it to the moon, big whoop! We have the world's only Thorium Reactors, the first high-efficiency Nuclear Plants, and the first and second Nuclear Fusion Plant. I mean, we could be held hostage to $5 a gallon gasoline and get to the moon, or we can keep our national High Speed Rail system, our highly advanced power grid and our insulation from insane madmen in the Middle East.

We didn't get our flag on a pile of Cheese, instead, we got The Power. I think we had a worthy national focus.

 

[Lindseyman]

but the USA has always been pushing the envelope in terms of nuclear power.

Although the first Commerical Fusion Plant only came online in 2003, it followed decades of investments, enhancements and progress in terms of understanding the true implications of splitting the atom.

We have the world's only Thorium Reactors, the first high-efficiency Nuclear Plants, and the first and second Nuclear Fusion Plant. I mean, we could be held hostage to $5 a gallon gasoline and get to the moon, or we can keep our national High Speed Rail system, our highly advanced power grid and our insulation from insane madmen in the Middle East.
.

True but how? If it hadn't been for the political chaos in Britain and France in the late 1960s and1970s caused in the main by your neo-isolationism then you wouldn't have got all those nuclear scientist who advanced your research by 20 years in one fell swoop! It was Tube Alloys/Manhatten all over again!