DBWI: The future preempted, Apollo halted at 17

In 1972 there was tremendous pressure to end the Apollo program after the flight of Apollo 17. That mission was even reclassified as a "J" mission.

Interesatingly, when Apollo 17 returned with their rock samples and geological core samples, COngress reauthorized the following three Apollo missions and even put aside monies for Galileio Base and Daedalus station.

The fallout from that was a science and technology boom that effectivly handed us the keys to the solar system.

After that, the horse was out of the COrral, Nerva-K engines, the Bussard ramscoop and eventually in 1980, the historic landing on the Valis Maneris on Mars.

Now, the United States is the most powerful nation on Earth as well as the wealthiest due to mineral and precious metal retrievals from the asteroid belt.

This year, President McAuliffe has greenlighted the construction of the first ship to the Jovian system. She wants to know what Europa holds, and I could not agree more.

But what if we stopped?

What if the United States scaled back and, eventually halted manned space exploration?
 
The apollo project was specifically engineered to make cancellation politically impossible. So it would never have simply been switched off.

One of the benifits of all that experience is that we can look back at things like ROMBUS (and it's smaller kin from the same time) and say with certainty that, "Yes, they could have worked." Which carries the implication the half trillion dollars NASA spent on flagship programmes was wasted.

Killing Apollo off early might have let private industry have a go. In an ideal world, saner heads would have prevailed and set aside the race mentality. Everyone pre apollo agreed that first you work out how to get into orbit reliably, safely, and cheaply. Then you build a space station for long term orbital study, and eventually as a fuel depo and/or construction yard. Once you can refuel in orbit you don't need huge rockets any more.

Thus NASA's most likely goal if we end things at #17 would be to work on some kind of low cost to orbit reusable system. Probably using as much apolo hardware as possible. SSTO first time would be too ambitious, but they could probably have a low cost TSTO simply by 'rearanging the deckchairs' so to speak.

Probably would have had lots of smaller missions. Pity no one spotted that whole Grand Tour orbit in time. Maybe ATL NASA gets lucky?:D

Oh yes, and maybe a slightly less overconfident NASA wouldn't have been stupid enough to kill 16 workers during the Jumbo incident, and we'd stil be able to walk through Navada without a radiation suit!:mad:
 
The apollo project was specifically engineered to make cancellation politically impossible. So it would never have simply been switched off.

One of the benifits of all that experience is that we can look back at things like ROMBUS (and it's smaller kin from the same time) and say with certainty that, "Yes, they could have worked." Which carries the implication the half trillion dollars NASA spent on flagship programmes was wasted.

Killing Apollo off early might have let private industry have a go. In an ideal world, saner heads would have prevailed and set aside the race mentality. Everyone pre apollo agreed that first you work out how to get into orbit reliably, safely, and cheaply. Then you build a space station for long term orbital study, and eventually as a fuel depo and/or construction yard. Once you can refuel in orbit you don't need huge rockets any more.

Thus NASA's most likely goal if we end things at #17 would be to work on some kind of low cost to orbit reusable system. Probably using as much apolo hardware as possible. SSTO first time would be too ambitious, but they could probably have a low cost TSTO simply by 'rearanging the deckchairs' so to speak.

Probably would have had lots of smaller missions. Pity no one spotted that whole Grand Tour orbit in time. Maybe ATL NASA gets lucky?:D

Oh yes, and maybe a slightly less overconfident NASA wouldn't have been stupid enough to kill 16 workers during the Jumbo incident, and we'd stil be able to walk through Navada without a radiation suit!:mad:

That is a drastic overstatement based o na gross missunderstanding of how radiation works. the isotopes started falling off less than five years after that accident and did not even affect the nearest town.

Honestly it's just adorable the way some folks hear the word "Radiation" and go haring off into unreason.
 
I suspect that instead of manned missions, we'd be sending robots and satellites more when it comes to explore the solar system. Depends what happens after Apollo is cancelled though. if the Soviet Union for example were to survive a decade or more longer, they may make the push for Mars themselves and restart the Space Race.
 
I suspect that instead of manned missions, we'd be sending robots and satellites more when it comes to explore the solar system. Depends what happens after Apollo is cancelled though. if the Soviet Union for example were to survive a decade or more longer, they may make the push for Mars themselves and restart the Space Race.


I think that reasoning is the driving force behind continued support for manned deep space missions, If we don't another country on Earth will and then where will we be? I think that is solid reasoning for our Government all things considered.

Then too, sending a Sattelite or a robot probe is fine, at first, but nothing can beat a man or woman trained and skilled as an observer on the scene in situ telling mission control what he or she is looking at.

Nothing can beat that.

SUre, you can send your dog bingo to go sniff around the other side of the valley, but you know what at some point, you need to go on over and see what's there for yourself.

That's what manned spaceflight is, it us going over to see for ourselves.
 
That is a drastic overstatement based o na gross missunderstanding of how radiation works. the isotopes started falling off less than five years after that accident and did not even affect the nearest town.

Honestly it's just adorable the way some folks hear the word "Radiation" and go haring off into unreason.

The nearest town outside the radiation zone. And yet we still have those 12 counties and five towns sealed off from the public and declared 'unfit for human habitation'. Or are are those five somehow villages in your view? And honestly, it's just adorable how so many pro-nuclear advocates get all defense and literal the first time anything questions their views. :p (OOC:;):D)
 
The nearest town outside the radiation zone. And yet we still have those 12 counties and five towns sealed off from the public and declared 'unfit for human habitation'. Or are are those five somehow villages in your view? And honestly, it's just adorable how so many pro-nuclear advocates get all defense and literal the first time anything questions their views. :p (OOC:;):D)
Speaking of irrational hysterics, you were the one who said the WHOLE state was unfit to live in, now you scale it back to just five towns, not cities, towns.

Was it a terrible disaster? yes, does it justify the abandonment of the entire technology of nuclear energy? no more than a nasty car accident justifies a return to horse and buggy days.
 
I think that reasoning is the driving force behind continued support for manned deep space missions, If we don't another country on Earth will and then where will we be?

Is that like 'if the US doesn't become a two-war military, someone else will?' You're talking about it as if it's inevitable that it would happen to somone over the past 40 years. Or as if they wre a line of nations all chomping at the bit to take the lead if America fell. That's not how my history books record it...
 
Is that like 'if the US doesn't become a two-war military, someone else will?' You're talking about it as if it's inevitable that it would happen to somone over the past 40 years. Or as if they wre a line of nations all chomping at the bit to take the lead if America fell. That's not how my history books record it...
That is irrelevent to the fact that thanks to AMerica's chosen course of action, we now enjoy control of the sky and concommittent control over the Earth.

Three words, Rods from god.

Look it up.

Why else do you think the U.S> has been cutting back our strategic nuclear forces so much?

It's certainly not because we've gone all lovey-dovey and kiss-and-huggy.
 
That is irrelevent to the fact that thanks to AMerica's chosen course of action, we now enjoy control of the sky and concommittent control over the Earth.

Three words, Rods from god.

Look it up.

Why else do you think the U.S> has been cutting back our strategic nuclear forces so much?

It's certainly not because we've gone all lovey-dovey and kiss-and-huggy.
That message was clearly sent when one was "accidentally" dropped on Hanoi in 1975 to take out North Vietnam.
 
That message was clearly sent when was "accidentally" dropped on Hanoi in 1975 to take out North Vietnam.
Hey, who could have forseen that THAT particular five hundred pound iron and cobalt projectile sized module would have broken free of Daedalus station at that time it was an ACCIDENT!
 
It may have been but we have a free and united Vietnam.
I am just gladwe told the government in SOuth VIetnam the realistic dangers of that kind of an accident happening again in those days. I think it helped a lot to moderate and liberalise the Saigon Government's policies.
 
OOC: Orbital bombardment in the '70s? Getting minerals from the asteroid belt at a cheaper cost than getting them from earth? Come on guys, that's just too much
 
OOC: Orbital bombardment in the '70s? Getting minerals from the asteroid belt at a cheaper cost than getting them from earth? Come on guys, that's just too much

OOC: Orbital bombardment is easy if you have a ready source of material that doesn't have to be lifted out of Earth's gravity well.

Asteroid mining is mostly going to be used to supply needs in space. Mostly cheaper commo and power-transmission satellites.

Not just solar power, either, BTW. Down the line, if the materials are available, and we have the infrastructure up there(big ifs) orbit might be the perfect place to keep all those nasty fission plants. Yeah:rolleyes:, maybe not... But an SPS system would do wonders for Earth in the medium to long run.

This is all pretty low-probability stuff but fun. The DBWI could have easily gone in a different direction, "If we hadn't squandered all of our resources on three more Apollo launches, we might have been in a better position to maintain a manned presence in space. Congress might have approved the Space Shuttle and Congress wouldn't have been wrangling over one blue-sky proposal after another to return American astronauts to space. We haven't sent a man into space, except that a few Sputnik launches in the '90s, since 1975!"
 
OOC: Orbital bombardment is easy if you have a ready source of material that doesn't have to be lifted out of Earth's gravity well.

Asteroid mining is mostly going to be used to supply needs in space. Mostly cheaper commo and power-transmission satellites.

Not just solar power, either, BTW. Down the line, if the materials are available, and we have the infrastructure up there(big ifs) orbit might be the perfect place to keep all those nasty fission plants. Yeah:rolleyes:, maybe not... But an SPS system would do wonders for Earth in the medium to long run.

This is all pretty low-probability stuff but fun. The DBWI could have easily gone in a different direction, "If we hadn't squandered all of our resources on three more Apollo launches, we might have been in a better position to maintain a manned presence in space. Congress might have approved the Space Shuttle and Congress wouldn't have been wrangling over one blue-sky proposal after another to return American astronauts to space. We haven't sent a man into space, except that a few Sputnik launches in the '90s, since 1975!"

OOC Yeah, but I actually LIKE Manned deep space flight.
 
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