Discussion: Most Successful US Space Program Possible

Link,

Depends on what you mean by "modular/refined Saturn." NASA in ETS uses a Saturn Ic, which is just a Saturn F-1A engine first stage with an S-IVb slapped on top. The Air Force ends up sticking with Titans until the 80's, sure, but...

It's only after the Vulkan Panic that e of pi and Truth have NASA and the AF combining on a Saturn multibody platform, using Titan boosters. Which required, well, a Second Space Race of sorts. Fortunately, Saturn hardware was still in production to build on.

You're exactly right about that- Eyes Turned Skywards waits until the 80's for this sort of scaleable and streamlined launch architecture to emerge, but that's because it's an incredibly immersive and realistic TL based on the best-case scenario for the US space program post Apollo roughly within OTL budget parameters. It's exactly what Riain's talking about: go big to the moon and then use that infrastructure wisely afterwards. I'm talking about taking that path from the get-go, and without making the politics and technology as realistic as ETS does.


I suppose the larger question is whether an alternative 50's-60's where there's no Space Race, or at least not one as intense as we had, would have produced a better space program in the long run. It might well have forced NASA into a more economical approach, one that would have suggested using a multi-core approach. At some point, however, there's going to need to be a big boost in funding to do anything beyond LEO - or indeed, even a really major station - and that requires some kind of political prod.


Well, the title of this thread is "Most Successful US Space Program Possible" not "Most Successful Plausible US Program." For my economically viable "slowly slowly" space program to work out would take supernatural political, organizational, and planning acumen by some sort of NASA administrator genius who would have a far-ranging thirty year plan for the agency, the political power to implement it, and somehow not have it be grandiose, egomanical and overoptimistic (zees fleet of thirty ships will be assembled in orbit to carry a team of von-hundred men to conquer ze planets!) which is getting near ASB territory.

Throw in the peeeeerfectly timed slow-burning space race where the Soviets are juuust behind enough to keep us going or juuuust ahead enough to trigger a spurt of funding but a crash program mentality never sets in and there's never any bureaucratic or technological overrach and none of the developed infrastructure or capability falls into dis- or mis-use and the whole thing is turning pretty rapidly into a thought exercise (which it is) and not a TL.


EDIT: Although I've talked a lot about cost I think haven't mentioned so much the fact that I think an ideal US space program would also be "go to stay" : in such a TL where evolved Geminis on multibody launchers stage the first EOR-LOR mission to the moon in 1976 (in time for the bicentennial!), the crew rendevous with the lander/transstage stack at a modular, permanently inhabited mir-sized station, tank up from the attached just-now-plausible-operationally orbital fuel depot (experimented with since '69! no on-orbit explosions since '71!), and jet off to rendevouz with a pre-positioned supply lander to begin the crew's 30 day stay on the lunar surface.....
 
Last edited:
Top