Earliest Possible Date For an earlier space race

Using whatever PoD you need, and whatever butterflies, how early could a space program from ANY nation be created. How soon could sattelites be sent up, and how soon could people get into space? And then to the Moon?

Thanks for any and all ideas.
 
I'd say that satellites could be put up by around 1950. The Redstone missile first flew in 1952. It served as the core of the Jupiter satellite launcher, whose upper stages were relatively simple solid rocket motors. The Redstone itself was, basically, a scaled-up V-2. Von Braun planned, under the Reich, to use a V-2 derivative to put a satellite up by 1950.

Crewed missions to LEO: 1955, atop one of those Super V-2s.

Lunar missions...1965, maybe. The materials challenges of building engines strong enough to put some hundred metric tons in Low Earth Orbit mean that no booster strong enough is going to exist until around that year, barring a POD that generally accelerates materials science.
 

Glen

Moderator
I'd say that satellites could be put up by around 1950. The Redstone missile first flew in 1952. It served as the core of the Jupiter satellite launcher, whose upper stages were relatively simple solid rocket motors. The Redstone itself was, basically, a scaled-up V-2. Von Braun planned, under the Reich, to use a V-2 derivative to put a satellite up by 1950.

Crewed missions to LEO: 1955, atop one of those Super V-2s.

Lunar missions...1965, maybe. The materials challenges of building engines strong enough to put some hundred metric tons in Low Earth Orbit mean that no booster strong enough is going to exist until around that year, barring a POD that generally accelerates materials science.

That's always the possibility, to have science accelerated - so in a way, the question really is, what is the most primitive technology that can be used to get into a space race?
 
That's always the possibility, to have science accelerated - so in a way, the question really is, what is the most primitive technology that can be used to get into a space race?

Well based on a discussion at the Bad Astronomy Universe Today forum a few months ago you can probably get away without transistors or ICs for your navigation system, even radar might be be done without, there were several craft built in the 50's and 60's that took off and landed vertically without radar guidance. Also you don't necessarily have to have a Saturn V sized rocket if you adopt the Earth Orbital Rendezvous strategy(EOR); that is you assemble your lunar expeditionary craft in orbit using several smaller payloads. In fact the Apollo approach known as Lunar Orbital Rendezvous(LOR) was initially completely rejected as too risky. Best case scenario with a lot of drive and money, is satellite by 49-50, manned flight mid-fifties, the moon by 60-62.
 
on one hand, all ze german rocket scientists stay in germany (assuming we have no war, we want to focus on spacetravell, right?)

on the other hand, lacking a war the scientists receive less money to build their toys.

so it can go either way - faster or slower.
 
Go find a copy of Allen Steele's story "Goddard's People" where we gget manned space flight in 1945.

This same timeline shows up in the story "John Harper WIlson", and the novel The Tranquility Alternative.

(both of those stories are collected in the anthology Rude Astronauts)

Also fun is the Warren Ellis graphic novel Ministry of Space which has the Brits in space in the early 1950s, IIRC.
 
I'd say that satellites could be put up by around 1950. The Redstone missile first flew in 1952. It served as the core of the Jupiter satellite launcher, whose upper stages were relatively simple solid rocket motors. The Redstone itself was, basically, a scaled-up V-2. Von Braun planned, under the Reich, to use a V-2 derivative to put a satellite up by 1950.
no problem
Crewed missions to LEO: 1955, atop one of those Super V-2s.
Ummm... by '55, yes. You'd need something better than a Redstone, though. A modified Redstone with solid boosters, maybe.

The Soviets's Soyuz/R7/kitchensink rocket could have put up a man as soon as they put a capsule together. But it was a LOT bigger than anything the US had, or was likely to have.
Lunar missions...1965, maybe. The materials challenges of building engines strong enough to put some hundred metric tons in Low Earth Orbit mean that no booster strong enough is going to exist until around that year, barring a POD that generally accelerates materials science.
Ja. Actually, that early, you're probably looking at Space Station, EOR and LOR. But that's all doable, if expensive, with 'small' rockets.
 
Could you move it forward by having von Braun and some of his top staff leaving Germany for the US prior to the war somehow?
 
Umm... what 20?
The dates I'm seeing here are only 5 years in advance of OTL, or so.

Maybe as much as 10 by the time you're talking a moonlanding. Much more than that and you need a more radical POD further back in time, and nothing immediately springs to mind. There are certain basic technology's that you pretty much have to have like readily available Aluminium and liquid Oxygen. So you can't go back before those are industrially available.
 
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