+Rep, triumphant Germany is probably the only way. Perhaps having Germany win WW1 could do it too.Depends on how early the POD is.
With a POD as late as 1961/1962, the US could have been on the Moon a few years earlier.
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If the US had gone with an architecture utilizing an open-cockpit lunar lander, a Gemini capsule and two Titan 3 launches, they could have landed humans on the Moon as early as July 1967!
http://www.friends-partners.org/mwade/craft/gemnilor.htm
http://www.astronautix.com/articles/bygemoon.htm
If you want something much earlier, you're going to need to push back the POD further. Perhaps have the Germans win the second world war and then have a space race between Nazi Germany and a surviving world power (US? Surviving USSR? Both?) although that would require the V-2 rocket technology leaking to another surviving superpower. I don't see the Nazis visiting the Moon on an expensive propaganda mission without some kind of competition (They nearly killed Von Braun for joking about reaching the Moon, they clearly were only interested in developing rockets for practical military purposes). This would also require Hitler not cancelling the rest of the Aggregate rocket series.
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I could see a development plan along the following lines.
A-4: suborbital (first successful flight, 1942)
A-9: manned suborbital (first successful flight, 1946)
A-10: manned intercontinental ballistic missile (first successful flight, 1949)
A-11: small unmanned satellite (first successful flight, 1950)
A-12: large payloads up to 10 tonnes into LEO (first successful flight 1955, first manned flight 1956)
A-13: superheavy launcher equivelant to the Saturn V of OTL (first successful launch 1958)
That's about the only way I could see a manned Moon mission happening before 1960.
Yeah, fitting a computer onboard the landing module is critical, and making that happen in 1969 was a stretch. The POD would have to give us earlier computers, as well as an earlier drive to land on the moon.But without onboard computers to calculate telemetry, then communication is critical beyond low earth orbit. Remember "Apollo 13"? Course corrections were run on a main frame and radioed in; the pilot checked it with a slide rule. That was stretching the limits of prudence.
the USA landed on the moon in the 60s, but i have wondered if it was possible for the moon landing to occur earlier. if it is possible, please specify some Changes in history that could allow this to happen and when this would happen.
Well, were the US to work on a moon landing based on their 1942 rocket hardware, they'd be equally doomed? Throwing up hurdles to overcome is well and all, but I don't think anyone suggested the A4 was supposed to be the final lunar rocket design.Let's face a TL were Werner Von Braun work on Moon landing based on A4 (V2) is doomed, why ?
The A4 was far from space worthy, low specific Impulse do Alcohol Oxygen propellant, it flight computer were a joke to today standard, the fuselage not cope speed over mach 6 and disintegrate.
To pull off an absolutely minimal moon landing (and return--the Atlas one skimps by not worrying about how to come home), you need about 90 metric tonnes in Earth orbit. That means large turbopump-fed engines, large lightweight tanks, and the stuff to guide a rocket to a safe landing--gyroscopic inertial measurement systems, at least simple computers to allow the pilot to control the spacecraft (it is very, very difficult--nearly impossible, really) to command a spacecraft entirely manually. Even in "manual control" of Apollo or Shuttle, there were two or three layers of software turning their commands into actual valve and gimbal motions.
That technology was just barely in infancy by 1950, and a lot of the advancement had been quite recent. It matured over most of the early 60s to the point where it became at all conceivable, which combined with political focus and will finally by the turn of the decade it was ready. I could see some slight advancement if somebody was to decide that it was a priority worth spend billions and billions of dollars on in 1950, but there's levels of development you have to pass through to even understand the next problems that need solving.
Got a question : how much of 'computers' had the russians on their crafts ?Computers will be arguably a bigger critical point than rocketry, and it is hard to see how you can pull it off without transistors, given weight issues. And it will be a considerably higher risk venture than even Apollo was (and Apollo was real high wire stuff as it was).