Eyes Turned Skywards

My vote would be some political wrangling (maybe skip the Air Force entanglement, though lord knows how that would be possible) and get a smaller shuttle, perhaps even with a reusable 1st stage as they originally wanted. Though the fly back booster they went with might be a little too high a development time methinks.
 
If my guess was anything presuming the PoD is after the Shuttle is as it was (I think 74/75), it'd likely be oriented at extending the time the Shuttle could be on orbit for, along with increasing the available MW available to Spacelab.
 
If it is about doing STS rationally (as opposed to merely abandoning the idea of evolving toward a reusable launch system and concluding expendable is the only rational way to go) I wonder if I may have helped inspire it with my notions about recovering STS SSMEs separately from an Orbiter, thus freeing up the payload to be any of a great variety of things. I honestly don't know if I would be more tickled if it turns out others think some of my concepts were sound, or if I learn of completely different and even better ways to do it.

I can agree that STS exactly as we did it was a fumble--but I don't agree that either the very basic concept, of reusable elements being a help to launch economics, was clearly wrong, nor do I think the specific technologies we developed for STS were all dead ends. Reconfigured, they could be the basis of a system that I estimate could launch well over twice, perhaps 3 or 4 times the useful mass into orbit, and with superior safety for manned missions. (By superior, I mean at least as good as Apollo--OTL STS had no survivable escape modes for the vast majority of the flight!)
 
Augh, I haven't checked here in about 4 months. Oops!

You're welcome e of pi, and also I got this for Christmas.
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But Block III+ didn't have solar panel arrays, unless my memory has completely failed me.

It didn't. The screenshots show a Block V with a Block III+ Mission Module, since I haven't finished the Block IV one (Block V used the Block IV MM for orbital missions).

Don't worry Cobalt, I'm still working on that IVA :)

It's taking much much longer than expected, due to personal life and stuff, you know. Don't expect it any time soon though.

No worries, but you should pop into the Discord sometime to say hi. @Daelkyr has been working on redoing the CSM and LEM IVAs.
 
This is my first post on the board since... *goes to check* wow, late 2010. Have popped back occasionally, but just not posted anything.

However, I read through this timeline on and off over the course of several months, and thought I ought to say something.

Do you have any plans to publish this?

This is, in my opinion, up there with the very best alternate history - the initial POD is eminently plausible, and very little of the developments from hat point seem forced, with the one exception being the one you pointed out (wanting to get to Saturn Multibody, and so needing to head towards Saturn-IC. Even that seems something which would have been a sensible option at the time).

ANd as it goes on, your TL has affects on things outside the immediate subject - different aerospace mergers, development of Europa and Vulkan, different US Presidents, the airline bombings... even popular culture. And yet it all feels so plausible, in many ways more so than our own history.

I wish I had more to say, other than: very well done, fellas!
 
This is my first post on the board since... *goes to check* wow, late 2010. Have popped back occasionally, but just not posted anything.

However, I read through this timeline on and off over the course of several months, and thought I ought to say something.

This is, in my opinion, up there with the very best alternate history - the initial POD is eminently plausible, and very little of the developments from hat point seem forced, with the one exception being the one you pointed out (wanting to get to Saturn Multibody, and so needing to head towards Saturn-IC. Even that seems something which would have been a sensible option at the time).

ANd as it goes on, your TL has affects on things outside the immediate subject - different aerospace mergers, development of Europa and Vulkan, different US Presidents, the airline bombings... even popular culture. And yet it all feels so plausible, in many ways more so than our own history.

I wish I had more to say, other than: very well done, fellas!
That's very kind and on behalf of myself and @Workable Goblin, as well as our many contributors, I'd like to thank you. We put a lot of work in as a hobby, and I'm always incredibly pleased to here people enjoyed it as much as we enjoyed writing it! :)
Do you have any plans to publish this?
We're not really looking to publish it, largely because Part I would need a lot of tender loving edits to bring it up to standards, and we'd be heavily tempted to fix many of the major issues in the timeline's early posts as far as plausible policy goes...except that those are things like the Saturn 1C decision and then the Saturn Multibody selection that lay the grounds for everything else in the TL, and changes might require re-writing most of the rest of the TL extensively. Given that level of work, we're mostly working on other projects. I appreciate the compliment that you like it, though!

It reminds me I need to get around to threadmarking, though, to make it easier to re-read.
 
I would think that a minimum of historical skewing can justify Multibody, perhaps earlier than it was adopted in the original TL. Retaining some use for the magnificent F-1A engine has got to have some attractions for somebody, hasn't it?

Maybe not. Other discussions elsewhere suggest Rocketdyne was profoundly uninterested in capitalizing on the equally impressive and crucial J-2S OTL, an engine much easier to find justifications for using on upper stages. I suppose management was excited by the challenge of following through on SSME, an evolution from an alternate hydrogen burning engine of modestly higher thrust than J-2 and considerably higher ISP whose title eludes my memory at the moment; I'm sure it falls trippingly off the tongues of some others. I suppose the other engine had higher chamber pressures and perhaps went partway down the path of staged combustion followed by SSME, and therefore also had somewhat better sea level performance than even the J-2S, which seems to have perhaps eliminated the special problem the J-2 had with its low pressure gas generator at SL--offset by superior expansion from a narrower throat. The other engine was I suppose meant for possible ground firing from the beginning as SSME would be. Apparently this was the lineage Rockedyne, looking forward, preferred to develop instead of simply standing pat with minor tinkering on the J-2S.

This is a general problem in the astronautics biz, I guess, perhaps greatly exacerbated in the USA by the money-no-object gung-ho Apollo moon landing to meet a self-imposed deadline. This doubtless encouraged not only NASA big wigs but the entire chain of their private contractors to look ahead to ever more nifty future goals, and be generally disinclined to pursue maximizing utility of what they had in hand. And of course Apollo tech, being a series of kludges with designs frozen in the early 60s, would tend to appear quaint and out of date to such future-oriented designers. The entire premise of ETS is a major reversal of that mentality, to instead take what they have in hand at a given moment (the time of the OTL Shuttle Decision, specifically) and see how much utility they could wring out a fixed kit. Early in the TL's publication I did suppose there would be continual incremental innovations, and I think we saw some, but the pace seemed glacial to me compared to expectations.

And this is of course because even modest, incremental variations in important technologies involve a need to go back to square one as far as confidence in reliability of the new system thus modified goes. If Rocketdyne were to come out with a significantly modified F engine meriting a designation change, that engine would have to undergo a new battery of tests comparable to those carried out on the original F-1, then when integrated into a Multibody stage tested again as part of re-certifying that new model, and so on. I thought a virtue of throwing away each rocket set (and even manned craft) with each launch would be the opportunity for steady incremental improvement, but this did not allow for the testing factor.

So the TL assumes that with NASA under other management, this one man (tacking to be sure, on alternate winds that were present OTL, so this one man is leveraging a different mix of OTL pressures) can first of all bring NASA management around to a new mindset, and then the formation of alternate market pressures presumably redirects the thinking of dozens of major corporate contractors to fall in line, and this new way of thinking stabilizes pretty quickly. Then it is possible to work out the potentials of a fairly fixed kit of equipment and show that it compares well to the dreams of the most highly advanced tech boosters of modern times. Especially if one is of the view that the most exciting real world developments of OTL past decades do not involve quantum leaps to new regimes of performance requiring highly developed new materials and so forth, but rather holding firm at current levels in terms of engine pressures and temperatures and so forth and focusing on lightening and cheapening the fabrication of modern engines that do as much, or in absolute terms somewhat more poorly, but at a drastically lowered cost.

As many subsequent threads have explored, this is quite an about face from the mentality of the industry of the early 70s, that assumed that problems like high costs per launch would be addressed with radical new paradigms rather than incremental cost reductions, and furthermore forced a paradigm based on analogy with aeronautics rather than take a fresh new look at rockets for what they are, rather than Buck Rogers evolutions of airplanes. That's two different psychological hurdles to overcome right there, and in retrospect it may be far too much to ask of one man to accomplish.

Then again this one man was responding to strong pressures that existed OTL, to the hard reality that first of all Apollo era NASA budgets were inflated well beyond politically sustainable levels, and secondly the USA and world as a whole was entering a "hangover" period in which even perfectly sustainable levels of spending seemed possibly extravagant. Nixon and Agnew had no personal animus against the astronautics business, but certainly were under pressure, from majority Democrats and from a couple different wings of Republicans with different reasons but overlapping agendas, to rein costs in.

In that context, making lemonade in the form of a national launch system with standardized parts from the lemon of excellent but highly specialized systems developed for Apollo certainly would have some weight. It would annoy most everyone, but if the overall projected budgets included room for firm planning of new space stations, these could appear as the glamor product for their wild-eyed designers to focus on.

Rationally speaking, I don't think the case for ending Saturn 1B production and regarding the multi-tube first stage as inefficient and quaint was nearly as strong as it looked--but I have to admit, it looked strong in the day. Knowing it was a kludge, that it perpetuated 1950s technology (and a contractor who was very much out of the mainstream in the aerospace biz, however strong they may have been in the field of making tanks and other field vehicles for the Army) all worked against noticing that it was a highly effective kludge. Knowing what I know now, replacing the stage structure with an extrapolation of the S-1C monolithic two-tank was no guarantee of improvement and risked steps backward in terms of actual performance, and in any case called for a lengthy series of tests delaying introduction of Saturn 1C. But at the time of publication this seemed like a no-brainer requirement to me, and doubtless would look like that to legions of highly qualified and experienced astronauticists as well.

Given that we could expect Boeing, getting the message that economy and simplicity were at a premium and if they played their cards right they could look forward to long decades of serial production on a large scale, could come in on time and under budget with a solid design for both 1C and then Multibody, the Multibody Decision seems sweetly reasonable and painless to me.

Therefore--if the TL falls, it falls on the assumption that it would be possible to redirect the mass mentality of both NASA and her accustomed contractors so deeply and do it so quickly. It depends I guess on which is the tail and which is the dog, a government (the bulk of which is effectively the military) capable of rational self-assessment, or contractor interests shrewd at short term manipulation of the state. The modern debacle of SLS would seem to cast a cloud over the government's ability to examine its own soul and aim at thought-out, rational objectives, but this may be a product of a couple generations of inertia given a salutary re-direction in the ATL.
 
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