....
Unfortunately for enthusiasts of spaceflight in the late 1970s, the outlook for space had gotten no more friendly since the early part of the decade. Nixon, at least, had been a huge fan of the astronauts, and Agnew was as much infatuated with spaceflight as any member of the Lunar Society or the National Space Organization; Carter, on the other hand, was a Georgia peanut farmer, having as little interest in space as anyone else meeting that description might be expected to...
This remark struck me as quite wrong and unfair and thus derailed my reading farther in the post for some days, let alone responding.
It would be quite in place as a description of the attitudes of the stereotypical Lunar Society member as described below; growing up in a rather right-wing military family stationed in the Deep South during the Carter years, and reading a lot of the LS type point of view by people like Jerry Pournelle during those years, I might have agreed at the time myself--but I was in junior high and starting high school at the time.
Carter was most certainly not just a peanut farmer; among other things he'd served in the USN as an engineering officer aboard nuclear submarines. In fact in checking with Wikipedia to make sure I hadn't got that wrong, I learned some interesting things I'd never known before which in this context I think are worth repeating:
...He applied for the US Navy's fledgling nuclear submarine program run by then Captain Hyman G. Rickover. Rickover's demands on his men and machines were legendary, and Carter later said that, next to his parents, Rickover had the greatest influence on him. Carter has said that he loved the Navy, and had planned to make it his career. His ultimate goal was to become Chief of Naval Operations. Carter felt the best route for promotion was with submarine duty since he felt that nuclear power would be increasingly used in submarines. Carter was based in Schenectady, New York, and worked on developing training materials for the nuclear propulsion system for the prototype of a new submarine.[16]
On December 12, 1952, an accident with the experimental NRX reactor at Atomic Energy of Canada's Chalk River Laboratories caused a partial meltdown. The resulting explosion caused millions of liters of radioactive water to flood the reactor building's basement, and the reactor's core was no longer usable.[17] Carter was ordered to Chalk River, joining other American and Canadian service personnel. He was the officer in charge of the U.S. team assisting in the shutdown of the Chalk River Nuclear Reactor.[18]
Once they arrived, Carter's team used a model of the reactor to practice the steps necessary to disassemble the reactor and seal it off. During execution of the disassembly, each team member, including Carter, donned protective gear, was lowered individually into the reactor, where he could stay for only a few seconds at a time to minimize exposure to radiation. They had to use hand tools to loosen bolts, remove nuts, and take the other steps necessary to complete the disassembly process.
During and after his presidency, Carter indicated that his experience at Chalk River shaped his views on nuclear power and nuclear weapons, including his decision not to pursue completion of the neutron bomb.[19]
There are many things President Carter can be criticized about--and not just from a right-wing point of view either--but the sort of cheap shot that derailed me is characteristic of people who are going into the discussion determined to oppose him for political reasons having nothing to do with what he actually did, a mode of discourse I'm sure we're all familiar with. To have the authors include it as a simple statement of fact in their editorial voice was most dismaying!
Put it this way; if Jimmy Carter were
really to blame for the stagnation of US space efforts in our timeline, you'd have made the POD someone else getting elected in 1976. You didn't; quite rightly the POD is earlier, in the early Nixon administration. If there were no manned US spaceflights during the Carter years, it was because of decisions made half a decade before Carter was elected, to commit to developing the STS--which Carter sustained. Meanwhile of course quite a lot of developments in unmanned space operations went forward, military, scientific and commercial.
In your own timeline, actually, Carter gets the glory of continued US
manned space missions. It is not my impression that Carter was hostile to such and I'd think in a timeline where manned operations were happening he'd be sure to take some credit for them and reaffirm the US commitment to expanding space operations in a way that had more political resonance.
I do recall that in much earlier posts, you showed how the Reagan administration, when it came in, had in the person of David Stockman and his acolytes rather the appearance of a barbarian horde determined to raze NASA's deep space science missions to the ground.
That has solid historical support!
I distinctly remember the atmosphere of hope, in 1980 and '81 or so, that with a conservative clearing of the temple of overbloated and unvisionary Big Government we'd enter a Golden Age of rip-roaring free enterprise that would include glorious activities in space including permanent colonization, of orbital stations, the Moon, and eventually beyond.
Oddly enough though, that isn't what happened, either OTL or in this timeline. That's realism.
The rest of the post, quite properly as it is about popular attitudes, does recap the debate and feelings of OTL pretty well.
I'm less sure that something different wouldn't have happened ITTL, though, with the US government continuing manned operations in a sustained series of space stations. There would be more grounds for hopes and confidence that the gradual NASA program would indeed slowly but surely lead to ongoing expansions, continued explorations, eventually a permanent human presence in orbit and beyond.
Therefore, while I'm quite sure the libertarian far right would rant against the sinister influence of government and bureaucracy, they would not seem, as OTL, as much to be the
only camp to join if one had, um, Eyes Turned Skyward. A respectable
moderate movement in favor of sustaining and if politically possible, incrementing the existing NASA program would also be viable, and would attract more support from people who were rather repelled by the other political baggage that comes along with the Lunar Society's "Cowboys in Space!" agenda.
To be sure, the New Right in the USA was very much in the cards and in the air; the LS types would be quite robust, on a political roll. And one reason for that is that their approach resonates very strongly with deep American myths; this is how and why Reagan, and other right-wing Republicans, got the Presidency and later control of the legislature as well.
But having gotten the White House, and for the next 2 years control of the Senate as well, OTL at any rate the Republicans did more dismantling of NASA than upgrading it.
That was well and good according to the message Pournelle and company had been putting out; kick the weak and parasitic bureaucrats out, and let Real Men (TM) have at it and the results would be spectacular!
But the cavalry of these Real Men (TM) space cowboys has yet to appear on the horizon to sally forth and conquer space, and I think a lot of people who were charmed by the vision were chilled by the reality. I know I was; the first concrete result of the new Reagan agenda I saw was notices at the public library (which I haunted) that due to funding cuts hours and services were going to be curtailed. Similarly had I know that Stockman and company were out to shut down the scientific operations at JPL, I would not have taken that as a sign of progress. Across the board, it soon became obvious that there is such a thing as infrastructure and it needs to be maintained, that not everything worth doing (or even vital) yields a profit, that declaring the system of public/private cooperation that had evolved over a century and coincided with American power at its height null and void and tearing it apart would not automatically lead to a renaissance. It's stuff like that that turned a person like myself raised as a moderate conservative into a far-left-wing radical.
ITTL, when the Privateers started their raiding, someone like my young college-aged self would have somewhere else to go, I think, than the Lunar Society. And LS people would include people of less fanatical views, who would be heard. Perhaps LS would not split, perhaps it would be polarized and the more moderate types would move on to the other organizations and redefine them as the voice of the vision of more space but with less radicalism!
And that movement might have traction with the US public, because part of what is attractive about the LS vision is just plain doing something in space. Americans, and I gather people in the world in general, are interested in space activities, as a spectator sport to be sure. When these are manned, the interest sharpens, but people do get excited about Mars probes and Jupiter flybys and so on.
What a moderate space society might do is bring it home to enough politicians, in either party, that their constituency does like to see stuff happening in space, whether it is done by some private company or their government or someone else's government doesn't matter--but
if it is done by their own government, knowing that
their representative helped make it happen might count for some points in the next election.
Given that the general political landscape remains pretty much as OTL, I'd think that in the Carter years the moderate lobby would not be very strong and the LS types would indeed steal the thunder, because the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence and rhetorical spectacle is cheap.
But with the coming of Reagan's slash and burn approach to the institutions that had in fact been the ones providing the public with its orbital eye candy, I'd think the moderate wing would rally and have some influence on the nature of the gradual Democratic rebound. As late as 1985 Reaganite right-wingers seemed unstoppable but by the election of 1986, something like balance was returning to US government.
You have Space Moderates of course--the NSO. What I'm saying here is, by 1982 or so, the NSO might, after a period of being pulled into an LS type agenda, rebound as an active camp of a positive but alternate vision of the way forward in space, one that can accumulate rather more influence and voice than you credit it with, to balance the LS frame with another. As the 80s progress, support of space operations might not, in this time line be as much exclusively right-wing turf as it was OTL, and the enthusiasm the more liberal space supporters bring might rebound on liberalism in general, which was badly in need of a positive vision in the '80s!
Mondale's track record of hostility to space programs might bring dismay to the space moderates--but then again, they might be strong enough, by 1984, to force the man to recant and pledge support--much as I'm sure Carter would have in this timeline. Or perhaps Mondale would be butterflied away from the Democratic nomination in the first place--in favor of whom, I would not be able to say, Gary Hart maybe--or John Glenn? Whoever got it, I imagine they'd still get trounced handily by Reagan in '84, but there might have been less of a sense of angst, a total absence of agenda, that the Democratic party suffered from in those wilderness years.
Space moderates might help the Democrats recover a coherent, positive vision of what they stand
for--basically New Deal/Great Society ***
IN SPACE!*** For the idea that a society that works for everyone asks some sacrifices of everyone, but enables everyone to accomplish great things together that they could never do on their own.
Obviously OTL the extremist budget-cutting agenda that Stockman believed he had been given a mandate to carry out was not fully supported; Reagan himself would of course have capitalized on any rising moderate space movement and co-opted quite a few of the moderates back into the somewhat moderated Lunar Society type circles by reaffirming his support of the existing space programs and holding out hopes for more--including of course Freedom Station. The moderates would not all want to revive the Democrats.
But some would, and by colonizing both parties, I think the net of general public support for a serious space program would be thrown wider and dredge in a broader and more solid base for it. Every politician would soon understand that a certain level of commitment to space was quite as important as sustaining the military; the space budget at a much lower level of course, but both in their places equally untouchable.
If space moderates really could change the Democratic nomination for President in 1984, I guess that would be the first really large mega-butterfly the timeline has developed, and broad political events would become less predictably parallel to OTL after that. If Democrats, returning to power in the Senate and increasing strength in the House, and in state governments, do have a more coherent vision of a New Deal for the 21st Century, and bolstering space operations is a small but important part of that, I can believe they might put forward a candidate in 1988 who might win.
That would of course butterfly the Clinton Administration, as I think Clinton would not be ready yet. Exactly what other events it might also butterfly depends on one's take on the causes of major events of the 1990s. We already know nothing butterflies the collapse of the USSR, and this makes sense given the deep structural issues the Soviet Union had.