For All Mankind (AH Tv series at Apple TV)

[Expat]

You're right I have my timeline all mixed up when it comes to this show.

Still don't like Kennedy's chances in '72 given other events and the fact Nixon will have a lot of runway to move the ball forward on the moon while making it a major national security issue that a Democratic congress & prior admin had screwed up for years (that he only had a few months in office to turn around before the first landing). Nixon won in 1972 because his Vietnamization policy was working (and he would get the Paris Peace Accords signed 3 days after his second inauguration...short of a similar policy a D President likely won't get anyone to the table and the mainstream did not want a Humphrey style plan to end the war at the time) and his focus on crime after the turbulent Johnson administration would make it hard for most Democrats (especially ones who never had an executive elected office) to prove themselves at least to be safe candidates when it comes to "Law & Order".

Kennedy (and establishment) could likely get the even less charismatic Humphrey out and Jackson as well (viewed as the moderate sane choice). McGovern might bow out as well, but also might force Kennedy further to the left beyond what is comfortable for the mainstream (especially for Southern voters and non-urban). Wallace could easily cripple Kennedy in the primaries (and debates) given in that era the South was a Democratic stronghold that they almost had to win to carry national elections. It's one of the big reasons Carter was picked for 76. In 72, Nixon has some popularity (with people who vote;-) and has a huge war chest.

Ugh, thinking about it Nixon was also not afraid to use his oppo research either. Between Wallace and Nixon, Kennedy may be too damaged to run again in 76 if he loses in 72. He might not have a 'waitress sandwich' story at the time but he was unbelievably reckless so there might be something that just wouldn't fly with the national public (that would normally be happily be smothered by Massachusetts\Beltway press...but with Nixon actively pushing his skeletons into the national arena...). Heh...interesting thought exercise at least.

The show gives us Nixon himself laying out how the Dems spin the space situation. “They’ll say Kennedy (JFK) started it; Johnson ran it down the field; and Nixon fumbled it at the ten yard line.” People care less about lengthy history lessons than what politicians have done for them lately, and when it comes to space all they know in ‘72 is GOP failure. And if anyone does go for history, you could easily say Ike dropped the ball to start and only through an effort by the Dems did we even have a fighting chance.

On Vietnam, recall the war is already done, conceded. GOP has to push that issue uphill to spin it as a victory when the military (and Nixon’s famed Middle America) is likely pissed at them for cutting and running.

I doubt Teddy’s running on law and order, but with two big policy stumbles (space and Vietnam) plus the emerging stench of crime and corruption from Watergate, it’s not exactly gonna be winning many news cycles for Nixon. Not a tent pole issue for most voters given current events.

Unlikely Teddy’s forced to the left. With no Vietnam the wind is out of the movement’s sails, he more likely tacks center. No percentage in going left, and no reason to go after McGovern’s coalition, which he’d fend off pretty handily, I reckon.

A Wallace third party run is probably good for Kennedy. A weaker Nixon means more southern conservatives go for Wallace who tried Nixon in ‘68. You likely get a more even split, leaving Teddy to scrape through with the non-conservative plurality.

But I doubt he needs it, with Nixon’s strengths largely neutralized and his weaknesses on the marquee. It’s Teddy’s to lose. Even if your opinion on his charisma comes across in the news of the day, the story is, “we’ve got two dullards and a charismatic racist to choose between.”

As for ‘76, the show indeed explored the possibility that Teddy wouldn’t be selected by the party to run again. But I believe it ultimately went in his favor and he lost in a squeaker to Reagan.

 

[Grue]

On Vietnam, recall the war is already done, conceded. GOP has to push that issue uphill to spin it as a victory when the military (and Nixon’s famed Middle America) is likely pissed at them for cutting and running.

<double checks AU history to see what weirdness they applied there>. 1970 with an unspecified date? It's periphery to the show but that's some handwavium there. Without something equivalent to OTL he likely wouldn't even decide to run given the fact they'd massacre him with challenges in the primaries. Honorable peace was central to his campaign in the first place and the North would never come to the peace table unless Nixon pursued an entirely different policy or the Soviets yanked their support.

Once Kennedy's in, short of multiple Carter-sized screw ups, I don't see him losing a incumbency run unless the economy really sours (like it hit in the late 70s). Granted imo Senators do not make good Presidents, so Teddy might be able to screw up badly enough that fawning press coverage couldn't protect him.

As a side note, after 1968, Wallace was back in the fold and ran in Democratic primaries (so no 3rd party run for him in 72, especially considering he failed to deny either party enough electoral votes in 68 and likely hurt the Democrats more than Republicans). Granted he could get shot again, but likely still hurts Kennedy in the primaries. Unless Wallace is on the ballot for the national election, 72 doesn't look reasonable for a Democrat to beat Nixon in the South.

 

[AdmiralMB]

Once Kennedy's in, short of multiple Carter-sized screw ups, I don't see him losing a incumbency run unless the economy really sours (like it hit in the late 70s).

Kennedy was caught in an affair with Mary Jo Kopechne, a White House staffer ITTL (Chappaquiddick is butterflied) which Reagan uses to his advantage at the nascent CPAC in 1974. You also have the Apollo 23, 24, and 25 incidents that while resolved, would absolutely shake confidence in the space program and Kennedy's management of it. And if it emerged that Kennedy exchanged Saturn V contracts for votes on the ERA (Precipitating the aforementioned Apollo incidents) then Reagan can whip up support from those that opposed ERA, even if Reagan himself is not in favor of a repeal, by leveling charges of corruption and cronyism on Kennedy.

In the News Shorts leading up to Season 2, it was explained that the 1976 election ended in a very narrow victory for Reagan after a 2000-style recount and court case in Ohio. Reagan also squeaks by in his 1980 bid for re-election (also against Mondale), which contrasts with his blowout wins in 1980 and 1984 OTL.

 

[e of pi]

Might we see civilian astronauts - perhaps some sort of early "space hotel" like Space Station 5 in Space 2001?

Really that should almost already be a thing by the period shown in the show--with >10 Shuttle missions a year and Sea Dragon also having to launch to support the silly Shuttle-to-the-moon architecture, a kilogram in LEO will probably be <$500/kg and an astronaut seat in LEO something under $20m, both in 2021 dollars, given that above 10 flights a year, the marginal cost of a Shuttle launch in hardware turnaround and ET fabrication even IOTL was about $200m (1994). A Shuttle modified to fill the cargo bay with a crew pod could potentially get 30 people up at once, maybe more (Rockwell had a proposal for a remarkable 74-person passenger module which even at OTL costs of about $200m per marginal flight in 1994 dollars would be about $2.7m per seat--plenty low enough for a small stream of tourists, like the round dozen we're supposed to see in the next year IOTL even at prices of ~$40m/seat).

 

[The Historian]

It took me entirely too long to realize, and I dunno if anyone's pointed it out yet, that the direct inspiration for Pathfinder seems to be the Delta Glider, especially in the wing shape and thickness of the wing. DG has something like 32km/s of Delta-V, which is enough for a Mars-And-Back trip. Pathfinder may well be designed similarly, and as a bigger ship could carry either more fuel or more payload for those huge far-reaching missions.

 

[Shevek23]

It took me entirely too long to realize, and I dunno if anyone's pointed it out yet, that the direct inspiration for Pathfinder seems to be the Delta Glider, especially in the wing shape and thickness of the wing. DG has something like 32km/s of Delta-V, which is enough for a Mars-And-Back trip. Pathfinder may well be designed similarly, and as a bigger ship could carry either more fuel or more payload for those huge far-reaching missions.

I have not had the opportunity to play around with Orbiter software and so had no idea what you were referring to.

Plainly the DG is pure science fiction of the Chuck Jones level of realism. I'd imagine it feels realistic, in that perhaps a spaceplane of this design, given the entirely magical engines, necessary to produce the thrusts offered at the fantastically low rate of propellant mass depletion implied, would respond to the controls as advertised. Yes, if we had Star Trek or even Expanse level super-nuclear engines of this unspecified kind, it would behave like this--sort of. I doubt the game designer bothered to consider what would happen if a plume of any sort of material were ejected into the atmosphere above a runway with the sorts of energies required, for instance. (It would be like setting off a continuous string of tactical nukes, pretty much. Somehow I doubt this accurate feature is modeled!)

If we figure Pathfinder masses about 120 tonnes and can store 30 tonnes of hydrogen (the only propellant that gives nuclear thermal engines their advertised high Isp as in that sort of design specific impulse is a function of molecular mass, of the inverse square root of it in fact), that mass ratio (150/120) and an achieved mission delta V of 32 km/sec implies an Isp about 15,000 sec! When we are dealing with systems as fantastic as this, of course we might show that the NTR thermal considerations governing Isp do not apply and we can use water, or mercury, or tungsten for propellant I suppose, which sidesteps the volume-stuffing problem but raises questions about the range of masses we want one spaceplane hull to handle.

I'd just reiterate, if the Reagan Administrations of the TL have managed to produce an engine like this, that somehow does not quick-fry the crew and whatever state it is launched over with massive neutron and gamma ray fluxes (we need 10-15 times the power output we'd need for a more realistic NTR in the Isp ballpark of 800-1300, for a given amount of thrust, and nuclear power generation is pretty inevitably associated with these "side effect" outputs) and can be packaged into a modest number of tens of tonnes, shielding if any and all, leaving any room for either propellant, ship structure or cargo at all, well as a power generator it would eclipse anything known to human engineering in OTL 2020, or projected with any realism for centuries to come. Using it for a spacedrive is a sideshow versus the potentials involved in transforming the US power grid to the long-promised "power too cheap to meter" and all the implications of that.

 

[robertsconley]

Here is a Stack Exchange discussion on the Delta-Flyer

How feasible is the Delta-Glider?

In Dr. Martin Schweiger's freeware spaceflight simulator Orbiter 2016, a very popular(but fictional) spacecraft is the Delta-Glider. It is capable of take-off from a runway, has hover engines for ...

space.stackexchange.com

 

[Shevek23]

Here is a Stack Exchange discussion on the Delta-Flyer

It seems you forgot to include the actual link.

In any case, unless the Delta Flyer is using something other than rockets to achieve thrust, the rocket equation applies. The question is how does the propellant mass purportedly loaded in relate to mass of dry structure and cargo, but 32 km/sec delta V is a large number and so to get the specific impulse down to values that seem at all realistic (with even "electric drives" aka ion drives in a previous generation's terms being substantially lower than the one I estimated on the premise of hydrogen propellant, and also far too low in thrust (the only way to avoid the stupendous power generation requirement while maintaining high specific impulse) to perform the way Pathfinder does in canon.

So it may well be Pathfinder is written to emulate what DF does in the Orbiter simulator. But both are essentially fantasy, apparently. Perhaps your Stack Exchange dialog will reveal some sweet spot of higher mass ratio and lower Isp I had not considered, but I don't think there can be a way to dance out of this--a high thrust system that also falls within reasonable levels of power generation is going to require a lot more bulk to store the reaction mass than can be stuffed into the spaceplane hull.

 

[robertsconley]

It seems you forgot to include the actual link.

fixed it, sorry about that.

In any case, unless the Delta Flyer is using something other than rockets to achieve thrust, the rocket equation applies. The question is how does the propellant mass purportedly loaded in relate to mass of dry structure and cargo, but 32 km/sec delta V is a large number and so to get the specific impulse down to values that seem at all realistic (with even "electric drives" aka ion drives in a previous generation's terms being substantially lower than the one I estimated on the premise of hydrogen propellant, and also far too low in thrust (the only way to avoid the stupendous power generation requirement while maintaining high specific impulse) to perform the way Pathfinder does in canon.

The the unrealistic aspect of the Deltaflyer is that it's engines have an Isp of 4078.86 or roughly 10 times better than the shuttle main engine which is around 453 sec. Below it is workup.

The whole reason for the Deltaflyer in Orbiter is to have a forgiving craft for beginners to use. However forgiving for Orbiter means you have excess delta-vee. The controls have a lot of automation built in but there are still tasks to perform. Everything else works as per real world physics. The way the excessive delta-vee is achieved is by giving it a unrealistic Vex/Isp value. Orbiter is hard enough for a novice to learn.

I worked a lot on my Project Mercury and Project Gemini add ons to get them to the point where a novice has a shot of flying the craft. It was one part was making sure the default configuration of the switches were in just before launch configuration and one part simplifying NASA manuals and flight plans. They have to follow the ascent and re-entry instruction exactly as the margins are so tight. Luckily both capsules had a lot of automation the Mercury more than Gemini.

Meadville Space Center

So it may well be Pathfinder is written to emulate what DF does in the Orbiter simulator. But both are essentially fantasy, apparently. Perhaps your Stack Exchange dialog will reveal some sweet spot of higher mass ratio and lower Isp I had not considered, but I don't think there can be a way to dance out of this--a high thrust system that also falls within reasonable levels of power generation is going to require a lot more bulk to store the reaction mass than can be stuffed into the spaceplane hull.

A NERVA style rocket would roughly be twice as good as the Shuttle Main Engine. Orbiter's Deltaflyer with an Vex/ISP of 9800/1000 would have a delta vee of 7952 seconds.

So you need roughly 9400 to reach Earth Orbit for a normal launch. However air-launch gives a break on the delta-vee requirements. The problem is figuring out much.

One answer can be found here

Benefits of air-launching a rocket

Is there a way to quantify how much you would gain by air-launching a rocket compared to a ground launch?

space.stackexchange.com

And it is calculated to be 13%
Which would make around 8150 to low earth Orbit.

So roughly we are looking at 7952 per Orbiter's Deltaflyer versus 8150 for need for orbit from a air launch

That would put it in what Jerry Pournelle calls nickel and dime territory i.e. you are in the ballpark and repeated iterations of the engineering can get it to the point where it can achieve orbit. Pournelle felt strongly that the Delta-flyer could have reached orbit as a SSTO by quickly iterating through the engineering.

I say it close enough that "OK it may have worked provided the engineering is worked out." Look who figured you could make a viable rocket out of a water tower right before the Starship testing program? Also up for debate is whether make a nuclear 120 kN engine.

 

[seraphim74]

I wonder if the Soviets launch(ed) the Interkosmos program ITTL. We know that the US brought to the Moon astronauts from friendly countries (there was a Dutch astronaut, IIRC). Do the Soviets do the same with their allies? Was there a Pole on the Moon?
I think it is possible. The program was a good propaganda tool to show solidarity of the Eastern Bloc and to demonstrate Soviet willingness to share their achievements with their socialist satel... I mean brothers. The scientists from Eastern Europe might be useful, and IOTL there were also participants from France or UK, which might help to acquire some of western technology.

 

[errorofmyself]

What are other PODs in the series?

 

[Polish Eagle]

What are other PODs in the series?

While the general consensus seems to have been that Sergei Korolev's survival was the PoD, there is a line in the first episode ("I'm glad Al Shepard isn't around to see this") which implies an earlier PoD--the death of America's first astronaut.

Or maybe he died in a completely mundane accident after the formal PoD?

 

[Pipcard]

It took me entirely too long to realize, and I dunno if anyone's pointed it out yet, that the direct inspiration for Pathfinder seems to be the Delta Glider, especially in the wing shape and thickness of the wing. DG has something like 32km/s of Delta-V, which is enough for a Mars-And-Back trip. Pathfinder may well be designed similarly, and as a bigger ship could carry either more fuel or more payload for those huge far-reaching missions.

It's also reminiscent of the much larger XR5 Vanguard mod with a skin like this.

 

[Kloka]

While the general consensus seems to have been that Sergei Korolev's survival was the PoD, there is a line in the first episode ("I'm glad Al Shepard isn't around to see this") which implies an earlier PoD--the death of America's first astronaut.

Or maybe he died in a completely mundane accident after the formal PoD?

Personally I think Meniere’s forced him into resignation.

Korolev living may butterfly away Soyuz 1 and almost certainly butterflies away Soyuz 11. The lunar crash mission is butterflied in as their replacement,

 

[Ogrebear]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1411062589023416326

 

[MaxGerke01]

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=2284595248337378

 

[MaxGerke01]

Has FAM mentioned or implied the AIDS pandemic so far ? Seems to me that with characters like Larry and Ellen and considering the real world history of what the Reagan Administration failed to do they would be really dropping the ball.As they potentially are with expanding rights for blacks-it needs to cover more than just Danielle eventually. The expanded space race potentially makes both of these better ittl well tell us how dont let us just assume it..

 

[Inoeth]

Has FAM mentioned or implied the AIDS pandemic so far ? Seems to me that with characters like Larry and Ellen and considering the real world history of what the Reagan Administration failed to do they would be really dropping the ball.As they potentially are with expanding rights for blacks-it needs to cover more than just Danielle eventually. The expanded space race potentially makes both of these better ittk well tell us how dont let us just assume it..

Honestly that was one of the biggest surprises of the most recent season- that AIDS didn't come up. I was fully expecting Larry to get it given the beginning of the season when he's going out with lots of boyfriends to party... Ellen had her whole come out/not come out plot line as well...

I think we'll see gay rights as a much bigger thing next season. My guess there is that Ellen will come out once humans land on Mars- tho there's also the whole potential that she stays in the closet to seek higher office to continue to work on promoting NASA... We'll just have to wait and see how it all works out.

I'm just generally sad that it's gonna be a long time (a year?) until the next seasons- but certainly happy that they've renewed it and that they clearly have plans for many more seasons to come.

 

[General Mosh]

I finally started watching this show. Really enjoyed Season 1, the last two episodes especially were nailbiters. I think the show is doing a pretty good job interweaving micro and macro dramas, with a lot of different perspectives. Lot of fun to watch, and a great outing for alternate history.

 

[Allochronian]

Has FAM mentioned or implied the AIDS pandemic so far ? Seems to me that with characters like Larry and Ellen and considering the real world history of what the Reagan Administration failed to do they would be really dropping the ball.As they potentially are with expanding rights for blacks-it needs to cover more than just Danielle eventually. The expanded space race potentially makes both of these better ittl well tell us how dont let us just assume it..

To my knowledge, there is no mention of it.
It's probably going on in a similar manner under Reagan, but the next president may or may not choose to deal with it more efficiently.

I'd also love to know if there is ever a War on Drugs, among other things (Did Nixon go to China?, assassination attempts on the presidents in 1975, 1979 and 1981, Beagle conflict.)