How ambitious can alternate space histories get?

[Mechadogzilla]

Jupiter, moons of Jupiter. Same thing. There is nothing there.

???

Have you seen the movie? They organize the expedition to Jupiter because they uncovered smoking gun evidence of intelligent life in the moon monolith and before powering down the one thing the monolith did was emit a radio frequency directed towards Jupiter. They are following the only lead they have to make first contact with aliens. This is said directly in the movie more than once.

This is because 2001 is a story and not a serious prediction of the future or a rigorously plausible thought experiment ATL. No one involved understood the film to be an endorsement of the value of real world travel to Jupiter lmao.

 

[lionhead]

People have, in fact, put “their money” on the line to go find out what is at Jupiter (and Jupiter’s moons), quite a few billions once you add up all of the spacecraft that have primarily been aimed there. Enough for a human mission? No. But if human missions were sufficiently cheap to do, or the world were much richer relative to the cost, someone would probably do it.

And in any case “nothing” is certainly wrong. The Galilean moons are all, except perhaps for Callisto, rather interesting from a scientific perspective, as is Jupiter itself. There are also a lot of volatiles and a great deal of energy available there, which while not practically useful right now could very well have value in the future, somewhat like bauxite vis-a-vis people in the 17th century. There is also some possibility of life, with proposals for how life could exist on both Jupiter and some of its moons, although this could fold back into the “scientific perspective” mentioned above. There is plenty to motivate people to spend a relatively modest amount on traveling to and investigating the planet and its moons, which is why they do so.

Not to mention the plasma physics and magnetodynamics that were of interest to the physicists who pushed so much for Jupiter studies in the 20th century, before the true nature of the Galilean moons was known at all.

I its interesting for scientists sure, there is so much you can learn. But is it lacking in ambition that we haven't gone there yet? Lack of motivation? Or is it really a matter of "yeah, it could be interesting, but do we really want to spend all those resources and time and manpower to get there or is it better to use our resources for other things?"

Is that lack of ambition? I'm sorry, i'm just really focussed on the OTL being near the "less ambitious" part. I feel that should be the benchmark.

???

Have you seen the movie? They organize the expedition to Jupiter because they uncovered smoking gun evidence of intelligent life in the moon monolith and before powering down the one thing the monolith did was emit a radio frequency directed towards Jupiter. They are following the only lead they have to make first contact with aliens. This is said directly in the movie more than once.

This is because 2001 is a story and not a serious prediction of the future or a rigorously plausible thought experiment ATL. No one involved understood the film to be an endorsement of the value of real world travel to Jupiter lmao.

Oh i'm not talking about the movie. I'm talking about the actual moons of jupiter. Hell if there are artificial structures anywhere outside of earth we should be on top of it asap. Does that make the space travel and tech in the movie more ambitious than OTL though?

 

[Sasza]

Oh i'm not talking about the movie. I'm talking about the actual moons of jupiter. Hell if there are artificial structures anywhere outside of earth we should be on top of it asap. Does that make the space travel and tech in the movie more ambitious than OTL though?

I guess only greater interest from the military can lead to more ambitious flights.


I once wondered about an intermediate scenario, where the Soviets centralize their space potential at an early stage and we have cooperation between Glushko, Korolev and Chelomei from the beginning.

They land before the Americans on the Moon using EOR. They also used LOX/H2 engines for missions to the outer planets.

 

[njslim]

We can get even bleaker--your scenario at least has the memory of Apollo to show it could be done.

Here's one I have in mind:

Al Shepard beats Gagarin to space (but not to orbit--though the broad mass of the US population can't tell the difference). There is no Kennedy moonshot goal, Apollo remains the LEO-focused program it was supposed to be initially, with some MOL-scale space stations as annexes to it. This chugs along until 1973, when the oil crisis and stagflation combine to render the program less popular with the public--and with the overall not-that-impressive (at least, to the public) scientific results from microgravity research and military disinterest, the program is quietly wound down, with a reusable lifting body spacecraft proposed as successor but also wound down (perhaps entirely killed under Carter). The Soviets, for similar reasons, ultimately wind things down as well--coming second, they were never able to squeeze as much propaganda value out of it as they got IOTL, and the Politburo is overall less interested (maybe they even squeeze some propaganda out of winding it down--'the warmongering capitalists continue to seek ways to weaponize space, long after experience has shown the lack of utility in that; while their citizens starve and die of drugs, they pander to their warmongering industrialists; we are more enlightened. Now, get in the truck, we're going to Afghanistan...'). There is talk of revival under Reagan, in the context of SDI, but that also dies when the Cold War ends and we get the thrice-damned Peace Dividend. On the unmanned front, we probably see Voyager, but maybe no Viking (by extension, no Mars revival in the 1990s?). Mars is written off as "as dead as the Moon." Hubble might still go up, launched on a Titan III rather than Shuttle. Not sure about Galileo, Ulysses, and Cassini ITTL--maybe the complicated politics of working with the Europeans on those ends up killing them?

Space advocacy functionally doesn't exist ITTL, except maybe the Planetary Society. In your scenario, the occasional space advocate can still point to Apollo as an example of, "it can be done, it has been done, and the results speak for themselves," comparing Apollos 15-17 to the later unmanned probes. ITTL, there isn't even that example, and space advocacy is entirely the domain of a relatively smaller population of planetary scientists and astronomers. Pretty much the only people who talk seriously about space colonies are the LaRouche cult, and even they say it comes after controlled fusion power plants.

Shepard was scheduled to fly before Gagarin, but do to a series of mishaps, some of them comical it was delayed until after Gagarin flew in April 1961 Mercury Redstone 1 - unmanned test flight in November 1960 started to lift off pad, it got 4 inched before ground cable prematurely disconnected causing Redstone engine to shut down leaving fully fueled rocket sitting on pad The esca[e tower jettisoned and then the parachutes popped out A replacement Redstone flew a month later Mercury Redstone 2 with chimp HAM flew in January 1961 - it had a "hot engine" where turbopump overspeed caused fuel to be forced into combustion chamber at accelerated rate Von Braun had set the abort timer at 139 seconds - he had never witnessed a Redstone engine fire for less The propellants were exhausted ar 147 seconds triggering abort sequence and giving the chump a wild ride Because of this Von Braun insisted on another test flight in March 1961 - Shepard was supposed to fly then An unmanned Redstone, labelled booster development with a boiler plate capsule was launched to check out modifications to the booster

 

[Fulano]

Some alternate space timelines try to be "realistic" and fit within expected economic and political limitations, being slightly more (or less) advanced in capabilities than OTL. Others push the boundaries of realism or outright break them altogether (as if an ASB intervened) to create fantastical scenarios in which humans travel to the outer solar system by the year 2000.

What the scenarios in your picture have in common is, that they start post-WW2, but I genuinely think the "Space Age" could have started even earlier. You just have to settle territorial disputes way earlier than OTL, and then, instead of focusing on their neighbors, the Colonial Powers start focusing on Space.
You just need a crazy/eccentric King/Prime Minister inspired in Julio Verne, or another proto-Sci-Fi author, to start investigating in Aeronautics, and I am sure the rest will follow even if for fear of being left behind.
For this, you could make the "Belle Époque" to never end, but instead of getting the absolute tragedies that were the World Wars, we get some kind of "Cold War" between each other, so instead of a Soviet-American Cold War Era, you end with an Imperial Cold War Era in which all the different Empires compite between each other in which celestial body is the next one in being colonized.

Of course, you could go even earlier, like write a story about an industrialized Roman Empire against an industrialized Song China, or something along those lines. But I don't have the enough knowledge to comment about those times.

 

[Nell_Lucifer]

What the scenarios in your picture have in common is, that they start post-WW2, but I genuinely think the "Space Age" could have started even earlier. You just have to settle territorial disputes way earlier than OTL, and then, instead of focusing on their neighbors, the Colonial Powers start focusing on Space.
You just need a crazy/eccentric King/Prime Minister inspired in Julio Verne, or another proto-Sci-Fi author, to start investigating in Aeronautics, and I am sure the rest will follow even if for fear of being left behind.
For this, you could make the "Belle Époque" to never end, but instead of getting the absolute tragedies that were the World Wars, we get some kind of "Cold War" between each other, so instead of a Soviet-American Cold War Era, you end with an Imperial Cold War Era in which all the different Empires compite between each other in which celestial body is the next one in being colonized.

The easiest would probably be Wilhelm II with his dreams of Germany taking her place in the world, his passion for new technologies (even if it was somewhat superficial) and his pet project in the form of the Wilhelm Institute which could be turned into a proto space research complex if he has the interest.

And Tsarist Russia, which was drinking for a few good years the space juice and had many talented people to tackle the challenge.

 

[Centauris]

I do not know if anyone wrote about this, but I feel like if Russian Empire somehow survived and industrialized (better transformed into a republican Federation), while allying with the US (which helped USSR with industrial development IOTL) in earlier 20th century. They could pretty much be rivaling in space more, if the level of tension between them is lower and their gov-s do not put lots of resources into nuclear offence/defense projects, agreeing on the limitations early on. Freed up capacities could be used to make space travel cheap with far-going plans of extracting resources from space and even dumping some trash out there, why not? But that kind of TL is highly stable, and we know that the previous century OTL got us to the brink of technogenic, global catastrophy.

 

[Kalga]

Assuming an earliest POD of 1945, the worst case scenario would obviously be a Cuban Missile Crisis induced WWIII. The Communist world would obviously be bombed back to the stone age, Europe being bashed in for the 3rd time in as many generation (and this will have a generational mental trauma on their population), north America being punched in the face, Africa & middle east collapsing along for the ride, and a generally not fun time to be around for a few decade. Even going pass the decades of reconstruction rocketry & space exploration will be firmly portrayed as imperialistic & militaristic aggression, which would halt development there for at least half a century (like a more severe fearmongering of nuclear power in OTL). Not to mention environmentalism and even deindustrialization might come into fashion and stay that way for generations. In that case man might make it to the moon by the 22rd century.

Now for a "reasonable" best case scenario would simply require more slack to be found in the superpower's budget. For the US, dodging the Vietnam war would create a lot of savings, and maybe dial back on some of the other foreign adventures. Not antagonizing Cuba when Castro first seized power would be a plus as well. On the Soviet side dial back on conventional military and nuclear spending after a sufficient deterrence would be a good start (but of course very difficult).

 

[Workable Goblin]

We can get even bleaker--your scenario at least has the memory of Apollo to show it could be done.

The problem I see with this scenario is actually that the budget of NASA is too small here--it's still doubtlessly expensive, but you're starting to get into similar budget territory as, say, the Antarctic or particle physics programs, and those have never been at serious risk of being shut down (even if the collider program was killed), partially because there just isn't much mileage to be had from them. Not only that, but by being so small NASA has probably retained a lot of its NACA ethos and has probably gotten rather good at cultivating Congressional support in key districts, even more so than IOTL. I suspect it's more likely that a few flashy things, such as a proposed reusable logistics vehicle, get cut, while the bulk of the program quietly carries on.

Even going pass the decades of reconstruction rocketry & space exploration will be firmly portrayed as imperialistic & militaristic aggression, which would halt development there for at least half a century (like a more severe fearmongering of nuclear power in OTL).

I doubt that. Rocketry would be decisively in the background here as any kind of tool of "imperialism" or "militarism," given that the overwhelming majority of the weapons delivered would be by bomber aircraft rather than missiles, and both sides would be using missiles. It would be about like portraying tanks as a tools of imperialism in the wake of World War II. The major issues would be that 1) there would be no money for it for a long while 2) the U.S. wouldn't have any competition to spur it to invest in human spaceflight (again--after all, the Cuban Missile Crisis post-dated several Mercury flights) even if it did have the money 3) no one else for a long while is going to be rich enough to invest in human spaceflight.

 

[oberdada]

The sky is the limit.

(Sorry, someone had to say it)

 

[Hearkener]

Assuming an earliest POD of 1945, the worst case scenario would obviously be a Cuban Missile Crisis induced WWIII. The Communist world would obviously be bombed back to the stone age, Europe being bashed in for the 3rd time in as many generation (and this will have a generational mental trauma on their population), north America being punched in the face, Africa & middle east collapsing along for the ride, and a generally not fun time to be around for a few decade. Even going pass the decades of reconstruction rocketry & space exploration will be firmly portrayed as imperialistic & militaristic aggression, which would halt development there for at least half a century (like a more severe fearmongering of nuclear power in OTL). Not to mention environmentalism and even deindustrialization might come into fashion and stay that way for generations. In that case man might make it to the moon by the 22rd century.

That's a fairly optimistic assumption. My (pessimistic) take is that a WWIII with nukes would permanently destroy human civilization globally. Even if that doesn't happen, the reconstruction would likely take centuries, and involve none of the states that defined global policy prior to the war, as those would most likely be wasteland at this point. Environmentalism and deindustrialization are moot points, because we no longer have an industrial society. All of human history thereafter would have to be regarded as a separate entity altogether. Man might never make it to the moon in that scenario.

 

[Workable Goblin]

That's a fairly optimistic assumption. My (pessimistic) take is that a WWIII with nukes would permanently destroy human civilization globally.

The effects of a WWIII with nukes very much depends on when this war takes place, because the relative balance of power and number of nukes in existence varied dramatically over the course of the Cold War, and up to today. For example, between about 1945 and 1955 a WWIII with nukes would look basically like WWII with nukes, because the United States had a limited number of nukes and a limited bomber force to carry them; it would have taken years of industrial effort to enable them to actually carry out mass nuclear strikes.

In this case, we're discussing a 1963 war, so the available stockpiles and delivery systems (especially delivery systems) simply are not enough to "permanently destroy human civilization globally," not even close. The Soviets were just too weak to hurt the Americas or Australia or New Zealand that badly.

 

[Pipcard]

I was talking about spaceflight-centric TLs, not nuclear apocalypse TLs that make everything else irrelevant.

 

[Hearkener]

In this case, we're discussing a 1963 war, so the available stockpiles and delivery systems (especially delivery systems) simply are not enough to "permanently destroy human civilization globally," not even close. The Soviets were just too weak to hurt the Americas or Australia or New Zealand that badly.

True. I was thinking more of the period around 1985 when the number of nukes was the highest and the advent of modern rocketry had made defense against a nuclear strike all but impossible.

I was talking about spaceflight-centric TLs, not nuclear apocalypse TLs that make everything else irrelevant.

Oh, sorry if I derailed your thread somewhat. My personal opinion is that OTL was already fairly ambitious in terms of space-travel. Going to the moon, or pretty much anywhere outside of Earth's orbit, is a colossal waste of money and time by practical considerations. Space is huge, empty and lethal, and pretty much everything up there can also be found down here. Even parking weapons out there isn't hugely efficient, because now you have given your enemy the additional protection of Earth's atmosphere and magnetic shield.

I think the most ambitious you can get while still being semi-realistic is turning space into the deep sea: humans build structures there to harvest ressources from asteroids, but nobody actually lives on those permanently, and military assets are mostly small craft and stations up in orbit.

 

[Kalga]

I was talking about spaceflight-centric TLs, not nuclear apocalypse TLs that make everything else irrelevant.

Hence why no one is talking about a 1983 WWIII POD (half the reasons, the other half being that most of the cool shit had already occurred). Nukes as actual apocalypse inducing weapons is only going to happen at the late 1960s at the earliest. Before then it's very likely that North America will be "mostly fine" and South America completely unaffected by any direct effects (of course they'll be affected by indirect effects, everything affects everything else at some point or another).

But if WWIII and nuclear usage of any kind is off the table, then a more violent and longer lasting decolonization of Africa & Asia should suck enough resources form the superpowers to cripple any space program.

I doubt that. Rocketry would be decisively in the background here as any kind of tool of "imperialism" or "militarism," given that the overwhelming majority of the weapons delivered would be by bomber aircraft rather than missiles, and both sides would be using missiles. It would be about like portraying tanks as a tools of imperialism in the wake of World War II. The major issues would be that 1) there would be no money for it for a long while 2) the U.S. wouldn't have any competition to spur it to invest in human spaceflight (again--after all, the Cuban Missile Crisis post-dated several Mercury flights) even if it did have the money 3) no one else for a long while is going to be rich enough to invest in human spaceflight.

Fears aren't always rational (like with the anti-nuclear crowd often pointing at Chernobyl as their go to example), and the missiles in Cuba would be one of the few ways the USSR could reach the US in 1963. The material consequences of a WWIII early enough would likely be made up within a couple of generations (at least for North America).

That's a fairly optimistic assumption. My (pessimistic) take is that a WWIII with nukes would permanently destroy human civilization globally. Even if that doesn't happen, the reconstruction would likely take centuries, and involve none of the states that defined global policy prior to the war, as those would most likely be wasteland at this point. Environmentalism and deindustrialization are moot points, because we no longer have an industrial society. All of human history thereafter would have to be regarded as a separate entity altogether. Man might never make it to the moon in that scenario.

1963 is not 1983/84/85/89 (the far more popular WWIII POD, precisely because there is the actual nuclear capability to end the world). Human civilization will mostly continue in the Americas and Oceania, and world civilization would probably recover materialistically by the mid 21st century. Hence why the various societal handicaps to further stunt space tech.

 

[Sasza]

Just about how to stop humans from flying into space.

I don't know why people have such a lack of hope lately.

 

[Jürgen]

What the scenarios in your picture have in common is, that they start post-WW2, but I genuinely think the "Space Age" could have started even earlier. You just have to settle territorial disputes way earlier than OTL, and then, instead of focusing on their neighbors, the Colonial Powers start focusing on Space.
You just need a crazy/eccentric King/Prime Minister inspired in Julio Verne, or another proto-Sci-Fi author, to start investigating in Aeronautics, and I am sure the rest will follow even if for fear of being left behind.
For this, you could make the "Belle Époque" to never end, but instead of getting the absolute tragedies that were the World Wars, we get some kind of "Cold War" between each other, so instead of a Soviet-American Cold War Era, you end with an Imperial Cold War Era in which all the different Empires compite between each other in which celestial body is the next one in being colonized.

Of course, you could go even earlier, like write a story about an industrialized Roman Empire against an industrialized Song China, or something along those lines. But I don't have the enough knowledge to comment about those times.

Yes, I think a multipolar world would deal with a space race better. Of course the interesting part is if decolonization happen under it and how especially UK will deal with becoming a smaller actor in space from being one of the strongest.

 

[Sasza]

Yes, I think a multipolar world would deal with a space race better. Of course the interesting part is if decolonization happen under it and how especially UK will deal with becoming a smaller actor in space from being one of the strongest.

Let Japan and Europe simply focus on more ambitious projects rather than just the needs of current commercial and military needs, e.g. a joint station based on HTV and ATV modules next to the ISS.

 

[Athelstane]

I recall reading somewhere on this site that the first rule of alternate history is that there's always a better space program.

This is certainly true of "alternate history" as a popular phenomenon!

But the reality is, getting men on the Moon by 1969 was frankly an extreme outlier of possibilities, given any number of plausible historical points of departure in the 19th or 20th centuries, let alone earlier. It took a near perfect confluence of developments to even make it possible.

 

[UniversalCommons]

The real hard part about it is that there is not a lot past 2050 which is easy to find. The predictions get really wild after that point. NASA has lots of information until you reach about 2040 for real missions. For the big timeline sites like Quantumrun, it ends up at 2050. For the other timeline sites future timeline, they seem to be very focused on artificial intelligence lately, this is also true of Future Business Tech. People don't seem to want to guess beyond 2050 because it is very murky. There are predictable events like Haley's comet or Oumama which happen at fixed points in time, or potential asteroid strikes. These are predicted events for astronomy. Therre is also a clear pattern for exploration and colonization. First you explore and colonize the inner planets. Then you explore and colonize the outer planets. Then you create a separate timeline for mining the asteroid fields and Kuiper Belt. Then you reach the heliosphere edge and end up at the Oort Cloud. The Oort Cloud has a lot of strange things in it oumuamua, dwarf planets like Sedna and Farout, comets, cometary mining as a possibility. About two light years from the sun you are at the edge of the solar system right near deep space. This is where you could look out and see rogue planets that are not part of solar systems or start picking out exoplanets to send probes to. After this it is starshots to other solar systems, followed by exoplanetary explorers. Then finally colonists to other star systems.