Implications for the Space Race starting six years earlier

Tzaero

https://falsesteps.wordpress.com/2016/03/29/vr-190-stalins-rocket/

Found this POD yesterday, summed up it details Soviet designs for a modified Soviet clone of the V2 to put men into space. Stalin checked off on the endeavour in 1946 but the program got held up in bureaucracy and forgotten. The designer is a rather unknown fella called Mikhail Tikhonravov who eventually ended up in OKB-1 in 1956.
The author speculates had it gone to plan it could have launched in 1951.


What would be the US response and would Truman be better than Ike in the earlier opening of the space race?

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Warringer

Von Braun could easily have launched Explorer I (or whatever name it would have been with Project Orbiter) with the first Jupiter C rocket in 1956.

The problem was that the Redstone (first Stage of the Jupiter C) was based on A-4/V-2 and had former Nazi scientists and engineers working on it, with all elements being military rockets. The US Navy Vanguard was developed from civilian rockets and therefore 'better' suited for the peaceful use of space.
 

Tzaero

One thing was I was thinking was with an earlier NASA founded in 51/52 and a more active space race, might project Orion have a better chance of going on ITTL.
Perhaps other nuclear rocketry has quite a better chance as well.
 
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arrowiv

What about a manned US program along the lines of the Von Braun "Conquest of Space" proposals or something like the film "Destination Moon"?
 

Polish Eagle

We had a discussion some weeks back about an earlier Atlas ICBM/MX-774 program. https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...ead-of-icbm-development.395592/#post-12923342

That, I think, is the most likely American response to this Soviet stunt--speeding up the Atlas program and putting up a functional satellite and possibly even manned capsule by 1957.
The follow-on to that would most likely be something like the X-20, as both NACA and the USAF were interested in the applications of a manned orbital airplane. It would most likely be under either USAF or US Army jurisdiction (I lean toward the former, since MX-774 was a USAF program and X-20 would have been winged). That would go up in the early-to-mid 1960s.
 
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