Is Our TL's Space Program Backwards?

I can count Mars 5 though, which was down on Mars almost a year and a half before the Viking probes. Also, Mars 3 might well have been more successful if it hadn't landed in the dust-storm.

Mars 5 was an orbiter (and several years late compared to the US Mariner 9, or for that matter the orbiter portions of Mars 2 or Mars 3). Mars 6 was a lander, but it crashed during landing, kinda like, say, the Mars Polar Lander (or for that matter Mars 2).

The fact that Mars 3 had to land during the dust storm, and in a preprogrammed position, was a significant factor in its failure, yes. It is also a significant example of how the Russians screwed up their designs compared to the Americans (eg., the Vikings were perfectly capable of standing off and waiting--indeed, Viking 1 did when the original landing site looked bad). Using that as an excuse for their poor performance is...novel, to say the least.

Apollo 1?

Um, what does that have to do with anything? I didn't say the US was universally successful, did I? That was the point where the US was starting to get a bit like the Russians, running for their goal, and they paid for it. Better to have been slower.

Actually, my exact words were:
"and the whole programme cost, with inflation figured in, not much more than the current budget (2005 dollars)"
Perhaps I should have made it more clear that I was extending the budget comparison over the same period.

Well yes, because it was not clear at all that you meant a multi-year summation of NASA's budget, rather than a single year of said budget.
 
I think that space tourism is little more than a fad. Reality is that space travel is still too dangerous, too physically demanding that there is little if any people able to pay that would be able to actually go there.

Physically demanding? What? One of the big problems with space travel is that it's the complete opposite of physically demanding, being in microgravity for long periods of time is similar to lying in bed for equally long periods of time on Earth. You might develop upper body strength, and you could make an argument about launch, but modern launch systems don't stress the body much more than a rollercoaster. Citing physical demands as a reason that people won't travel into space is just wrong.
 

Hendryk

Banned
Since this is turning into a debate about the desirability of a space program, count me among the killjoys who think the money is more urgently needed elsewhere, and that until we can provide everyone right here on this planet with the basic amenities of modern life (starting with drinking water), it's putting the plow before the oxen to dream about Martian colonies.

I'm fine with a reasonable, pragmatic space program. Communication satellites, orbital telescopes, unmanned probes, what have you. But if you put a higher priority to colonizing Mars than stopping the creeping environmental collapse that is affecting hundreds of millions of people, then I disagree.
 
I don't know. From what I've read, and admittedly my own views on how best to spend space dollars, I think the space race was actually a huge mistake and distraction. It led to the use of a frankly bad model of how to get to the Moon mostly because said model happened to use existing assets and hopefully would not take too long to get done, hardly assets in an actual exploration program. Not to mention the cultural effects on both NASA and the spaceflight advocacy community, especially the latter, and especially politically. There's a reason Lanius had to write a book debunking the myth of Presidential leadership, although the SLS should have knocked that into people's heads.

I think you're right and you're wrong. :) I think the Space Race works sort of like the Uncertainty Principle. In a Classical world, an electron can't jump energy levels, but delta E/delta T makes it possible to have huge energy spikes over short periods of time.

Space development, without something to give it an inordinate push, simply won't happen. Sputnik launched, and in less than a year, we had stuck a 2nd stage on an IRBM and launched probes to the moon. That ability to adapt off-the-shelf stuff to respond to an exigent situation was what made the leap into space possible. But it wasn't immediately profitable, and it's only profitable in a limited sense today.

At some point in the next hundred years, something will change massively in the way we produce energy or materials or both such that it will be cheap and easy to develop space. I think it will be a side effect, just as the first Space Race was a side effect of missile development, and it will make everything that came before look like tinkertoys.

Don't ask me how it'll happen. I can't tell you, any more than I can tell you how we'll keep Moore's Law in business (apparently, we're doing it with 3d transistors now). But it will happen.
 
Space development, without something to give it an inordinate push, simply won't happen. Sputnik launched, and in less than a year, we had stuck a 2nd stage on an IRBM and launched probes to the moon. That ability to adapt off-the-shelf stuff to respond to an exigent situation was what made the leap into space possible. But it wasn't immediately profitable, and it's only profitable in a limited sense today.

Well, space development in the 1950s/1960s sense seems to have at least one big driver behind it regardless of what situation anyone is in: spy satellites. Even in a very peaceful world, that would be of obvious military and . Communications satellites were also pretty attractive and well-known long before anyone could actually launch things into space.

So, I think it's extremely likely, given a post-1945 world, that there will be space development by the 1950s (CORONA started in 1956, after all). I think it is very unlikely that a Cold War can be prevented at that point, and if a Cold War starts, the value of ICBMs (and IRBMs, which are really enough as Juno proves) will eventually be obvious, especially once cruise missiles start having trouble. If you have ICBMs or IRBMs, putting a thing into space is not such a large step, and if you can put things into space you can bring them back down. Nice things, like camera film...

@Hendryk: We can (and should, and must) do both. Besides, they do significantly feed back into each other. R&D for space flight contributes both directly (as with Earth observation satellites) and potentially indirectly (as with astroculture, which has been shamefully neglected by NASA up until now, but would be necessary for those Mars bases you love banging on about), while a wealthier, more developed, less environmentally troubled world is more capable of affording spaceflight and perhaps more willing to throw money its way.

Also, as I said, space industries and space mining has the advantage of being extremely environmentally clean with very abundant and easy-to-reach resources. Obviously not true of Earth-bound industries and resources!
 
Well, space development in the 1950s/1960s sense seems to have at least one big driver behind it regardless of what situation anyone is in: spy satellites. Even in a very peaceful world, that would be of obvious military and . Communications satellites were also pretty attractive and well-known long before anyone could actually launch things into space.

Re: Spysats, you're right on the money. Re: commsats, it's my understanding that you need decades of government investment before they become privately lucrative. Does that happen in a Space-Raceless world?
 

Delta Force

Banned
Space tourism is a fad.
The market is not nearly as broad as it would need to be - sure, there's lots of shallow support for space tourism ('yeah, sure, I'd like to go to space'), but not nearly enough support at the necessary cost level ('yes, I will pay $x million (or $x00,000) to go to space').
Plus, a sufficiently-safe launch vehicle isn't really available. Spacecraft are significantly less safe than airliners; a loss of a vehicle carrying a space tourist would severely damage any nascent space-tourism industry.

Early aircraft were deathtraps before they became the safe form of transportation they are today. Even rockets have greatly improved. In the early days when rockets failed, they usually did so in a dramatic fashion with a massive explosion. Nowadays when they fail it is usually not so dramatic, with the craft entering a lower orbit than expected or a mechanical failure trapping the orbiter to the upper stage and falling back to Earth. Our failures are a lot less common and are now a lot less likely to kill someone (if they were manned). The only astronaut deaths due to a rocket failure was Challenger, and even that accident would have been survivable if the Shuttle had ejection seats or a launch escape system. Soyuz had an incident with a pad abort and also with an abort in space, but in both cases the crews survived.
 
Re: Spysats, you're right on the money. Re: commsats, it's my understanding that you need decades of government investment before they become privately lucrative. Does that happen in a Space-Raceless world?

Yes. Comsats have a great deal of defense interest as well. Actually, pretty much any space application that has significant commercial applications today has significant defense interest. Weather satellites have obvious military uses, communications satellites too. Navigation satellites. Earth-observation. Okay, Earth-observation is more a civilian thing, but pretty much everything that's up there and making someone money is something that started in an effort to get the military some useful capability or provide some useful government ability.

Also, Telstar was after all spearheaded by AT&T, and there seems to have been a reasonably decent push for commercial satellites by the mid-1970s (if nothing else, all those cable TV stations needed satellites for transmitting their programs around). That was mostly slowed down by Shuttle, and NASA's extravagant promises (plus low, low introductory rates!). Hard to justify launching something now when you could launch it in a couple years at half the price, or so you think. Of course, there were a lot of civilian governmental comsats as well, Anik for instance. So it seems like companies thought it was worthwhile to start investing before too long.
 
Mars 5 was an orbiter (and several years late compared to the US Mariner 9, or for that matter the orbiter portions of Mars 2 or Mars 3). Mars 6 was a lander, but it crashed during landing, kinda like, say, the Mars Polar Lander (or for that matter Mars 2).
Damn, I read the bit wrong, one up to you.
 
Since this is turning into a debate about the desirability of a space program, count me among the killjoys who think the money is more urgently needed elsewhere, and that until we can provide everyone right here on this planet with the basic amenities of modern life (starting with drinking water), it's putting the plow before the oxen to dream about Martian colonies.

I'm fine with a reasonable, pragmatic space program. Communication satellites, orbital telescopes, unmanned probes, what have you. But if you put a higher priority to colonizing Mars than stopping the creeping environmental collapse that is affecting hundreds of millions of people, then I disagree.

Colonizing Mars? All right. That's probably a bridge too far right now. (Sorry, Robert Zubrin.)

But part of the problem is that most people think we spend far more on space than we actually do. In the U.S. federal budget, it's a fraction of a percent. And we have gotten a hell of a return on that money over the years - both in raw science and in practical applications, even allowing for the dubious claims that are sometimes made. Had the U.S. government not gotten into space when it did, we might still not have commsats.

NASA gets about $19 billion this year. And that's a massive drop from what it got in real dollars during the peak of the Space Race - or even in the 90's. I wonder what the federal govt could spend $19 billion - which really is not all that much in a $2 trillion budget - that would generate a better return.

But I can think of one reason to stay with space that hardly gets mentioned. There are tens of thousands of Near Earth Objects floating around the Solar System, and who knows how many large long period comets that come in from time to time. We don't have most of them cataloged. And we have no immediate means of doing anything about them if one turns out to be on a course for Earth. We have a Project Spaceguard (thanks, Arthur C. Clarke) but it's woefully underfunded.

Correcting that problem is certainly worth a few dollars.
 
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