My point is that IIRC the Space Shuttle's main raison d'etre in the 80's was supporting SDI and NRO sats, and launching civilian sats to bring in cash, with scientific missions as they could squeeze them in.
Military funding to subsidize orbital lift capabilities is what I'm aiming at. Without it, the STS has a lot of problems getting and staying funded. Sure the Shuttle was a 1970's design and started earlier than SDI, but without the SDI bandwagon/80's military buildup to ride, STS has trouble getting more momentum.
The Challenger disaster didn't help matters making NASA look foolish.
No, Shuttle's main reason for being in the 1980s was not to support SDI and NRO, and I don't know where you got that from. The main purpose everyone expected it to be put to was completely replacing every other US launch vehicle for all missions, commercial, military, or otherwise. They expected to launch plenty of scientific missions, and to use the low launch costs to help get a space station going. They were even hoping, in the '70s, to maybe start work on O'Neill-type colonies or space solar power...about as likely as Congress turning about-face and ordering them to go to Mars, but they dreamed big back then.
NRO and
much later SDI satellites would have been launched as part of Shuttle's general launch mission, it would have nothing to do with supporting those systems specifically being Shuttle's mission. As I said, SDI didn't even
exist until after
Columbia and
Challenger had launched,
Discovery was nearly ready to launch, and
Atlantis was well along in final assembly.
Shuttle was pulled along by the '80s military buildup about as much as, say, the F-15 or F-16. It had existed long before anyone knew Reagan, or hell Carter would be President, its mission had been defined a long time ago, and if Reagan ordered more or had them doing more things...fine, that's what they were designed for.
I think we can both agree there's tons of civilian uses for STS and from a spaceflight perspective, another generation should have been developed but as far as Congress was concerned from 1975-2009, that all could go whistle past the graveyard, between the dot-bomb recession, Discovery disaster, and
military misadventures sucking the Treasury dry.
I don't agree that another generation of Shuttle should have been developed. That entire road was the wrong path to go down at the time and probably still is now (the integrated cargo-passenger reusable space launch vehicle). Improved expendables and a somewhat consolidated expendable line up were the right way to go so far as cargo vehicles are concerned, and some type of probably reusable passenger vehicle to be launched by those expendables (not coincidentally, what it looks like we're getting, or what e of pi and I are doing in Eyes Turned Skywards). Spaceplanes or lifting bodies are fine in that role, but the technology isn't there for a full on SSTO, and even a TSTO is marginal.
Anyways, the development costs would have been impractically large for a real Shuttle II. Impossible to fund.
Also,
what Discovery disaster?
Columbia, surely?
Enough Congressfolk saw the problem with launch costs and refused to fund more shuttles vs Delta's to launch satellites. It was a chicken or the egg problem , not enough Shuttles meant not enough launches and therefore no economy of scale improvements to lower costs or push to develop a next generation shuttle to scale up ops or give shuttle crews much safety margin to keep up the pace of launches.
You can beat me all day in aerospace knowledge but you can't escape that simple fact. SDI masked the problem a little bit, then ISS work gave it a little more impetus but once that work wrapped up, everyone sort of looked at their shoes and killed the STS program. Bad idea AFAIC, but that's the ugly truth of the matter.
STS was canceled, essentially, in 2004 or thereabouts...long before ISS work was done. In fact, the only reason they did a return-to-flight
at all after
Columbia was because of ISS. If it had been 1988, they would undoubtedly have dropped the entire Shuttle project like a hot potato.
SDI didn't mask the problem at all because
no SDI payload ever launched (not quite true, but very nearly: certainly no operational payload). There was no traffic, no business for Shuttle based on SDI payloads. If you're going to blame anything for masking the problem of there not being enough staff or infrastructure to keep up with NASA's promised launch rates, you should be blaming NASA management, which papered over the deficits for a while, until it blew up in their face with
Challenger. This had nothing to do with the number of vehicles per se, they simply didn't have enough people or facilities to perform essential work on even a 24-flights/year schedule, to say nothing of the *really*-optimistic ones. Heck, Michoud couldn't even produce enough ETs for that, or at best it would have been working flat out.
Besides, many SDI payloads couldn't have been launched by Shuttle in the first place. Not enough injected LEO mass, or not enough cargo bay space. They needed other, expendable launchers to do it.
Anyways, this is all *wildly* off-topic, which is talking about a "no-JFK" TL without any Moon challenge. Going back to that, if NASA had had its druthers what would have happened would basically have been the von Braun scenario, US builds a space station, does a circumlunar flight by 1970, follows up with actual landings sometime that decade. Beyond that...vague planning only in '59 or '60. Gemini would have been skipped altogether, everyone would have been waiting for the Block I Apollo for initial Earth orbital tests (Gemini-type flights), then modifications for circumlunar or space-station flights. Main NASA booster would have been the Saturn I or Saturn IB, plus a "Saturn II" mid-heavy (~50+ tons) booster for the really heavy lifting needed for an EOR mission plan or a circumlunar flight.
Lunar landing probably would not have happened. Blue Apollo...maybe, probably not due to the lack of useful Air Force manned space missions. Human spaceflight would undoubtedly have endured despite the lack of a lunar landing, since as I noted earlier the competition aspect was too important. You can't just totally cede to the Soviets something like that. Space Shuttle would probably actually pop back up, but as a pure station logistics vehicle to replace Apollo in the late '70s or early '80s (first flight time, projected) launched on a Saturn IB or equivalent.