JFK doesn't issue his challenge to put a man on the Moon

Hi! What do you think would have happened had JFK not issued his manned lunar mission challenge -- say, because NASA and people like that argued that it was going to be extremely dangerous and expensive?

Instead, he does something else to compete with the Soviets (I don't know what though -- maybe space exploration, hanging around Earth orbit, etc. I can't remember how much had gone up on both sides when he made the speech).

Perhaps he decides to say "we'll cure cancer by the end of the decade" or something like that.
 
I've seen it suggested that the 'by the end of the decade' messed up the chances of reusable craft being developed as it had to be done quick.
 
Well, there's a problem with this. Several, actually.

1) Certainly, he could have just abandoned the whole idea of glorious achievement, but assuming that he didn't:
2) The trip to the moon was a 'simple' engineering problem. Yes, it would take massive amounts of resources and money, but we knew how to do it (in principle). The 'moon' was a wild, visionary, yet achievable target.
3) something else in space, perhaps 'a space station'? Wow, whoopy-dingy. Who cares? Wouldn't get people excited.
4) Cure for cancer. Heh. They didn't even know what caused cancer then, let alone how to cure it. OK, they could outlaw tobacco and ban most industrial chemicals, but that'd be about it. And those wouldn't happen, nor would they reduce the cancer rate by more than... 50%? so, no that's not an alternative.
5) If he'd gone for 'eliminate poverty', say. Hah! Look how well Johnson's attempt worked.
6) If he said 'moon in my lifetime' there'd be no urgency, no flood of money to NASA, and we would likely never have gotten there by now. Of course, if we HAD, we might still be there. Sigh.



Ya. In some ways it was counterproductive. While it was a wonderful, inspiring message, and caused the US to pull up its socks in science and engineering, for instance, it was basically a one-off propaganda stunt. NASA got addicted to a flow of money, and there was no carry through.

Moreover, once the US 'won' the space race, a lot of the push behind 'STEM' education, as we call it today, petered out.

A lower funded space program that gets a space station up by ...?72? visited by reusable Geminis, say, and commercial space launch (McD and Martin competing for government contracts, say) would probably have gotten us a lot further.

And space geeks (me included) would hear of the time a US president almost committed to going to the moon, and would be sighing about the lost opportunity.
 
I think that maybe the Russians might have gotten their man on the moon first, and we be reading about some Russian being on the moon first. Also, I think that if he did not declare his challenge, then perhaps we could have done it in secret and got away with it anyways, and the space race would not be as big of a deal.

If he issued another challenge instead of space, I think he might have issued the challenge of spreading democracy around the world, due to the fact Soviet Russia was sucha communist influence on the world.

As a joke proposition, I have to say that he would issue the challenge to make marijuana legal, but i highly doubt that would happen because with the politcal agenda going on at that time, that would have been the least of his worries. I think he would have been more concerned about not having nuclear winter.
 
The simplest reason for him not to make the announcment might be if Shepard flew before Gagarin, or if Gagarin's flight failed badly and set the Soviets back significantly so Shepard and Glenn fly without any apparent Soviet response. Then the political pressure on Kennedy, already severe after the Bay of Pigs, is lessened and Apollo it seems like too big a gamble to take.
 
I think that maybe the Russians might have gotten their man on the moon first, and we be reading about some Russian being on the moon first. Also, I think that if he did not declare his challenge, then perhaps we could have done it in secret and got away with it anyways, and the space race would not be as big of a deal.

No, secret moon missions are impossible. The sheer scale of the enterprise, the fact that other nations could track the craft, not to mention hiding the launch of something like a Saturn V, makes it pure ASB.
 
Having Alan B Shepard make in into space before Yuri Gagarin would certainly help. If that happened, it's likely they wouldn't be talking about going to the Moon for another 20 years.

While this leaves open the option of going to the Moon, it would be later, but perhaps more capable. OTL, they accomplished the task by stripping the whole thing down, almost to the bone - especially in the LEM.
 
An American in space first would certainly remove alot of the 'shame' in the US over Soviet achievements. The question is, how do the Soviets respond? If someone as 'emotional' as Krushchev is involved he'll want to up the game.

Also I've been interested in a Soviet landing on the Moon actually leading to NASA pushing for a Mars mission. The only way to deal with the Hammer and Sickle flying on the Moon from a PR stand point would be to play it down and say "yeah well its only the Moon, we're going to another planet". An American going second is not enough and even a Moon Base isn't going to whip up excitement. I don't think an American president could actually stand down from the Space Race like the Politburo did, the electorate's patriotism is something of much more importance in a democracy than a communist state.
 
An American in space first would certainly remove alot of the 'shame' in the US over Soviet achievements. The question is, how do the Soviets respond? If someone as 'emotional' as Krushchev is involved he'll want to up the game.

Which is probably going to increase the risk factor enormously. Even when they had the great propaganda coup of the first man in space Krushchev kept trying to top it; insisting on having three men wedged into a one man capsule even though it eliminated any margin of safety.

Also I've been interested in a Soviet landing on the Moon actually leading to NASA pushing for a Mars mission. The only way to deal with the Hammer and Sickle flying on the Moon from a PR stand point would be to play it down and say "yeah well its only the Moon, we're going to another planet". An American going second is not enough and even a Moon Base isn't going to whip up excitement. I don't think an American president could actually stand down from the Space Race like the Politburo did, the electorate's patriotism is something of much more importance in a democracy than a communist state.

The question then is could the Russians have landed a man on the moon? The performance of the N1 rocket was probably the single biggest factor working against it but when you look at the relative budgets the two programs had, even allowing for the different economic systems, its hard to believe the Soviets could have made it.
 
The question then is could the Russians have landed a man on the moon? The performance of the N1 rocket was probably the single biggest factor working against it but when you look at the relative budgets the two programs had, even allowing for the different economic systems, its hard to believe the Soviets could have made it.

They could have. It was a distinctly improbable outcome of events, but theoretically possible. It would take lots of working, though. Really quite unlikely. The more likely thing is that the Soviets land on the Moon second, or at any rate can't pretend they didn't have a Moon program (which they did right up to '91). In that event, a trip to Mars, or at any rate an immediate commitment to Mars is perhaps unlikely--we did get to the Moon first, after all--but it's reasonably possible that a Moon base is committed to. Don't want the Reds to get the whole thing, after all. Can't give up on it if they've reached it...
 
They could have. It was a distinctly improbable outcome of events, but theoretically possible. It would take lots of working, though. Really quite unlikely. The more likely thing is that the Soviets land on the Moon second, or at any rate can't pretend they didn't have a Moon program (which they did right up to '91). In that event, a trip to Mars, or at any rate an immediate commitment to Mars is perhaps unlikely--we did get to the Moon first, after all--but it's reasonably possible that a Moon base is committed to. Don't want the Reds to get the whole thing, after all. Can't give up on it if they've reached it...

The best shot for the Soviets might be to ditch the N1 and go with some variant of the Earth Orbital Rendevous apporach. The pure EOR envisioned building a craft in orbit that would fly to the moon, land, take off, and return to Earth. A compromise would be to launch a command module and a lander separately, dock them in Earth orbit and then follow an Apollo type flight plan. Avoids the need for the big rocket but has a lot more launches and docking involved so more potential failure points but still better than the guaranteed failure of the N1

The other big alternative is that the Soviets take up Kennedy's idea of a joint mission floated I think in 63'; which the Soviets rejected iOTL because they thought they were well ahead in space technology.
 
The other big alternative is that the Soviets take up Kennedy's idea of a joint mission floated I think in 63'; which the Soviets rejected iOTL because they thought they were well ahead in space technology.

Actually, the Soviets didn't reject it for that reason--they were so aware of American leadership in the missile race that they didn't want the world to see their nakedness. That, and there wasn't a consensus in the Soviet Union until the mid-1960s that the Americans were serious about it. And the US Congress took steps to prevent a joint mission.

The problem with an American space station program is that the Russians held the lead in lifting capacity until the flight of the Saturn I in 1964, and they retook it the next year with the Proton booster. The United States would be unable to beat the Soviets to a space station, and the Soviet one would be bigger until the end of the decade, giving the impression of consistent Soviet leads until around 1968. Apollo, IOTL, allowed the Americans a concrete deadline far enough away that they had time to 'catch up' in manned space technology.

Personally, I think that, without Apollo demonstrating the capabilities of a field geologist on the surface of a planet, and establishing the infrastructure that became the Shuttle Program, single-handedly saved manned spaceflight. If the United States had gone for a less ambitious station program, the lack of 'sex-appeal' in the science done on board, combined with the economic recession of the early 1970s, and the fact that manned spaceflight would generally be a much smaller industry and thus less politically important, combined with the MOL program cancellation, would be the end of manned spaceflight in the United States--the Office of Space Science would triumph over the Office of Manned Spaceflight. As robot capabilities grew, advocates of manned spaceflight outside the L5 people would be few and far between.

This is just my rather pessimistic interpretation. Truth is life and e of pi are better read than I am, and so will probably have a different answer. But from what I read of the public support for manned spaceflight, even with the Russian menace, being less than 50% for the duration of the 1960s, and of the USAF's lack of willpower to develop its own orbital system, the above scenario seems most likely to me.
 
I Agree with Dathi

IIRC Von Braun and the USAF had massive boners to get MOL's up and running both as observation posts and missile batteries IOTL until the Outer Space Treaty in 1965 kyboshed the militarization of space.
A lot of the USAF space and near-space stuff like Dynasoar got axed b/c of that treaty.
As to the observation part, spy sats became a lot more capable thanks to miniaturization of electronics to make the costs of a MOL look absolutely insane to get and keep a human crew in orbit just to keep the USSR honest.


As mentioned before, if Bay of Pigs ISN'T a disaster JFK has to eat crow over and/or Shepard made it first into space AND back, then a lot of the pressure is off NASA to make up ground with a billion-dollar publicity stunt.
Apollo was and is a testament to what humanity can achieve that should have inspired more human exploration of space.
Soviet retrenchment and American disinterest in continuing Saturn production
pretty much killed MSF as more than a LEO affair.

Much as the STS gets slagged on this board as a dead end, the real dead-end was SDI.
No SDI, STS dies an early crib death.

As far as the early 1970's recession, the US never getting full-bore into Vietnam as LBJ did would have butterflied that somewhat. All that defense spending on top of the Great Society programs was what overheated the US economy before OPEC decided to punish the West for backing Israel in 1973.

YMMV as to whether more money available and butterflying the Outer Space treaty makes it more likely a MOL-Blue Gemini-Dynasoar USAF space program gets and keeps a lot more people in space and the Soviet response spooks Congress into spending more.
We ought to do a TL "My Blue Heaven" exploring those POD's! :D:D
 
Much as the STS gets slagged on this board as a dead end, the real dead-end was SDI.
No SDI, STS dies an early crib death.

That doesn't make any sense, since SDI wasn't started until 1983: 2 years after the Space Shuttle's first flight, and well after all the decisions that led to the '80s trainwreck were made. Once it's approved, there's no way that STS is going to go down without either a catastrophic event that makes it untenable (ie., a nuclear war or something of that level that makes the US incapable of developing it) or Challenger, and the latter (as we saw OTL) probably isn't enough to do it. Prior to actually flying, it promises to be too revolutionary and too much the only way to keep up with the Reds in space to die; afterwards, NASA (and to a lesser extent the Air Force) is much too invested in it to let it die without an equivalent program showing up or a *major* catastrophe (say, STS-26 goes the way of Columbia...ouch is the word) occurring.

Even if interest in space dramatically increases for some reason (eg., major impact scenario->never again!), that's still not enough to stop the Shuttle train...if anything, it'll speed it up prior to Challenger, and afterwards will at worst result in the ALS or NLS going ahead for some SEI-type thing.

Also, Dyna-Soar died in 1963, well before the OST. It actually went down because McNamara asked the Air Force to justify the program and they basically couldn't, not in any military sense. He let them have MOL because that did have a well-defined military mission. A rapidly obsolete one, mind, but nevertheless a military mission.

Actually, the Soviets didn't reject it for that reason--they were so aware of American leadership in the missile race that they didn't want the world to see their nakedness. That, and there wasn't a consensus in the Soviet Union until the mid-1960s that the Americans were serious about it. And the US Congress took steps to prevent a joint mission.

The problem with an American space station program is that the Russians held the lead in lifting capacity until the flight of the Saturn I in 1964, and they retook it the next year with the Proton booster. The United States would be unable to beat the Soviets to a space station, and the Soviet one would be bigger until the end of the decade, giving the impression of consistent Soviet leads until around 1968. Apollo, IOTL, allowed the Americans a concrete deadline far enough away that they had time to 'catch up' in manned space technology.

Personally, I think that, without Apollo demonstrating the capabilities of a field geologist on the surface of a planet, and establishing the infrastructure that became the Shuttle Program, single-handedly saved manned spaceflight. If the United States had gone for a less ambitious station program, the lack of 'sex-appeal' in the science done on board, combined with the economic recession of the early 1970s, and the fact that manned spaceflight would generally be a much smaller industry and thus less politically important, combined with the MOL program cancellation, would be the end of manned spaceflight in the United States--the Office of Space Science would triumph over the Office of Manned Spaceflight. As robot capabilities grew, advocates of manned spaceflight outside the L5 people would be few and far between.

This is just my rather pessimistic interpretation. Truth is life and e of pi are better read than I am, and so will probably have a different answer. But from what I read of the public support for manned spaceflight, even with the Russian menace, being less than 50% for the duration of the 1960s, and of the USAF's lack of willpower to develop its own orbital system, the above scenario seems most likely to me.

Once HSF gets linked to international competition, which it would even if Shepard et. al. go first (since Gagarin orbiting is more impressive than Shepard's hop...) there's no way it can possibly die until the 1990s at the earliest, and by that point it's much too entrenched to go away completely. The would be essentially ceding a certain amount of prestige and public attention to the Other Side, which is obviously pretty unlikely. Now, cutbacks? Scaling it back to essentially a handful of Salyuts/Almazes on the one side and *Skylabs/MOLs on the other through at least the '70s? Yes, that's very likely. They'll still be serviced by Apollos, probably even launched by Saturns, but other than that they won't really look like much OTL.

BEO HSF is another story, and that has a decent shot of not happening even by the present day if no Apollo program is launched, with instead robots ruling the roost. But then, that's not really too different from OTL, and in any case is at worst a mixed curse. Robots, after all, are really quite productive scientifically.

The best shot for the Soviets might be to ditch the N1 and go with some variant of the Earth Orbital Rendevous apporach. The pure EOR envisioned building a craft in orbit that would fly to the moon, land, take off, and return to Earth. A compromise would be to launch a command module and a lander separately, dock them in Earth orbit and then follow an Apollo type flight plan. Avoids the need for the big rocket but has a lot more launches and docking involved so more potential failure points but still better than the guaranteed failure of the N1

The Soviet EOR plan would actually have needed/used the N1 (much smaller than that and you need impractically large numbers of launches for '60s Soviet technology), however the performance requirements would be smaller than for the single-launch scenario so they could either go L3M (ie., bigger, more redundant Lunar equipment, closer to the OTL Apollo stuff) or cut the LEO launch mass for N1 but improve safety in the process. The second would obviously be better...
 
My details are wrong but I think the point stands

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.

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.

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.
 
I suspect that without the competition from Apollo the X-20 might have survived. The MOL would probably have gone forward but under the auspices of NASA as a science platform, possibly you might have had a 'Skylab' much sooner. The question is what would the Soviets have done? In OTL they fell behind as the Gemini missions progressed but here they wouldn't have faced the overreach the trying to match Apollo brought but on the other hand Brezhnev was much more conservative with regards to MSF iOTL and he might have been reluctant to commit to a program where the USSR kept coming second.
 
IMHO the situation in the 60s was that the US would not let the USSR "win" a space race. If the USSR was leaping ahead with more/bigger manned flights and/or moves towards the moon (like a circumlunar flight) the USA will do whatever it takes to catch up/pull ahead.
 
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.
What SDI? Reagan's plans required something a heck of a lot bigger/cheaper than the Shuttle.

I may be misremembering, but I don't remember any connexion between the Shuttle and SDI at the time. Of course, I was jeering the loony Ronnie Raygun at the time, so might have suppressed connexions.
 
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.
 
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