JFK survived

There was no long-range space plan. Neither of the brothers cared about space beyond the prestige of the US being first on the moon. In May '68 RFK even told Boeing workers in Seattle that "we should slow down the race to the moon." I take that to mean after the moon landing.
 
The key is that the public lost interest in the space program after we beat the Soviets to the moon. That lead to the budget cuts.
 
Another very important one- there is a good chance there will be no Watergate. That means that the media-politician ROE will be pre-1974 until the mass media of the 1980s kicks in. In summary, they are friends, not sworn enemies. In the case of the Kennedys, and Bobby particularly, this was quite literal. Journalists were their personal friends and got treated as such. Sometimes they even pitched in to help write a candidate's speech.
 
The key is that the public lost interest in the space program after we beat the Soviets to the moon. That lead to the budget cuts.
That played a heavy part of what harmed the space program, but it was not the be all end all, in my opinion. I think there were problems of losing our way and losing focus. The 1960's were an extremely hectic time, and while landing on the moon was nice and drew the world's attention when it occurred, there was a bloody quagmire in Vietnam, taking on the establishment and the old order, or fighting back against damned anarchistic hippies trying to crumble the fabric of society, racial tensions flaring, riots, and so forth. I think there wasn't as much time for paying attention to a creative outlet like space when so much needed attention domestically.
And, NASA lost vision. Had the moon been followed up by the other benchmarks (colonies, space stations, trans-earth-to-moon whatever) I think such achievements would have kept interest or at least exploit something enough to return a profit. The problem is, budget cuts (you could cut Vietnam or the domestic programs, and Johnson and Nixon seemed to choose space as a whipping boy) ended those grand schemes, until you were just left with zero-g elementary school experiments aboard the space shuttle for forty years (itself a craft intended to only be a LEO vehicle operating alongside the Saturn, as I've said previous), and now its kinda hard to start that motor of space age interest up again. Had those aforementioned things been allowed, I think you would have created an infrastructure which would not lend itself so easily to cuts.
 
RFK also planned to use space as a whipping boy for the deficit-reduction measures on domestic spending. Or as he put it: "if I had to choose between cutting back on welfare* or space, I'd choose space."

*Aka PWROR.
 
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