Justice for Von Braun, when is there a Moon landing?

If Von Braun were jailed or otherwise unavailable when would the moon landing happen

  • It would not have happened yet

    Votes: 7 5.8%
  • 1980s

    Votes: 11 9.1%
  • 1980s but by the Soviet Union

    Votes: 19 15.7%
  • Mid 1970s

    Votes: 24 19.8%
  • roughly as in otl

    Votes: 60 49.6%

  • Total voters
    121
Can't find it now, but I had seen a '50s Cartoon of an Army Moonlanding.
Pilot: We aren't the first here, look at that ship.
Copilot: Russians?
Pilot: Worse. Navy.


This idea provide the punch line for William Tenn's short story "Project Hush".
 

Archibald

Banned
Ramjet-powered intercontinental cruise-missile. Boosted by a rocket for lift-off to Mach 3+. Delta with canards. Killed by all-rocket missiles, that is, ICBMs.
 
Archibald wrote:
I'm a die hard fan of the Navaho. It was an incredible flying machine.

Considering how much of the design, development, and testing work was used on other airframes... :)

Fasquadron wrote:
I'd not heard of it before, I confess.

I'm semi-surprised, but as the next book on my "to-get" list (https://www.amazon.com/Navaho-Missile-Project-Know-How-American/dp/0764300482) notes, "least known, yet most important" of the early US missile projects because it advanced so many technical areas to the point where WHEN the US finally decided to go-ahead with building ICBMs they had a solid basis for most of the technology in place and available. It is hardly discussed or generally known other than it was 'canceled as obsolete due the superiority of ballistic missiles", (which is pretty much the exact same quote used in any source that even mentions it :) ) which is shame.

Archibald wrote:
Ramjet-powered intercontinental cruise-missile. Boosted by a rocket for lift-off to Mach 3+. Delta with canards. Killed by all-rocket missiles, that is, ICBMs.

Well not completely 'killed' you know, after all it 'lived on' in the Hound Dog and XB-70 directly and indirectly in Redstone, Thor, Jupiter, Atlas and the Saturn-1 among others :)

Primer for you fasquadron:
http://www.designation-systems.net/dusrm/app1/sm-64.html

Randy
 
Fasquadron wrote:
Hmm. I wonder how the USAF pilots would react to the _Navy_ having a spaceship that can "fly" while they are stuck with capsules...

Why I would think they would accept that the 'experts' (literally most of the air-medicine community in and out of the military) know what they are talking about and will calmly accept the idea that they should accept the idea of being simple 'passengers' for safety reasons instead of screaming and throwing fits which might delay the first USAF manned spaceflight and 'force' the Navy to step in and (per the concept of Vanguard being more successful TTL) save the US's honor by lofting the first person into 'space' on-board a Navy rocket (smirk)

To be fair, the 60s, 70s and 80s do seem to have been dominated by the idea that if launch costs became cheap enough, a market would be priced into existence that would be demanding hundreds of thousands of tonnes of mass be placed into orbit every year.

I can't think of any books, editorials or articles I read from that period that suggested that the real market was for simple reliable machines that could launch a few tens of tonnes of mass be placed in orbit every year.

Being 'fair' said domination was mostly based on assumptions with dubious supporting facts and often blind optimisms that did not match up to known facts and knew knowledge :) Most of the 60s ideas can be forgiven as the general knowledge base was being built on a day-to-day basis and the carryover from the 50s, (again this is thanks to things like Colliers and Disney) which simply assumed that space would become an accessible frontier as had happened on Earth. Between the Space Race and reality this enthusiasm waned between the late 60s and mid-70s when the idea of the Space Shuttle allowing cheap access once again revived the interest but again the assumptions were based on dubious assumptions and optimisms so that by the mid-80s most of the 'domination' was more pro-forma rather than fact and momentum kept it going. We continue to see this in "spurts" to this day as each "next-big-thing" is offered up as the champion which will finally 'bust-open' the Space Frontier. Space Ship One, the first Dragon flight, and ITS are primary recent examples but it is rather obvious that such a breakthrough has yet to come about. Mostly because the economics simply aren't there until and unless a viable incentive is found at the same time affordable, reliable, and regular access is available.

And frankly nothing 'up-there' is worth the cost unless prices drop significantly more than predicted which precludes the demand to drop prices.

The Space Race, Apollo as we know it, (which BTW was NOT what "Apollo" was planned to be) and the similar Soviet efforts have colored and shaped the way we think and design how we access space and unfortunately it is engrained enough that even supposed 'out-of-the-box' thinking is only rarely actually outside that paradigm/box. We have a successful and "economical" (in a loose, but accurate sense of the word) way of exploiting space that satisfied our current, (and most foreseeable for the near future) needs from space and the only 'incentive' for change is a very small segment of the population that wish to expend great effort, money and resources on what amounts to personal rather than public interests with little or no ability to show return for such investment other than 'intangibles' of low order interest to the majority.

If the cost was low enough this would generate 'interest' but most of it is in very transient visitation such as tourism with very limited stay length and high infrastructure requirements which of course pushes the price up significantly. Access could also increase interest and use of orbital research and industry but that not only does not require human operation it is often better if humans are not or only rarely involved. And it's arguable that even with low cost, frequent access general interest would still remain low due to the higher costs of supporting and 'living' in space.

We've "learned" these hard facts from over half a century of 'access' to space but arguably it could be shown that much of what we take as 'fact' is based on the way we've done things in the past, (we've "proved" that certain things "work" with more often than not only cursory examination of alternatives if anything) and more an 'assumption' than an actual fact. Part of the question of alt-his is would we learn the same lessons under different circumstances? Or would different inputs equal a different output? As of today 1/2 of the responders to the OP poll believe that everything would pretty much have come out with the same outcome as OTL with the suggested POD.

That's the fun, right? :)

Randy
 
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