LEVIATHAN Rising: An Alternative Space Age

[Juumanistra]

Welcome to LEVIATHAN Rising, a Turtledove-nominated timeline about the rather novel premise of the United States Navy being the agency at the heart of the American space program. Or my preferred alternative title: Admiral Heinlein Conquers Space With Mythological Cryptozoology and the Bestest* of NASA’s Never-Built Toys.

* Subject to the author’s opinion on what the bestest ones are. If you’re a space fan, all of the author’s chair-spinning while flailing his arms and giddily squeeing “ENCELADUS BY 1970!” ought to tell you where those sympathies can be found. …even if the precise thing being referenced wasn’t technically ever a NASA design. Details, details.

The Timeline in a Nutshell
LEVIATHAN Rising asks – and to various degrees tries to answer – a simple question: What if Robert Anson Heinlein, the dean of rocketpunk, had not contracted the tuberculosis which derailed his career in the U.S. Navy? Heinlein graduated from Annapolis in 1929 near the top of his class academically, wished to make the Navy his career, and by all appearances had the makings of a very promising one prior to his medical discharge in 1934. Had he managed to continue his career in the Navy, it is quite probable he would have risen quite high indeed. And lest anyone assume this is the usual allohistorical parallelism of “Bob Heinlein became one of the most important sci-fi writers of all-time, ergo he achieves the same prominence in the Navy,” it’s worth remembering his brother Lawrence reached the rank of major general in the Air Force.

The events of the timeline result in Heinlein crossing path with the Navy’s nascent space program. One of the travesties of our time is how underappreciated the Navy’s space-related ambitions were from 1945 until 1958 or so. The major reason for that is the one Naval space-related thing everyone does know about, with Vanguard TV-3 having the spotlight shined on it and then coming down with a violent case of the explosions. But that doesn’t detract from the seriousness of the Navy’s interest in space, the successes it recorded with the Viking rockets and Transit satellite navigation system, or the depth of talent which the Navy had at its disposal. Four of the first five Americans in space -- Alan Shepard, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, and Wally Schirra – were Navy men (Glenn was a Marine, but still), while the Naval Research Laboratory was (and still is) a powerhouse in the space sciences. There’s also Robert Truax, who…well, it’s probably a coincidence that the thing he’s best known could be described as a leviathan rising from the depths.

Definitely a coincidence.

By putting Heinlein and the Navy’s early interest in space onto a collision course, it’s hoped that interesting and entertaining things will result, as an American space program evolves that is at once immensely familiar and quite alien. As well as producing a variety of butterflies, some fairly predictable and others distinctly less so.

Why Does All of This Sound Vaguely Familiar?
Because you have read – or at least heard of – The Return of William Proxmire.

And if you haven’t heard of The Return of William Proxmire, it was a short story written by Larry Niven in 1989 that involved a time-traveling curmudgeon of a senator who traveled back in time to cure Bob Heinlein of his tuberculosis, so he would continue his Naval career and would never write any of that sci-fi nonsense. Which would mean the American taxpayer would never have to waste any money on a space program, which was all the fault of a public that grew-up reading about Heinlein’s Glorious Rocketpunk Future. And when Senator Proxmire returns to the present after succeeding, well…Admiral Heinlein doesn’t let the Soviets build spacecraft it doesn’t work out as planned.

Despite my like of The Return of William Proxmire, this timeline strives to be a distinctly more grounded experience. That said, the precise point of divergence is purposefully kept vague, so perhaps a time-traveling William Proxmire is the reason why Heinlein doesn’t catch TB.

What Can the Reader Expect from this Timeline?
It is my intention that the timeline will convey events through a numbered-chapter format, in which expositive prose is presented via a third-person (mostly) omniscient voice. At present, LEVIATHAN Rising is not intended to tell a conventional story, at least of the sort which embodies characters and dialogue. In other words, don’t expect Ocean of Storms. (You shouldn’t be expecting that in any event, because BowOfOrion is a much better author than I am.)

Notwithstanding the lack of conventional narrative in the mainline chapters, the timeline also includes a variety of excerpts from in-universe media of various sorts intended to provide a bit more context and flavor, as well as break up the monotony of the format. It also furnishes an excuse to use the equivalent of over-the-top accents and falsettos for my narrative voice, which is a welcome change of pace.

When Will the Next Update Be Posted?
Soon™. Plus two weeks. So at least ten minutes before Kaiserreich releases its Hungarian focus tree.

More seriously, the timeline is currently on hiatus. When I began writing LEVIATHAN Rising, I had a very particular writing cadence in mind. I wanted to practice Heinlein’s Rules for Writing Science Fiction, specifically that in order to write sci-fi, you had to write sci-fi. The original intent was to write 500-1,000 words per day, with a new chapter going up twice (or more) a week. The nature of this high-paced approach lent itself to a fast-moving progression of events that tended to focus only on certain key events and leave many things to the viewer’s imagination. Or, at the very least, encouraged not sweating the details too much because the timeline was not attempting to wade into the weeds and be detail-heavy.

And then, at some point around Chapter 9, I managed to lose the plot and things became quite detail-heavy. The pace of new postings plummeted like a stone as chapter size bloated. This was not a bad thing, as I am distinctly happier with the end-products, but I feel there is a significant difference in quality between the first and second halves of the timeline as currently written. And that difference is jarring, as well causing tonal and potential continuity problems.

So I’ve decided, after a fair amount of consideration, to put the first half of LEVIATHAN Rising into revision to bring it up to the standards of the later, more recent chapters before proceeding with new mainline chapters. It is unknown precisely how long this process will take, but my tentative hope is to have it completed by November, so that National Novel Writing Month can be spent working on progression rather than revision. That said, it is quite likely that there will be an update or two containing new interlude content in the meantime.

…Was That A Hearts of Iron 4 Joke?
Yes. This is also a timeline which features an alternative history anthology called What Childish Fantasy!, derived from an essay written by Winston Churchill.

Everyone has their vices. Some people drink. I make references to other allohistorical media. (I also torture acronyms.)

Will There Be Art?
Incredibly unlikely, as my artistic skills are non-existent and I am disinclined to invest the time into Kerbal Space Program to learn how to model things with Kerbal Space Program 2 around the corner. (But which has been so delayed it will come out only after regular posting has resumed but before the KR Hungarian focus tree.)

 

[Juumanistra]

Chapter 1: Fear and Loathing in Collier's Magazine
While many institutions inside the Department of Defense can claim that their stories began in either inter-service rivalry or Teutonophobia, the Astronautical Service of the United States Navy is the only one that can claim it was born from both.

It can all be traced back to a symposium, organized by Collier’s magazine, on the subject of space exploration. It was intended to provide the raw material for a series of articles on the dawn of a new “Space Age”. As a half-dozen luminaries of rocketry and the celestial sciences – Willy Ley, Fred Whipple, Joseph Kaplan, Heinz Haber, Oscar Schachter, and Wehrner von Braun -- were gathered, the editors discovered two things. The first was that more than half of the panel appeared to be German, even if Schacter’s greatest sin was to have been born and raised in New York City. The second was that, while the Army was represented by von Braun and the Air Force by Haber, there was no presence from the Navy. Out of an abundance of caution about stepping on toes at the Pentagon during an ongoing war, it was decided by the editors that prudence dictated at least attempting to find a Navy man to round out the panel. (And, “if he had a name that didn’t make you think of bratwurst, all the better,” Ley would recall some two decades later of being told of the decision.)

And, as the technical consultant for Collier’s, the search for the Navy’s top rocket man fell to him. It was to be a short search, which ended with a man who wasn’t a rocketeer of any stripe by professional training. Captain Robert Anson Heinlein was a veteran of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, having spent much of his career afloat, including command of a destroyer for the final year of the War. Since the War’s end he had come ashore to a posting at the Naval Research Laboratory, working on “advanced concepts for navigational aids”, as the highly classified Project BOWDITCH orbital radio-positioning system was referenced as. Notwithstanding the classified nature of his work, Heinlein was widely regarded as the most outspoken of the Navy’s futurists and an ardent enthusiast for the potential – both civilian and military – of rocketry. And that he was eager to participate was simply icing on the cake.

The symposium yielded the seminal “Man Will Conquer Space Soon!” series, which premiered in the March 22, 1952 edition of Collier’s. The centerpiece of the series was von Braun’s and Ley’s grand design, which with help of an iconic spread of art from Chesley Bonestell, envisioning a massive Space Station in near-Earth orbit and an epic lunar expedition, with the promise of even bolder future trips to Mars and beyond after that. Contributions from the rest of the panel consisted of complementary articles or primers from their areas of specialties.

Captain Heinlein’s – titled “Halfway to Anywhere” – centered on the basic fact that the hardest part of spaceflight is climbing out of Earth’s gravity well. To illustrate the problem, he asked his readers to envision a world in which there no gas stations. In order to get anywhere by automobile, the driver had to bring not only all of the gasoline which would be required for the entire journey to and from a destination, but also all of equipment to store that gasoline and to transfer it into the car’s fuel tank. Hauling around all of that gasoline would quickly require redesign of the car to accommodate the extra weight and volume, necessitating a bigger engine to propel the vehicle and heavier running gear to endure the load. But that increased weight would, in turn, necessitate bringing even more gasoline to compensate for the increased fuel consumption necessitated by the more powerful engine and heavier total weight of the car. This design process would continue until the point that an automobile became so uneconomic and impractical that private ownership would not be feasible at all!

This was the problem which confronted man at the dawn of the Space Age, as a rocket had to bring everything it needed with it up Earth’s gravity well. To truly conquer the stars, Heinlein argued, man will need to build infrastructure – “celestial harbors and astro-colliers”, he called them -- to reduce the amount which rockets must haul with them up from Earth. To demonstrate this principle, he outlined an orbital structure called an Atmospheric Consumables Collector. Consisting of “a great still in the sky”, the Collector skimmed, condensed and distilled oxygen and water vapor out of the upper atmosphere, with its altitude being maintained by air-breathing lift-jets powered by a network of mirrored surfaces focusing sunlight to flash-vaporize atmospheric reaction mass. (“They [the lift-jets] work as one would use a magnifying glass to incinerate an ant, save the magnifying glass is effectively several square-miles in size,” the article memorably understated.) The condensed water and oxygen would be picked up by an “orbital tug”, which captured tanks full of consumables via a great tether and pulled them up out of the atmosphere for delivery to the Space Station.

The net effect of all of this work would be to make the Space Station more economic to construct and operate, because the oxygen and water vital to any human habitation in space got a “head-start” of several hundred miles on something launched from sea-level. (Something, Heinlein noted, took von Braun’s Ferry Rocket three stages and thousands of tons of hydrazine and nitric acid to accomplish.) Mankind’s steady march into space would depend upon turning his immense creativity to find ways to making orbit as easily accessible as possible, as the article concluded that “if you get your into orbit, you’re halfway to anywhere.”

The Collier’s series caused a stir and helped prime the United States for a bout of space fever, though it would not properly get underway until the adaptation of the Collier’s series by Disneyland three years later. Collier’s would also continue to publish periodic articles from its panel until 1954. Between print and the Small Screen, the likes of von Braun, Ley, and Haber would continue to strenuously advocate for their vision of an American-led conquest of the stars.

Captain Heinlein, however, would be denied the opportunity – and limelight – afforded to the other contributors to the Collier’s symposium. As his contribution to the Collier’s series had caught the attention of the Secretary of the Navy himself, David Kimball. Who found himself intrigued by Heinlein’s proposition to create a system of orbital infrastructure analogous to similar systems developed and utilized by the Navy on Earth’s seas. As, while the Revolt of the Admirals was a mere three years prior, its scars remained visible and rebuilding trust in the Truman administration’s political appointees was vital. And, if the war in Korea had done much to paper-over the differences between the services, it was an inevitability that they would come to blows in the future about who would have primacy in a “Space Age”. The funding of Project BOWDITCH had been, in part, an attempt to find a niche for the Navy in a realm that did not offer an immediately obvious one. Heinlein’s novel – and highly publicized – scheme further offered the Navy a natural and organic outgrowth of its existing missions while still attempting to secure a position in the coming clashes in the Pentagon over space.

So it was that on May 15, 1952 that, by order of the Secretary of the Navy, a committee was to be formed – chaired by Captain Heinlein – and housed within the Naval Research Laboratory to comprehensively investigate the “economic, military, and political dimensions and consequences of the dawning of a ‘Space Age’” and to make recommendations, specifically for the Navy and for the United States more generally, on actions to be taken in response to the results of the committee’s investigations. While the specific order creating the committee did not address its name, it quickly became the Research Group on Leaving Earth Via a Theoretical Astronautical Navy.

The LEVIATHAN had been born and all that awaited it was the future.

 

[TheBalkanizer]

Interesting

 

[Dathi THorfinnsson]

(And, “if he had a name that didn’t make you think of bratwurst, all the better,” Ley would recall some two decades later of being told of the decision.)

While Robert and Anson are good English names, Heinlein does imply ancestral bratwurst.

Edit: apparently 6th generation American. Which is pretty impressive.

 

[Juumanistra]

While Robert and Anson are good English names, Heinlein does imply ancestral bratwurst.

Indeed it does. Though the quote was intended to be recollection what the Collier's editors wanted, not what they got. Unfortunately, even with allowances for alternate history shenanigans, rocket science and German-sounding names amount to an either/or proposition at this point in history.

Clearly one of the LEVIATHAN Group's recommendations needs to be the annexing of the British Interplanetary Society to save rocket science from the vestiges of the Huns.

 

[RanulfC]

Interesting POD and "main" theme
Going to be interesting to see how this will play out because for one thing Captain Heinlein is NOT going to be a big fan of Eisenhower's "peaceful/civilian" use of space only policy I have a feeling "Vanguard" TTL is going to be a bit different...

Randy

 

[Juumanistra]

Chapter 2: Left In a BOWDITCH to Rot
Sometimes, in order to go forwards, you have to go backwards. And to understand the first report produced by the LEVIATHAN Group, it is important to first understand the history of an adjacent and interrelated Naval Research Laboratory program: Project BOWDITCH.

Inaugurated in 1949, Project BOWDITCH was an ambitious space technology program intended to improve the safety of aerial and maritime navigation. The Pacific War had taught the U.S. Navy a series of painful lessons as to the limitations of then-current navigational technology, as most sailors could recount at least one instance of running afoul of improper dead-reckoning, outdated charts, or misreading the stars. What was needed was a technological solution that allowed ships to accurately determine their location without regard for chart or visibility.

Easier said than done, to be sure. Project BOWDITCH, nonetheless, proposed a novel solution. By orbiting an artificial satellite in a regular, predictable orbit that broadcast a radio signal, it was theoretically possible for a receiver on Earth to analyze the Doppler shift of the signal relative to receiver to determine the receiver’s own position relative to the satellite. If an entire constellation of such artificial satellites existed, it would be theoretically possible to use multiple orbital signals to triangulate one’s own position. While the idea was conceived and originated within the Naval Research Laboratory’s Department of Radio, it was felt by the Office of Naval Research that the project would benefit by being headed by an outsider who was a technically versed sailor with ample practical navigational experience. And the candidate was Captain Robert Heinlein.

With the formation of the LEVIATHAN Group, Heinlein remained the chief of Project BOWDITCH. The Navy had envisioned LEVIATHAN as a continuance of Heinlein’s participation in the Collier’s symposium, a distinctly extracurricular activity that did meaningfully intersect with his duty-station beyond, perhaps, water-cooler interactions with Milton Rosen’s Viking rocket team. Idle hands, however, are the devil’s workshop.

As by May 1952, Project BOWDITCH was fast approaching a development bottleneck. For, while a good deal of laboratory development had been done with regard to how a proposed BOWDITCH satellite might operate, it was unknown whether the idea would work as intended until a radio-broadcasting satellite was in fact placed into orbit. And, between the war in Korea and a general lack of a suitable launch vehicle, there was little chance of flying even a proof-of-concept testbed any time soon. Which left Captain Heinlein and a not-insubstantial portions of the Project BOWDITCH team with diminishing professional responsibilities which might be thrown at a more productive task.

Like the LEVIATHAN Group’s work, for example. The LEVIATHAN Group, as authorized, had no staff, no budget, and no facilities: It was intended to produce something like the Collier’s series, a mostly high-level overview of issues garnered via personal interviews, with fewer flashy art spreads and more classified nuclear programs. But with a shop of under-worked engineers and scientists, a disproportionate number of whom grew-up reading John Campbell-edited pulps, opened up new possibilities as the LEVIATHAN Group work began to become something else entirely.

The three-volume First Report of the Research Group On Leaving Earth Via A Theoretical Astronautical Navy was delivered to the Office of Naval Research on December 7, 1952. The superstitious might have worried about doing something momentous on the anniversary of that blackest day of the U.S. Navy. The report was black enough, by itself, not to be tarred by the ignominy of being dated Pearl Harbor Day. For, it bluntly stated, nothing less than the physical survival of the United States itself was dependent upon the Navy’s becoming a “Three-Ocean Navy”, bestriding the Sea of Stars as it did the Atlantic and Pacific. And to demonstrate the point, the First Report drew a sketch of the distant year of 1977 as was imagined by the LEVIATHAN Group.

It was a world where the United States and Soviet Union stared atomic annihilation in the face every minute of every day, each side with hundreds – if not thousands – of “intercontinental strikers”, powerful multistage rockets capable of lobbing thermonuclear weapons with multimegaton yields thousands of miles on ballistic trajectories, as well as “orbit-forts” -- maneuver-capable orbital structures built to resist attempts to shoot them down and bristling with thousands of megatons more of atomic hellfire -- whirling around in near-Earth orbits. Most terrifying, though, were the “boomers”: Ships powered by muscular atomic rockets, immensely more capable than any chemically fueled system, with bomb-bays full of atomic bombs and missiles that prowled cis-Lunar space, capable of “diving” towards Earth without warning and obliterating any foe in an overwhelming and unstoppable first-strike.

Notwithstanding the potential atomic holocaust, the future of 1977 was also not without its bright spots. It was a world where Clarkellites – space stations in geosynchronous orbit – allowed real-time of broadcasts of television and radio across the globe. Going to sea was markedly safer than it once was, thanks to the proliferation of a BOWDITCH-like “global maritime positioning system”. Advanced weather forecasting, made possible by the observations of “orbital weathermen”, had rendered hurricanes and tornadoes a threat of the past. Cheap orbital access was economically transformative, as all manner of new innovations were achieved, from sub-orbital passenger flights to microgravity manufacturing to access to functionally infinite electricity via solar energy. And man’s understanding of the heavens was revolutionized by the astronomical knowledge gained from space-borne telescopes and an observatory on the far-side of the Moon. All of that future, good and ill, was the result of the development of the rocketry and its adjacent technical fields. It could also not be avoided, as someone would attempt to establish dominance of nature’s ultimate high ground. And if it was not the United States, it would surely be someone hostile to American interests.

In concluding the First Report, the LEVIATHAN Group only made three recommendations:

1. The immediate establishment of a unified Bureau of Rocketry, equivalent in funding and personnel to the Army Ordnance’s Division of Guided Missiles and with an official range of responsibilities including that agency’s official and unofficial activities, to coordinate various Navy space-related programs and operate on equal-footing with the Army and Air Force.

2. The commencement of immediate work on the development of nuclear space propulsion systems, for there was no instance where, in the future, functioning atomic rockets would not be necessary.

3. The authorization of the LEVIATHAN Group to develop a unified program plan with which to win the coming Space Race before it begins and appropriate an adequate budget to start doing the same.

Whether the LEVIATHAN Group would get any of what it wanted, however, was a question that would have to wait for at least six weeks, pending the swearing in of the newly-elected Eisenhower Administration.
*=*=*=*=*
Author's Notes
As I said in my intro, I'd said I'd try to flag differently named stuff as well as purely TTL inventions. It really shouldn't need mentioning, but Project BOWDITCH is entirely invented from whole cloth. That being said, it does draw not-insignificant inspiration from TRANSIT, even if its presentation is more Navstar/GPS as described. You gotta let the dev-team dream before going and ruining their day by pointing out that, even if they can fly a satellite, designing the computer to make the system work is going to be painful. (Even more painful, mind you, as the AN/UYK-1 already was a bear to make fit aboard the Lafayettes.) Mostly, though, Nathaniel Bowditch deserves more love than just a survey ship and this is my way to do that.

 

[Juumanistra]

Interesting POD and "main" theme
Going to be interesting to see how this will play out because for one thing Captain Heinlein is NOT going to be a big fan of Eisenhower's "peaceful/civilian" use of space only policy I have a feeling "Vanguard" TTL is going to be a bit different...

Randy

My understanding re: Ike and "peaceful" space policy wasn't so much out of enthusiasm for civilian/"peaceful" space policy as pure exasperation with the services' never-ending bickering and incompetence. As the man wanted the Army and Air Force to focus on their critically important space-related tasks, specifically the development and deployment of ICBMs. Would you trust the Army with a slice of the space pie when they've got One Damn Job and they can't even keep Wernher von Braun pretending like he's on task? (All while the Army's also doodling stuff like Project Horizon in the margins of its proverbial notebook, whose primary purpose might as well be "we want to go to the Moon because it's made of land, and the Army owns all the military land stuff.") Or a USAF that, during Eisenhauer's Administration, never met a missile project that it couldn't find new ways to make behind schedule and over budget? (And that eventually determined the best use for Orion was as a way of guaranteeing that, in the thermonuclear penis-measuring contest of life, Curtis LeMay always wins? Though that's post-Eisenhauer and doesn't really count.)

Re: Vanguard, it's probably not going to end up too differently. At least the rocket, mind you. There's just not a whole lot that can be reasonably be done other than stage an Aerobee second-stage on top of a Viking first-stage and hope for the best in that department. The Navy's basically got nothing else in development -- or at least far enough along -- that you could stick atop a Viking to try and produce a different result.

Project Vanguard, though, that's a whole other ball of wax. I mean, who's to say Project Vanguard ever gets as far as it does? Project Orbiter might be the obvious choice ITTL, when there's a payload at NRL that's desperate to reach orbit for validation of an idea that's fairly attractive to both military and non-military users. Or maybe Project Vanguard throws away the actual Vanguard rocket, instead sticking with Jupiter and deciding to make its own Jupiter-based launcher. With blackjack and hookers! And no Roman gods of doorways.

It'll be fun to find out what's what there.

 

[Workable Goblin]

It was a world where the United States and Soviet Union stared atomic annihilation in the face every minute of every day, each side with hundreds – if not thousands – of “intercontinental strikers”, powerful multistage rockets capable of lobbing thermonuclear weapons with multimegaton yields thousands of miles on ballistic trajectories, as well as “orbit-forts” -- maneuver-capable orbital structures built to resist attempts to shoot them down and bristling with thousands of megatons more of atomic hellfire -- whirling around in near-Earth orbits. Most terrifying, though, were the “boomers”: Ships powered by muscular atomic rockets, immensely more capable than any chemically fueled system, with bomb-bays full of atomic bombs and missiles that prowled cis-Lunar space, capable of “diving” towards Earth without warning and obliterating any foe in an overwhelming and unstoppable first-strike.

Notwithstanding the potential atomic holocaust, the future of 1977 was also not without its bright spots. It was a world where Clarkellites – space stations in geosynchronous orbit – allowed real-time of broadcasts of television and radio across the globe. Going to sea was markedly safer than it once was, thanks to the proliferation of a BOWDITCH-like “global maritime positioning system”. Advanced weather forecasting, made possible by the observations of “orbital weathermen”, had rendered hurricanes and tornadoes a threat of the past. Cheap orbital access was economically transformative, as all manner of new innovations were achieved, from sub-orbital passenger flights to microgravity manufacturing to access to functionally infinite electricity via solar energy. And man’s understanding of the heavens was revolutionized by the astronomical knowledge gained from space-borne telescopes and an observatory on the far-side of the Moon. All of that future, good and ill, was the result of the development of the rocketry and its adjacent technical fields. It could also not be avoided, as someone would attempt to establish dominance of nature’s ultimate high ground. And if it was not the United States, it would surely be someone hostile to American interests.

Ah, the delusionsdreams of space nerds...well, I can't really be too harsh, I would like all of those things to be true as well, but even if they got ALL THE MONEY most of that could not possibly happen by 1977 (the "Clarkellites," GPS, and weather forecasting are possible, as are obviously the ICBMs; maybe "orbit-forts" or "boomers" could be built, but probably not, and certainly not both). One little nitpick, I don't think anyone would have thought of solar power satellites in 1952 because there was no really adequate way of generating power from solar energy at that time (solar cells had technically been invented but were practically speaking unknown). This is kind of obvious when you read the Collier's series and see that they had this "mercury boiler" system with mirrors focusing sunlight on a tube of mercury that would boil and drive a turbine; a pretty complicated and frankly kind of weird system, certainly not something that would be attractive for powering Earthly users (compared to nuclear power of some kind). (EDIT: Also, there was no viable or known way to transmit power from orbit to the ground; more likely, LEVIATHAN would talk about putting big mirrors in space to illuminate places on the ground and "banish night" like von Braun and the Russians liked to talk about doing) I guess technically Asimov had written about the idea in the early 1940s, but Heinlein obviously is not as plugged into that area as IOTL and that was really just a sci-fi contrivance anyway that handwaved the issue of "how do you actually generate power from the Sun" in the same way that the positronic brain handwaved all of the difficulties of actually building an AI. Serious proposals didn't really come up until the late 1960s, when solar cells were available in relatively mass quantities.

Also, it's funny to see them talking about nuclear rockets as though they were "necessary" for anything; quite the contrary, they're an awkward middle ground that's not really good for anything, since they give up the T/W ratio of chemical rockets while not achieving the ISPs of electric rockets. But that's something they'll have to discover for themselves, I guess. And they're probably not going to get nearly enough money to put them into service anyhow.

 

[Polish Eagle]

Intriguing that Heinlein gets the prior art on Propulsive Fluid Accumulator ITTL. IOTL, I am not aware of a proposal before Demetriades in 1956. Was there such a proposal?

 

[Kloka]

You guys are creating space TLs faster than I can watch them.

 

[jlckansas]

RAH would be at least a two star admiral by 1951 if he stayed in the Navy after WW 2. Looking at some of the listings for the KIA's from nis class during WW 2 shows most of them as being Major or Lt. COL if USMC or at least a LT Commander or Commander by 43. Also some of his class that stayed in the service after WW 2 became 2 and 3 star Flag officers in the early 50's. One thing about his specialty of gunnery or ordnance, he served on DD's and CV's before getting retired. if he was not medically retired I could see him going on to commanding either a Heavy Cruiser by 41 or being the Exec of the BB or CA division in the fleet, if not actually serving as a staff officer at a major Fleet command. Service on Nimitz's staff in WW 2 is entirely possible if not on the staff of Spruance afloat.

 

[Workable Goblin]

RAH would be at least a two star admiral by 1951 if he stayed in the Navy after WW 2.

Well...maybe. I mean, Rickover wasn't promoted to rear admiral until 1953, and while, yes, he's a special case I think Heinlein is being set up rather similarly so far...

 

[Gth]

Hmmmm a timeline that seems to be setting up a pre-Sputnik American sattelite launch, but is also unkind to NASA?

My caveman brain is protesting though I understand the implications

 

[Juumanistra]

@Workable Goblin :
There is a long and proud history of laughably wrong governmental futurism that the LEVIATHAN Group is tasked with upholding, after all. I mean, OTL's seminal work in the genre -- the Integrated Program Plan -- was dreaming of a hundred people full-time in LEO by 1990, plus another hundred spread out across the Moon, Mars, and outposts orbiting both in a NASA-run empire spanning the Inner System. At least the LEVIATHAN folks have the excuse that it's still 1952 and unbridled optimism is not only tolerable in this sphere, but positively expected.

That said, the folks at LEVIATHAN have some interesting insights that are worth considering. As their imagined striker/orbit-fort/boomer division of nuclear forces looks suspiciously like a funhouse version of the OTL nuclear triad a half-decade before that even started gaining traction as a concept. (Does this mean that OTL ballistic missile submarines had their nickname borrowed for an ITTL hypothetical class of spaceship that will, in due time, lend its name to TTL's ballistic missile submarines because they play the same conceptual role? Yes. Yes it does.) They've also zeroed in on the importance of orbital access and its economics out of the gate, though the extent of which won't really become apparent until we start getting to Visions of Futures Past excerpts. Whether that will survive contact with the political reality of early spaceflight is a different question entirely.

Re: nuclear rockets, I will note that even through 1957's Mars and Beyond, "nuclear rocket" was used to include everything with an atomic reactor, including nuclear-electric drives. So you get the treat of Wernher von Braun discussing his Martian atomic rocket that will be able to make the trip to the red planet in a mere 13 months! LEVIATHAN certainly means nuclear-thermal systems -- you can't have a Heinlein-centric timeline without dreams of a nuclear light-bulb -- but they are not incorrect that any they do with space-going nuclear reactors, for example, has potential applications because of how useful an atomic pile can be. (Such as JIMO! Even if that's utter post hoc rationalization. I also miss Project Prometheus.)

@Polish Eagle :
I'm not aware of anyone who proposed itearlier IOTL. I'll be honest that I wasn't even aware of Demetriades until today, though I was aware of far more recent takes on the concept. I'd settled on it as an idea to illustrate how a Captain Heinlein might take a -- the? -- most Heinleinian of concepts in halfway-to-anywhere, apply the ample-but-technically-informed creativity to it that we can assume Heinlein would still possess, and see what happens.

@jlckansas
I have tried my darnedest not to try to figure out what Robert Heinlein's naval career would've looked like, because it is an exercise in madness that can just as easily descend into a wank or getting him unceremoniously killed. (Also because it's worthy of a TL all on its own and I'm here for the rockets, not Captain Heinlein's Central Pacific Funtime Shenanigans.) If you want a headcanon for why Heinlein's not wearing stars (yet), he was in-line to make RADM with and intention to fly a flag on the USS United States and made some regrettable statements during the Revolt of the Admirals, resulting in a banishment to the Naval Research Laboratory to head a project that would see his career end overseeing a technological cul-de-sac, if not a dead-end.

Heck, that even end up canon.

@Gth :
Well, there are a lot of things between now and 1957, so it's probably wise to not strain too hard trying to fathom where things are going. If it's any help, though, consider this: NASA was born from a very particular moment for a particular reason, to get the American space program on-track after years of mismanage and in-fighting by the services. The Navy having more interest years before Vanguard is going to produce butterflies that could well make NASA as we know it never come into be. And, further, NASA's Golden Age was from its creation to 1972, which were also a very particular moment in history. Can you have NASA as we know it, for example, without the Apollo Program and its transformation following Kennedy's call for a Moonshot then martyrdom?

That's what I mean when I say the TL not being kind to NASA. I'll leave you go hypothesize if this means that JFK won't be assassinated or that he won't be elected at all.

 

[Gth]

OOOG WANT MOAR CONTENT

*BONK*

Yeah so Im in lol. Looking forward to seeing more

 

[Workable Goblin]

@Workable Goblin :
There is a long and proud history of laughably wrong governmental futurism that the LEVIATHAN Group is tasked with upholding, after all. I mean, OTL's seminal work in the genre -- the Integrated Program Plan -- was dreaming of a hundred people full-time in LEO by 1990, plus another hundred spread out across the Moon, Mars, and outposts orbiting both in a NASA-run empire spanning the Inner System. At least the LEVIATHAN folks have the excuse that it's still 1952 and unbridled optimism is not only tolerable in this sphere, but positively expected.

Oh, they absolutely would talk about all sorts of absurd things, though I think someone in 1952--when people were deeply skeptical of anything "space"--setting a date of 1977 for such an expansive future is...unlikely (2002 would be more reasonable). I was more commenting on that they could not possibly get that far that fast even if the entire country had a simultaneous epiphany and anointed Robert Heinlein God-Emperor of Space with a mandate to make it happen. Much less in reality, when there will be a great deal of skepticism and very limited budgets for him and his merry gang for some time.

Re: nuclear rockets, I will note that even through 1957's Mars and Beyond, "nuclear rocket" was used to include everything with an atomic reactor, including nuclear-electric drives. So you get the treat of Wernher von Braun discussing his Martian atomic rocket that will be able to make the trip to the red planet in a mere 13 months! LEVIATHAN certainly means nuclear-thermal systems -- you can't have a Heinlein-centric timeline without dreams of a nuclear light-bulb -- but they are not incorrect that any they do with space-going nuclear reactors, for example, has potential applications because of how useful an atomic pile can be. (Such as JIMO! Even if that's utter post hoc rationalization. I also miss Project Prometheus.)

True, nuclear reactors in space have some utility, although they'll probably greatly overestimate it (it's worth noting that the only ones that have actually flown were one U.S. experimental reactor and the Soviet RORSAT reactors...). That's understandable from a 1952 point of view, however, because the state of solar energy is pretty much non-existent and so nuclear power looks a lot better than it did once people actually started flying stuff into space and solar cells were around. Plus, you know, atomic is a synonym for awesome!

(Another important factor, incidentally, in nuclear power seeming more attractive from the 1952 point of view than it proved to be in reality was that the idea of gravitational assists was extremely nascent at the time, with Gaetano Crocco demonstrating the first fully worked out and relatively well-known example only in 1956. Lacking the idea of gravity assists meant that spacecraft to especially but not exclusively the outer planets were expected to have to provide much more delta-V and travel more slowly than has proven to actually be the case, which in both instances greatly increases the utility of nuclear power and nuclear propulsion of any type)

Well, there are a lot of things between now and 1957, so it's probably wise to not strain too hard trying to fathom where things are going. If it's any help, though, consider this: NASA was born from a very particular moment for a particular reason, to get the American space program on-track after years of mismanage and in-fighting by the services. The Navy having more interest years before Vanguard is going to produce butterflies that could well make NASA as we know it never come into be. And, further, NASA's Golden Age was from its creation to 1972, which were also a very particular moment in history. Can you have NASA as we know it, for example, without the Apollo Program and its transformation following Kennedy's call for a Moonshot then martyrdom?

That's what I mean when I say the TL not being kind to NASA. I'll leave you go hypothesize if this means that JFK won't be assassinated or that he won't be elected at all.

The popular narrative that NASA was formed because Eisenhower wanted a civilian program, ARPA failed to make it happen, and NACA was basically in the right place at the right time is...not really right. Actually, there had been elements within NACA working towards becoming the center of the space program for a considerable amount of time, and there was a good case to be made both for them to be that center and for most elements of the space program to be moved from the purview of the military into a civilian agency (as we can see from the fact that pretty much every other country in the world other than the Soviets ended up creating their own civilian space agencies that took over the majority of their space programs). In the former case, NACA already had a number of research centers with relevant specialists and experience, for example they had been working on rocket engines at Lewis for some time before Sputnik had been launched and Wallops had been established in 1945. Outside of the military and JPL (which of course promptly became part of NASA), they really were the biggest center of rocket expertise in the country.

In the latter case, if you look at what NASA did, completely ignoring Apollo and everything to do with it, it was mostly working on things that were either civilian versions or applications of things that were also of military interest, or things that there was no realistic military interest in. For example, NASA launched TIROS in 1960, pioneering satellite weather observations, Telstar in 1962, thus pioneering satellite communications (in conjunction with AT&T), and Mariner 1/2 also in 1962, sending the first spacecraft to another planet. While obviously the first two are also of military interest, as any fool who had to fight across the Pacific in World War II would well know, the TIROS and Telstar systems were specifically geared towards civilian ends, with the military left to set up their own parallel systems. You can point to similar examples in many other countries of non-military programs being underway. Ultimately, even if the Navy manages to start these programs, they're likely to be taken out of their hands in whole or in part at some point in time (probably quite early, to be honest, because it's blatantly obvious that the military doesn't really need to run most of these things) and put under civilian control so that civilian users don't have to deal with Pentagon bureaucracy and military priorities. And the logical agency to handle these programs is NACA, since as I said it does already have a lot of relevant experience.

 

[Schlock]

I wonder if Heinlein will push for a Moon base as part of this timeline, in public ostensibly as a source of materials for orbital construction due to the lower requirements of getting materials into orbit via magnetic catapult for building his space navy and have the 'Moon is a Harsh Mistress' option of a strategic weapon system that really sells it as a cheap orbital bombardment system to the US military as a way of getting around the SALT series of treaties.

 

[Dathi THorfinnsson]

I was more commenting on that they could not possibly get that far that fast even if the entire country had a simultaneous epiphany and anointed Robert Heinlein God-Emperor of Space with a mandate to make it happen. Much less in reality, when there will be a great deal of skepticism and very limited budgets for him and his merry gang for some time.

True. But NO ONE knew that then. Every space enthusiast then underestimated the cost and technical difficulty, usually by orders of magnitude.

 

[Workable Goblin]

True. But NO ONE knew that then. Every space enthusiast then underestimated the cost and technical difficulty, usually by orders of magnitude.

Well, not really. You’re more thinking of the post-Sputnik era and especially the Apollo era, when people were getting used to big budgets. In 1952, meanwhile, von Braun was expecting that maybe someone would land on the Moon by 1977 (rather less ambitious than having a nuclear-armed Moon base) and Mars by 2054…or maybe later!