National Goal: Space. Date: 1876

I am starting the planning for restarting a timeline where a large meteor hits New Hampshire on June 6, 1876. The blast is ~3.5 megatons, blowing a crater a mile wide in the middle of Lincoln, New Hampshire--a small town in the White Mountains.

By the time the dust has settled, the USA is all too aware that the sky itself holds dangers--dangers that can not be addressed from the ground.

Telescopes are built, astronomers coordinate to seek out dangerous materials above, and a shocked nation is determined to be prepared; the next one might hit New York or Richmond.

A commitment is made: The United States will prepare, and plan to be able to prevent such a disaster from happening again. If the USA puts an amount of resources about equal to ten percent of the average military budget into whatever it takes to figure out how to reach space, and then to do it, what's the earliest that a person might reach orbit and return?

My last try at doing this bogged down in details, and only got abut a week past the impact--next time, I'll be less detailed.
 
I have nothing useful to impart, but would love to see some ideas in this thread.

My GUESS is 1930s as an absolute earliest. It really depends on how world technological advancement is affected by the USAs early space push.
 
10 percent of whose average military budget? Certainly, ten percent of the US' military budget of the time would represent a very small investment and probably not do much. In addition, it's worth keeping in mind that we wouldn't get a peacetime income tax until the 1890's...which then got ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Getting the resources to do anything in the era of laissez-faire would be extremely difficult, especially since there's so little that could be done with contemporary technology.
 
True--the US had a small military budget. I'm thinking that it's a matter of national importance, so perhaps more than 10% of the military budget. Besides government spending, there's attempts to coordinated research, and a certain national consciousness that this is important. To begin with, the efforts are focussed on understanding what's out there--telescopes, orbital calculations, etc. The other drive is to figure out what needs to be done to get pointed that way--a long term national goal.
 
Putting something into orbit with 19th century technology is nearly impossible. The Jules Vern gun might be attempted, and quickly abandoned.But that could lead to some massive artillery pieces with a range of 100s of miles,that would make the powder keg that is Europe an interesting place.
Solid fuel rockets would succeed them and the research into solid propellents would have unexpected benefits for the fledgling chemical industry.That could start a ballistic missile arms race,making Europe even more interesting.
I'd expect high altitude flights as early as the 1890s,first suborbital flight in the 1920s ,orbital flights in the 1930s,the moon in 1940s.
 
I'd love to see a timeline where Pedro Paulet designs a successful rocket for outer space and sees it work during his lifetime, this could be it.
 

missouribob

Banned
I have nothing useful to contribute except that such a United States government would also be better served by reorienting the whole of the state towards scientific progress and space exploration. Basically I'm saying ramp up the disaster a bit, but not so much as to cripple the United States. Have some Third Great Awakening Religious Response that basically jump starts the Progressive Movement. Basically between the Federal Response and this weird religious one that calls for a reform of American society to prevent more calamities from God the United States gets its shit together early on. Here's my list of things:

Reconstruction needs to be restarted. I mean literal reconstruction not the political project of black suffrage or Republican domination. Get the Federal Government within a decade to pass an Income Tax amendment and carry out a proto-New Deal in the South and underdeveloped West. If the United States wants to get to space it needs to be more productive and some government infrastructure spending is needed in this time period. Hell a national plan to build a school system (even for blacks since even they need to do their part, maybe an focus on technical training?), a national urban planning department, and a Federal Reserve equivalent.

Now jump starting Progressivism will also probably lead to some mistakes like Prohibition for drugs and alcohol again but that's kind of fine. The point isn't for this to become a wank, the point is to change the perspective of Americans of the time and short circuit the Gilded Age. Also in the immediate aftermath you need this to become a War level focus for these things to happen. So 10 percent of military spending isn't going to cut it. Assuming by 1880 we can get an income tax (or at least the funding methods used in the Civil War, but really we want a freaking income tax), and the United States has a roughly 10 billion dollar economy. [1] Now let's say you can get such a panic in the country that you can get Civil War level spending out of people. The Civil War cost roughly 8 billion dollars. [2] Over 4 years that's 2 billion a year. So this Proto-New Deal/Reconstruction/Progressive Build Up can realistically be 20 percent of GDP a year.

Think of that, 20 percent of U.S. GDP spent on speeding along railroads, the creation of a school system, space funding and eventually sewers, electrification, interstate highway system, airports and most importantly the race to space. This United States by 1910 looks very different than ours. The butterflies from educating a whole generation of Americans that in our timeline didn't get a systematic education is hard to predict. Like I said before I don't know how much sooner you can actually put a man in space but I think this is the level of societal commitment you'll need to reach that goal in earnest.

References:
[1]https://www.measuringworth.com/datasets/usgdp/result.php
[2]http://www.civilwarhome.com/warcosts.html
 
As i see it, to defend against a threat, you first need to understand it. I'd anticipate a widespread effort to understand the skies, to chart more asteroids and comets, with better organization to not just find them, but plot their orbits.
Major telescopes are not mass produced, but perhaps a limited run of near identical telescopes could be made, allowing more research.

Even as this goes on, efforts to develop ways to get up there, or shoot down an incoming asteroid, would produce interesting, if impractical results. Big rockets can produce BIG explosions...

Meanwhile, Europe looks on in amusement as, with no mile+ diameter crater, Europe goes back to its routine of wars and politics.
 

Billion-Ton Comet May Have Missed Earth by a Few Hundred Kilometers in 1883


On 12th and 13th August 1883, an astronomer at a small observatory in Zacatecas in Mexico made an extraordinary observation. José Bonilla counted some 450 objects, each surrounded by a kind of mist, passing across the face of the Sun.

Bonilla published his account of this event in a French journal called L’Astronomie in 1886. Unable to account for the phenomenon, the editor of the journal suggested, rather incredulously, that it must have been caused by birds, insects or dust passing front of the Bonilla’s telescope.

Today, Hector Manterola at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, and a couple of pals, give a different interpretation. They think that Bonilla must have been seeing fragments of a comet that had recently broken up. This explains the ‘misty’ appearance of the pieces and why they were so close together.

But there’s much more that Manterola and co have deduced. They point out that nobody else on the planet seems to have seen this comet passing in front of the Sun, even though the nearest observatories in those days were just a few hundred kilometers away.

That can be explained using parallax. If the fragments were close to Earth, parallax would have ensured that they would not have been in line with the Sun even for observers nearby. And since Mexico is at the same latitude as the Sahara, northern India and south-east Asia, it’s not hard to imagine that nobody else was looking.

Manterola and pals have used this to place limits on how close the fragments must have been: between 600 km and 8000 km of Earth. That’s just a hair’s breadth.

What’s more, Manterola and co estimate that these objects must have ranged in size from 50 to 800 metres across and that the parent comet must originally have tipped the scales at a billion tons or more, that’s huge, approaching the size of Halley’s comet.

One puzzle is why nobody else saw this comet. It must have been particularly dull to have escaped observation before and after its close approach. However, Manterola and co suggest that it may have been a comet called Pons-Brooks seen that same year by American astronomers.

Manterola and co end their paper by spelling out just how close Earth may have come to catastrophe that day. They point out that Bonilla observed these objects for about three and a half hours over two days. This implies an average of 131 objects per hour and a total of 3275 objects in the time between observations. Each fragment was at least as big as the one thought to have hit Tunguska. Manterola and co end with this: “So if they had collided with Earth we would have had 3275 Tunguska events in two days, probably an extinction event.”

As far as I am aware their interpretation has been challenged but if it is good enough for 2011 to be taken serious, it certainly would work in an alternate, more alert 1883.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/...ed-earth-by-a-few-hundred-kilometers-in-1883/
 
I have read about that incident when I started the timeline the first time. It plays into my plans, since I think that, just as the USA is starting to wonder if the whole effort is worth it, these get spotted, and the effort is redoubled.
 
That big crater in New Hampshire will eventually fill with water and become a lake,it will be stocked with fish and become a major tourist attraction.
 
Putting something into orbit with 19th century technology is nearly impossible. The Jules Vern gun might be attempted, and quickly abandoned.But that could lead to some massive artillery pieces with a range of 100s of miles,that would make the powder keg that is Europe an interesting place.
Solid fuel rockets would succeed them and the research into solid propellents would have unexpected benefits for the fledgling chemical industry.That could start a ballistic missile arms race,making Europe even more interesting.
I'd expect high altitude flights as early as the 1890s,first suborbital flight in the 1920s ,orbital flights in the 1930s,the moon in 1940s.
I don't know if the people of that era could imagine someone in outerspace. Jules Verne and H.G.Wells were exeptional. Around 1930 in OTL there were enough dreamers to make an impact. Then UFO's get an extraterrestial origin. So i think, that if the people sees comets as a real threat, and the government would ask scientists for a plan of action, the scientists would maybe advise a program to build a supergun to blow up the comet after it enters the atmosphere. I don't know if they would be able to see that this isn't enough. I think this indeed could lead to early balistics. But space would need a second push like the Cold War in OTL.
 
I don't know if the people of that era could imagine someone in outerspace. Jules Verne and H.G.Wells were exeptional. Around 1930 in OTL there were enough dreamers to make an impact. Then UFO's get an extraterrestial origin. So i think, that if the people sees comets as a real threat, and the government would ask scientists for a plan of action, the scientists would maybe advise a program to build a supergun to blow up the comet after it enters the atmosphere. I don't know if they would be able to see that this isn't enough. I think this indeed could lead to early balistics. But space would need a second push like the Cold War in OTL.
Europe was basically in cold war mode from 1871 till 1914
 
"The rockets' red glare, bombs bursting in the air..."

License the British Congreve design which, incidentally, had a civilian application for shooting life-lines to near-shore shipwrecks, endow MIT then get out of the way...

"The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1861 in response to the increasing industrialization of the United States, MIT adopted a European polytechnic university model and stressed laboratory instruction in applied science and engineering."
 
The big crater will indeed fill with water--Lake Lincoln will be forever a monument and reminder of the power the skies hold. In time, there will be a monument, with photographs of the thriving town, the desolation after the impact, and a list of the dead and missing. (Including the governor of New Hampshire!)

Although few would concieve of going into space, there are some. A supergun has the obvious problem of having only one shot at a very fast moving target--this in a time when big guns only fire a few miles with anything resembling accuracy.

First problem is discovering what problems need to be solved...
 
PODs relying on meteors are ASB. Orbits can be very gravitationally complex, but they're not random and the outcome is pretty much the same. To change the trajectory of an object, you'd require some kind of outside source (e.g a sentient extraterrestrial chiropteroid) to give it a nudge. Not to mention that unless you have a very specific asteroid in mind, you're essentially handwaving the Solar System body into existence. It's not like weather where the specifics are chaotic and variable.
 
The POD is ASB, in a way; I put it here because I'm interested in the capabilities and potential for learning about UP THERE, and eventually going there, based on a realistic assessment of the capabilities of the time.

Like ships are built in classes, i think that any major astronomical research effort, be it in response to a disaster o not, might involve building telescopes in classes, much like warships are...save the design expenses once a design that works well is developed. That alone could aid research
 
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