PC: "2001" technological level by 2001?

If you want to have a "2001:ASO" level of tech BY A.D. 2001 the answer is simplicy itself.

Take the budgets for the War in Vietnam and the NASA effort to reach the moon and reverse them.

That's all you really have to do.

Let Saigon sink or swim.

Interesting, a funding level equivalent to a "war on space" could have interesting ramifications. Also that sort of funding would allow companies looking into larger space stations by 1980 (50+ people) to go ahead and escalate or even realize their plans.
 
M79, we are going to have to agree to disagree lest we derail this thread any further than we already have.

I am willing to leave it at that if you are.

I have one opinion about the Vietnam conflict that to me, is the correct opinion and you have a sharply differing opinion. I think for the sake of peace o nthe boards and the direction of this thread we should let it go.

Are you amenable to this?
 
Deal.

What about keeping the US military interested in space more overtly than OTL, like MOL-type projects or X-20 flights?
 
Maybe McNamara goes out the revolving door of office sooner?

I'm not sure that would help much in the matter of MOL and Dynasoar; I believe MOL wasn't canceled OTL until the Nixon Administration, while Dynasoar was axed early on. In both cases there was some question just what the Air Force was doing with manned space projects. The policy, laid down in the late Eisenhower administration, that NASA was generally going to be responsible for humans in space on the theory that US space efforts were mostly peaceful (with unspoken reservations about orbital surveillance, which however was shifted over to the CIA and NSA, both out of DoD's chain of command) was not cast in concrete; the White House always reserved the option of military space missions--if the services could think of legitimate ones! That was the problem with DynaSoar; when it came to explaining why the spaceplane should be an Air Force project, the mission scenarios the Air Force came up with were all in some combination physically dubious (wait, now, you're going to enter the atmosphere, do your {fill in blank here} mission then aerodynamically turn around and skip back into orbit and return to base...I'd like to see the numbers on that!:rolleyes:) or politically far outside the policy box. Insofar as they had clearcut military roles it wasn't clear why unmanned missiles and surveillance satellites couldn't do the job cheaper and safer. MOL was a consolation prize McNamara was willing to tolerate (and did, until he left office) because it was less technically questionable and less destabilizing. (Manned surveillance may or may not have been cost-effective--probably not, especially in view of advances in technology not realized yet in the early '60s, but trying it out was part of the point, and surveillance in general was a capability each side would happily deny the other, but not at the cost of losing it themselves, and so was a lot less controversial than talking about orbital strike capabilities).

What I wish about DynaSoar was that NASA were more interested in exploring alternatives to the basic ballistic capsule for manned missions, and funded to develop them in parallel with the moon mission. It would have been very cool if they had something close to DynaSoar in operation by 1970. Space tech experts on this thread are dubious that such approaches would offer worthwhile advantages over ballistic capsules but again it would be nice to have tried it out and see rather than simply never go there.

The STS is a very different sort of deal; its liabilities overlap those of any spaceplane to some extent but it bothers me that in dismissing the wisdom of incrementally developing return vehicles with serious aerodynamic maneuvering abilities they often equate the STS with the whole spaceplane concept in general.

Getting back to getting rid of Mac--well, it was my heuristic starting point, but in fact both Kennedy and LBJ had a lot of confidence in him, clearly he was doing the job they wanted done, for good or ill. The policy of making NASA alone responsible for manned space operations seems like a sound one to me unless one comes up with a specific space mission for military astronauts and every one I've ever heard of either pretty much duplicates the NASA mission or is hare-brained IMHO, either because of questionable technical claims or because of very aggressive and destabilizing intents (putting actual weapons of any kind in space for instance, or devising suborbital bombers). We just come up empty with legitimate military missions in space that aren't a likely spark to set off Armageddon and that can't be done as well or better by NASA--if they can be done at all! (An example of a technically hare-brained scheme would be suborbital troop delivery--on a scale where rapid response to a nearby friendly stronghold landing point would be more than a PR stunt, the cost would be incredible, whereas sending a craft reentering from nearly orbital speeds directly into harm's way seems like a good way to get it destroyed and its human payload killed.)

So McNamara was only doing his job when he put the kibosh on USAF doing DynaSoar; a different Kennedy/Johnson SecDef would have done the same, and so probably would a Nixon appointee if he'd been elected in 1960 instead.

MOL however did survive quite a few budget cycles and was getting close to being operational when it was axed, perhaps it could make it. Part of the MOL package was to be Big Gemini, which might conceivably have been replaced by a DynaSoar type spaceplane as the manned capsule the crew rode up in and returned in. If that is NASA went ahead and developed it, and it turned out to have advantages worth the inevitable liabilities--as a NASA spacecraft, with no modifications to weaponize it, it wouldn't be so controversial.

So we might get both. But if we get DynaSoar at all it can't be for the military purposes the Air Force tried to sell it with.
 
Shevak, the only thing that I have to say about Macnamara is this, I have never heard of, or seen anyone more in love with the smell of their own farts that was taken seriously for so long.
 
Shevak, the only thing that I have to say about Macnamara is this, I have never heard of, or seen anyone more in love with the smell of their own farts that was taken seriously for so long.

When he was in Ford he helped save the company, and his time with LeMay was also quite productive ... if you are not a Japanese, that is.

His "lets bring private market system to the defense system" was a complete disaster though ( although IMHO it looked like a good idea at the time ) ...
 
When he was in Ford he helped save the company, and his time with LeMay was also quite productive ... if you are not a Japanese, that is.

His "lets bring private market system to the defense system" was a complete disaster though ( although IMHO it looked like a good idea at the time ) ...
OPinions vary.
 
Everybody hates McNamara. The doves hated him during the war, the hawks have institutionalized hating him.

Oddly enough though, JFK evidently didn't hate him. LBJ kept him, nearly up to the point where he himself had to call it quits.

Wrong (as everyone seems to think) or right (as he must have been from time to time if only on the broken clock principle) he fit right in with the rest of "the best and the brightest."

On the matter of DynaSoar I think he was right, as far as his own job was concerned. The Air Force could not explain why they needed this thing.

I just wish NASA had picked up where they had to leave off. But that was not in McNamara's field of responsibility.

A lot of the hate and blame laid on him personally seems more properly to me to be discontent with the shortcomings and blind spots of US society in his times in general. That said--of course he rightly bears his share of it. Blame, and credit.
 
In my humble opinion the greatest reason we don't have the tech level from the movie "2001" in 2001 AD IOTL was because we were spending shit-tons of money and thens of thousands of people in a lost cause defending an absurdly incompatent fecklessly stupid kleptocracy, but at this point that is just my opinion, so, make of it what you will.
 
Another factor to consider- WI anti-space Senator William Proxmire is voted out of office much earlier because of, say, problems with his voters or even a victim of a political dirty trick? How would his absence in the Senate affect NASA funding?
 
Top