He was not prosecuted probably because the idea was not found dangerous. Even Galileo's ideas were supported by the Pope and most of the Cardinals, the problem started when someone from calvinist switzerland denounced him and someone in the catholic church said, "hey!, maybe there's something rotten there". Anyway the debate on Galileo's publication was more centered in the arguments he used and in the value of scriptures.
Indeed, sadly Galileo has been made up to be a martyr (sometimes by Protestant propaganda that wanted to paint the Catholic Church as
eeeeevil and anti-scientific - ironic when it was the Protestants who condemned heliocentricity more at the time

) . In truth he just used bad science. He turned out to be right in the end, but only by accident; he was an ideologue who stubbornly defended his theories regardless of evidence, and bit the hand that fed him.
On the WI in question, I think someone else would have thought of heliocentricity before long. After all, Aristarchus thought of it back in the classical period, but lost out to Aristotle and Ptolemy. The early seventeenth century was the time when optics reached the point where telescopes could identify serious flaws in even the most modified version of the Ptolemaic geocentric universe. I'm not usually as 'anti-Great Man theory' as this, but I think someone putting forward a heliocentric theory was pretty much inevitable in 17th century Europe.
Galileo's work on ballistics, I think, was more unique and might not have happened without Galileo (though his theories weren't tested until Descartes had a go during the 30 Years' War - in fact
using the 30 Years' War

).