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A long essay I did during research for the oft-mentioned but little-finished Apollo TL (well, it's got over 4000 words, so that's something). Presented for your enjoyment:

I'm sure we're all aware of the famous Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and its expansive interpretation of where we would be in 2001 in terms of spaceflight--a base on the Moon (with rooms indistinguishable from those in any number of office buildings on Earth); routine, low-cost Earth to space travel (by Pan-Am, no less); equally routine LEO-Moon travel; giant space stations rotating for artificial gravity and built on site (as opposed to being assembled in space out of pre-fabricated modules); and even the possibility of human flight to Jupiter. I am equally sure we're all aware that in reality, none of that came even close to being true. There haven't been humans on the Moon since 1972 and Apollo 17, and the programs that have popped up every now and then to rectify that--SEI and Constellation being the most prominent--have generally been almost destined to fail since their beginning. The Space Shuttle failed to achieve the low-cost routine space access it promised, instead becoming an expensive and relatively limited capability launcher than always seemed somehow disappointing (if beautiful). The ISS is of course nowhere close to Space Station V in grace, size, or conveience, and has been the child of an extremely drawn-out construction process. And, of course, human space flight anywhere beyond the Moon, even to so close and relatively habitable a place as Mars, seems as distant now as it did in 1969. So why did that happen? What led human spaceflight to become the narrow, restricted thing it now is, as opposed to the expansive vision promulgated in 2001?

The first challenge human spaceflight faced in the post-Apollo era was that it had and has limited public support. As Roger Launius (ex-Chief Historian of NASA) points out on his blog, Apollo actually had fairly limited public support in the 1960s, and spaceflight has always been one of the first things Americans would like to see cut in favor of more immediately beneficial programs and projects; even in late 1965 (in other words, at the height of project funding), more Americans preferred things like tax cuts, Medicare, defense spending, or deficit reduction in a head-to-head comparison than preferred space travel. In the period 1975-1979, over 40% of Americans believed every year that space flight funding should be cut--a percentage exceeded consistently only by those who believed the foreign aid budget should be cut (this, when NASA's budget was reaching its (thus far) minimum levels!). In the entire period 1961-1995 IOTL, there were only two points in time when the number of people who supported flights to the Moon equaled or exceeded the number who opposed such a flight: 1965 and 1994 (directly after Clementine). The only point in time where a majority of Americans even believed Apollo was worth the money was 1969, directly after the Apollo landings--and even in the wake of this obviously historic moment, only 53% of Americans did so. It is clear from these statistics that NASA, BEO exploration, and human spaceflight in general has always faced a huge uphill battle, not helped either by the fact that many, if not most, Americans believe that NASA receives much more funding than it actually does. Thus, while admittedly most people like NASA in an abstract way, this "liking" is, like the Platte River at its mouth "a mile wide and an inch deep." Few are willing to commit the sums of money needed to engage in significant exploration or development programs, and will only think about NASA when something spectacular happens, causing only Congress members who represent districts or states dependent on space funding (like Florida or Texas), or those who genuinely and personally like space exploration to support it in the political process. This means that in times of budgetary crisis, such as the early 1970s or perhaps today, NASA tends to be a low-priority, rapidly cut item in the Federal budgeting process. It is not for nothing that the most severe cuts to NASA came as the Vietnam war was intensifying and the Great Society programs promoted by Johnson were beginning to enter their full stride (and thus full cost).

Still, this limited public support cuts both ways, as it is clear that most of the public doesn't actually care about NASA at any given point in time--not that they dislike it or hate it, but they just don't think about it. This would allow the agency (if it were clever) to engage in a slow, undercover sort of buildup to an exploration program, one that didn't depend on impossible to regain Apollo-era funding levels but instead focused on developing technologies and infrastructure to make such a program achievable with a normal budgetary level. Unfortunately, this runs into the second challenge spaceflight faced in the post-Apollo era: NASA's engineering culture. NASA was born out of NACA, a research agency charged with advancing America's state of the art in aeronautics (and in fact retains that mission to today). Such a group is understandably reluctant to repeatedly fly the same craft over and over and over--that is the job of the military or the airlines, not a research organization. Similarly, most of the first astronauts were test pilots, who wanted to fly the biggest, best, and fastest airplanes around, not repeatedly go to low Earth orbit or make cargo deliveries to the Moon. Combined, these two factors have made NASA obsessed with having "the new" in opposition to the tried-and-true. For example, in the early 1970s it became increasingly obvious that NASA could not afford to develop the Space Shuttle *and* keep the Saturn V at the same time; Congress simply wasn't willing to pay for it. NASA's leadership thus dropped any hope of reviving the Saturn V like a hot potato, opting for the newer and sleeker Shuttle over the been-there done-that Apollo technology. In retrospect this was clearly a mistake; while the Saturn V was admittedly very expensive technology, the diverging Russian and American experiences over the past 40 years have shown that expendable capsules and rockets are a more flexible technology than anyone at the time believed, while the Space Shuttle's early goals of very high flight rates and very high reliabilities with reusable equipment appear to have been beyond the state-of-the-art, at least at the funding levels that were authorized. A hybrid program combining proven Saturn and Apollo technology such as the F-1 with new development (such as the orbiter itself) might have been able to achieve the same goals as the OTL program at a lower cost, while a program taking the opposite tack (station now, Shuttle later) might have found development of the latter an easier task in the atmosphere of the 1980s. However, such a program did not appeal to the engineers of NASA, and so millions of dollars worth of completed technology development was abandoned in favor of even newer and "better" technology. Such a program, of course, will cost a large amount of money, contradicting the limitation placed by public awareness on NASA's activity.

A secondary factor here, ironically, is human space flight supporters themselves. Whenever they propose expensive, expansive programs designed to be integrated platforms for expansion of humanity into the cosmos, they unwittingly give ammunition to their opponents, who can easily convince people that they would rather have bread than circuses. Even something as modest as proposing a heavy-lift vehicle (a launch vehicle with a payload of 50 or more metric tons into orbit) raises questions about its use; there are no payloads in existence today that need such a large vehicle to lift, and the development of such a vehicle, even taking into account the use of existing Shuttle technology, is likely to be quite expensive. Like the NERVA program of the '60s, such a vehicle is likely to fall prey to the wishes of Congress to avoid an expensive program of significant human development of space and end up dying, perhaps bringing down other aspects of the space program with it.

This leads to the third challenge to human spaceflight in the post-Apollo period: technology. In many ways, the spaceflight technology of today is not very different from that of the 1960s. Chemical rockets are still in use; reusable spacecraft are still distant (the Shuttle requiring so much inspection and refurbishment after every flight that they hardly deserve the title); and human spaceflight remains the province of just two governments, the United States and Russia (no Pan-Am here, I'm afraid), although recent successes have suggested that some private corporations are on the verge of providing human space launch services. Spaceflight technology today is simply not at the advanced level it needs to be at for something involving as many people doing as much stuff as in 2001 to happen. It costs too much and is too unreliable. The necessary development to make it not so prior to today's involvement of commercial providers requires either a NASA more willing to accommodate a period of "doing nothing" than appears likely, or a public (and thus Congress) more willing to devote additional funds to the agency (again something that seems unlikely). At the same time, computer and robot technology has rapidly improved since 1969, and robots do not need to eat, breathe, or come back, making it far easier and cheaper to send them to distant lands for exploration than human explorers. Thus, the limited NASA budget required by point 1 can easily accommodate a robust program of exploration involving robots, while only long-term development using the same can support human exploration, and that only at a limited rate.

Combined, all three of these factors make NASA, and human spaceflight in general, appear nearly fated to their current state. The technology required to enable Shuttle-like operations just wasn't there in the late 1960s and early 1970s, while NASA was unwilling to continue using the Apollo-era technology built at a cost to the taxpayer of billions of dollars, and Congress and political leadership in general were not willing to provide enough funding to NASA to allow it to build everything it wanted. Further, while over time Congress and political leadership were willing to provide slightly more money to NASA, they were not willing to invest it in grandiose exploration or colonization plans, while NASA (as per its culture) kept developing flagship plans that required extensive new development and correspondingly great expense, and robots seemed to be doing all the same things, only more cheaply than humans ever could. Any alternate history involving the space program in the post-Apollo era must take all these factors into account, factors which severely limit how much things can differ from OTL. But then, that's the fun of the genre, isn't it?
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