The fate of Star Wars if the Cold War had not ended?

I don't think Star Wars would have gone anywhere. The missile interceptors used today for tests against for potential ICBMs from North Korea fail miserably. It's doubtful that a nationwide system like this could be established by the United States and then also work effectively. It would also take tons of aircraft with laser beams attached to them to intercept missiles. They would not be precise either.
 
Which is odd, considering they made it work perfectly well in the sixties. http://www.designation-systems.net/dusrm/m-49.html.

Not to mention the Moscow defence ring, and other projects-http://www.ausairpower.net/APA-Rus-ABM-Systems.html

And I have to query your definition of "precision" if you think laser beams don't qualify.


Back to the beginning, the planned service version DC-Y as a launch vehicle, the full scale version, would have been a potential Shuttle replacement with much less turnaround time and cost; probably smaller payloads, less efficient as a rocket- there are good reasons for staging after all- but so much more reusable that overall costs would have gone down; incrementally, we're not talking order of magnitude leaps, but enough to make space access more viable.


I don't think the bureaucratised NASA of the early eighties would have known what to do with a working pebble bed nuclear thermal rocket; the big dreams had kind of lain down and gone ppthbbbt, post non-Apollo. It would either have made or broken them, if they could have come up with mission plans to make use of it or not.

We are basically looking at outpost emplacement, carrying heavy payloads to far away places and being repurposed as a settlement power plant after landing; was the supporting hardware, space suits and space tools, remotely ready? Did they have a non blue sky, not produced by an SF writer plan for a long haul spaceship? Doubt it.
 
The most reasonable ideas for applications of Timberwind seems to be as upper stages - that of course means that to use a Timberwind stage again, NASA or the USAF would need to put the stage through re-entry and recover it. Which is sure to cause a big reaction from the anti-nuclear camp.

Also, I really wonder what either would do with the payloads that Timberwind could launch - the largest Timberwind upper stage proposal (on top of a Titan-derived vehicle) had a payload competitive with the Saturn V. Only way I can see that being useful would be if the USAF was building a whole bunch of weapons platforms in orbit.

fasquardon
 
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