So I've been doing a fair amount of reading about the very early stages of the space race, when the 3 US military branches were all competing to lay claim to the plum new theater of operations... If any country was actually rich enough to have a space race with itself, it was the US.
The only plausible way I could imagine the Army and Navy maintaining their space programs was if the USAF didn't exist and if Eisenhower never became president... But even if these conditions were in place, it's hard to see much of a space race happening without some ideological rivalry to drive it...
Which led me to imagining what might happen if the US Army and the US Navy had relations as poor as those between the Japanese Army and Navy pre 1945... I suspect the results would be a fairly nasty dystopia for everyone on the planet, but it does sound like an awfully fun premise to me...
The question is: is there any plausible way to make the rivalries between the two services that strong with a PoD after the end of WW1 (I can't help but feel you'd need some sort of Authoritarian government to be running the US to make this happen, since otherwise, it is hard to see the democratic institutions of the US reigning in the bolshy Army and Navy)?
fasquardon