alternatehistory.com

In the 1950s and 1960s, the aerospace industry had a certain zeitgeist that screams out from publications from that era. Aircraft, which had gotten so much faster and reached so much higher since the Wright Brothers, were just going to keep speeding up and soaring higher until they merged with spacecraft to become spaceplanes, carrying men and materials into space to construct giant space stations and launch missions to the Moon, Mars, and Venus. Many of the lesser, merely supersonic airplanes, meanwhile, would be able to take off and land vertically, so that a minimum of room would be needed to operate them. And so on and so forth.

Of course, none of this happened. Far from continuing to increase in speed and capacity, the farthest-reaching aircraft--the F-108, the B-70, the Boeing Model 2707--ended up failing, being too expensive with too few benefits over existing aircraft to justify their construction. Only fighter aircraft, where being able to zoom at a few times the speed of sound for at least a few minutes was worth the cost, remained solidly supersonic. Other types of aircraft, especially commercial transports, instead turned towards cheapness and capacity, compensating for their slow speed with the ability to freight huge numbers of passengers and cargo on a single flight. Vertical takeoff remained the province of helicopters, with only a handful of very specialized exceptions, all of them military aircraft. Robots, mostly, not men (and later women) ventured out into space, doing most of the tasks that humans were supposed to have accomplished. And so on and so forth.

So, my question is: What if the '50s and '60s had a different vision of the future of aviation and spaceflight? First, what would an inverted zeitgeist look like? There are some inversions that are obvious--have Boeing and Lockheed and BAC and the others convinced that the future is in not supersonic transports, but instead in giant subsonic aircraft, with the supersonic relegated to merely a supporting role, for instance--but I'm knowledgable enough to realize that I don't know enough about the industry to see what an entirely inverted zeitgeist would actually be. Second, how could such a zeitgeist come into being? As I pointed out, in some ways it was a natural development from how aviation had evolved since the Wright Brothers. Every new generation of aircraft flew higher and faster than the previous--until the 1960s, when this tendency reached its limit. Is it possible for people to recognize this limit sooner than IOTL, and begin to adapt to the end of acceleration? Third, what would the effects be on the aerospace industry specifically and society more generally? Having a vision of the future dominated by opposite concepts that led in reality would surely change at least some decisions in the aerospace industry, and might have an effect elsewhere--no Concorde, for instance...
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