I brought this up in the
TL Ideas you lack the wherewithal to execute thread, but it's gotten a decent response so I'm posting it here.
After the Apollo 13 disaster ends in the deaths of the astronauts aboard, President Nixon ends the Apollo Program and, more significantly, makes the decision to privatize NASA, its goal of winning the space race complete. NASA becomes the American Aerospace Corporation (Amaero for short).
What follows is how I would see the TL going,
but you don't have to assume any of it is canon.
Amaero hires Arthur C. Clarke as head of research and development, who proposes a network of commercialized communications satellites. Amaero hits on the idea of satellite phones, and they quickly become ubiquitous in a world where cellular phone technology won't be commercially viable before the 1990's. Amaero becomes one of the biggest companies in America, buying up tech startups like Microsoft to make its satellites better.
Ultimately, techs like GPS, satellite tv, and even the internet show up commercially much sooner than OTL, but one company has a monopoly on them. This is where it starts getting a little cyberpunk. GPS is a paid subscription service. Internet anonymity is an oxymoron, and piracy is basically impossible, due to Amaero monitoring all the data sent over the Satnet (TTL word for internet). The FCC effectively bans internet porn. Wikileaks is not a thing. Advertising is absolutely ubiquitous and impossible to opt out of without a government non-profit organization license. Cellular phone technology is suppressed due to the threat it poses to satphones, which do not work indoors without a wi-fi router.
In addition, we know basically nothing about the outer solar system, since all those probes were purely scientific in nature, something the for-profit Amaero has no purpose for. The Soviets still send missions into space, but their program was hugely scaled back after NASA was sold off. Meanwhile, the US military forms a small Space Corps, which launches satellites out of the New Mexico desert using older NASA launch vehicle designs.
Eventually I want to turn this into a fully-fledged narrative, but for now I'm occupied with
Jesus Walks. This thread will be for brainstorming the TL.