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Hi. First post, though I've been a lurker for a while.

I've been fascinated by Project Orion, a proposal for nuclear pulse propulsion from the 1950s. It would've been so much better than chemical rockets, with weight being no object pretty much. Certainly, it would have made space travel much easier and more awesome. Hell, I could have possibly been sitting on the moon or Mars now...as the link says:

"At a time when the U.S. was struggling to put a single man into orbit aboard a modified military rocket, Taylor and Dyson were developing plans for a manned voyage of exploration through much of the solar system. The original Orion design called for 2000 pulse units, far more than enough to attain Earth escape velocity. "Our motto was 'Mars by 1965, Saturn by 1970'", recalls Dyson (30). Orion would have been more akin to the rocket ships of science fiction than to the cramped capsules of Gagarin and Glenn. One hundred and fifty people could have lived aboard in relative comfort; the useful payload would have been measured in thousands of tons (31). Orion would have been built like a battleship, with no need for the excruciating weight-saving measures adopted by chemically-propelled spacecraft. It is unclear how the vehicle would have landed; it is reasonable to assume that specialized chemically-powered craft would have been used for exploration. Taylor may have anticipated that a conventional Space Shuttle-type vehicle would have been available to transport people to and from orbit"

But sadly, the anti-nuclear crowd killed plus of lack of funding had killed it off. But let's say it succeeded. I was thinking the POD would be around 1958: ARPA would take the project under its wing instead of punting it off to the Air Force, who IOTL punted it to NASA, who refused to fund it because of the Apollo program. With ARPA's funding and full support, we could easily see an orbital test in '61 or '62 followed by a manned Mars flyby (possibly orbiter or even lander) in 1965 and a similar mission to Saturn and in 1970. The 1970s could see large-scale bases on the moon and Mars (due to the massive payloads that Orion drives could carry) and by the 2010s there would likely be a manned presence across the Solar System.

Assuming 1958 isn't too late of a POD for a non-ASB scenario, I suppose that would kill the Space Race before it even began. The Soviets aren't going to care about the moon when the Americans have already visited Mars. What effects would that have in the long term? Would the US still have a monopoly on long-range spaceflight? Would the lack of a Space Race allow the Soviets to better concentrate on other projects, and if so, what would they be? Would the environmental movement be strengthened by all the nuclear bombs going off in the atmosphere?
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