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What If the Apollo Program Had Continued?
proslack writes "The die had been cast years before Apollo 11 had even reached the moon. In the late 1960s, the Vietnam war was straining US finances. A fatal fire on the Apollo launch pad in January 1967 had blotted NASA's copybook. The Soviet moon effort seemed to be going nowhere. In the budget debates during the summer of 1967, Congress refused NASA's request to fund an extended moon programme.
What if things had been different that summer? Suppose Congress had granted NASA's wish, then fast-forward 40-odd years..." A nice little what-if sort of story that makes sorta nostalgic for a non-existent present.
The whole thing was fueled by the ongoing Cold War pissing contest. Continuation of the space race would have meant dealing with the ever-increasing tension of the Cold War. So I'm sad we never got our cities on the moon, but it's a damn good trade-off for not having to worry so much about all-out nuclear war.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Highly likely that:
1) We would have full time orbital manned space station at all times.
2) Visits between Moon and Orbital station would be LESS frequent.
3) Visits between Moon and Earth would be MORE frequent. (because Apollo lifts off from Earth. Public-Private partnership would see to it that NASA doesn't use the most economical way of transport)
4) No Space Shuttle. Rockets all the way. (Why mess with something that works)
5) Ion Spacecraft launched to Asteroids.
6) Still no man on Mars. But a permanent computerized research station on Mars that operates from fixed locations.
7) No Mars Rover. The Rover was a roaming answer. Fixed stations would necessitate no rover.
8) SALT II would have long been abandoned and Earth would be surrounded by nuke armed stations.
9) No Cruise missiles. Why build a Mosquito when an Elephant would be cheaper.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
...Vietnam was effectively the cold war. Rather than fight each other an an arena that had very high stakes (an invasion of Russia and the USA) the USA and Russia decided to fight in a number of "proxy" wars such as Vietnam and Korea.
And similarly, the cold war would have already ended itself. Soviet Russia while an interesting "experiment" ended up failing due to the fact that human nature plus the Soviet version of communism ended up with a government who could not financially sustain itself.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Arizona would be littered with soundstages by now.
And now the US looks like it will be emulating the USSR in decline.
???
I presume you are talking about the economy? Capitalism has cycles. You can't take a 6-month period and extrapolate it indefinitely into the future.
Who is modding this "interesting"?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
What benefits would we have got? Hard to say, probably nothing tangible - just a group of half-a-dozen scientists and technicians spending a few months at a time far out of the public gaze. There might be the occasional documentary, but there's only so much footage of rocks and dust - and one patch of dirt looks a lot like any other. So I doubt there'd be much about it in the news (again, just like antarctica). Just about the only time it would make the headlines is when there's a debate about cutting funding (again), or when something goes wrong - or when there's an expose about the billions being spent on it, for not-much in the way of returns.
Is that what we thought we'd get?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
No, dumbshit, not just like "Soviet Russia". (It's just Russia now, FYI)
There's a whole spectrum between unbridled capitalism and total socialism. When a 12 trillion dollar economy cannot provide basic health care to all (no, ER visits don't count) there's a goddamned problem.
As we've recently seen, unchecked capitalism is not a good thing since the markets aren't rational after all. And as we've seen with USSR in the past, that doesn't work either. I see no problem emulating nations like Canada, New Zealand, or Sweden. Hell, I've got friends in South America with better basic health care for the poor than we have here in the states.
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." - Inigo Mantoya
Sorry, but remarks like this also reminds me Major Frank Burns - "When are you two going to learn about Chinese treachery? Did Pearl Harbor teach you nothing?"
Similar to the upcoming US election results
The recent bust might not have anything to do with his assessment.
The Soviet Union was done in by rampant corruption. Some see the previous
administration as a repeat of what was going on in the Soviet Union prior
to it's collapse. At a certain point, you need to reign in your own greed.
This isn't just altruism, it's also enlightened self interest.
If you steal too much ultimately the system won't be able to sustain itself
anymore and it will collapse. "Greed with no rules" ultimately destroys itself.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
No, but history says you can extrapolate it twenty years into the future.
The book chronicles a real estate boom (like our generation had a few years ago) and the aforementioned stock market boom. The similarities between that time and ours, economically and sociologically, are astounding.
Give us another fifteen to twenty five years and our economy will be ok, most likely.
Free Martian Whores!
While we are daydreaming about what might have been, I'd like to imagine an alternate history where NASA didn't stop iterating.
NASA got the Saturn V through an iterative development cycle. Get Werner von Braun, have him build rockets very similar to ones he had built before; fly them, collect data, improve the design. Fly the new ones, collect data, improve the design. Over and over.
And then, for the Space Shuttle, NASA essentially said "We don't need to do that test and improve cycle anymore; we are just going to design the Space Shuttle on paper, build it, and be done." NASA's unsung heroes of rocket surgery managed to make it work, but that's a triumph of hard work and overtime against management stupidity.
It would have been cheaper to keep the test/improve cycle going than to spend ten years building the shuttle and flying nothing. According to Wikipedia, the Shuttle program will have cost $174 billion by its conclusion in 2010; the Saturn V program cost $32 to $45 billion in today's dollars ($6.5 billion in 1960's dollars; the inflation is depressing, isn't it?). But at the time the Shuttle project was started, the Saturn V had already been paid for; just keeping it flying would have cost even less than those numbers suggest. And besides, you wouldn't need a Saturn V for every flight; just for ones where you need that kind of crazy lift capacity.
It would actually have been far cheaper to keep flying expendables, but keep developing them, and hopefully iterate into something reusable. Take the rockets from the 1960's, and spend 20 years flying and improving them, and what would you have in the 1980's? A lot more stuff flying, more safely, and a lot cheaper.
The Shuttle was a mistake, of management more than anything else.
steveha
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