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What If America Had Beaten the Soviets Into Space?
MarkWhittington writes "April 12 is the 50th anniversary of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's first space flight. Coming less than four years after Sputnik, Gagarin's orbital space voyage galvanized the United States and led to President Kennedy announcing the race to the Moon six weeks later. The question arises: what if America had beaten the Soviet Union into space instead?"
It was 50 years ago, get over it.
The hang-wringing in the western press about this seems to me to be largely due to an inability to fit the event into the triumphalist narrative that has endured in government and media since the end of the cold war. The idea that capitalism, specifically our version of capitalism is best always, everywhere and forever.
Its disquieting to such dogmatists to be reminded of even a single success from an alternative way of doing things. Even if that way of doing things ultimately imploded on itself decades later, it makes a rational person question the absolutism of the narrative, and thus the narrators must try and dissect and blunt the impact of the threatening event.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
A war begins with a nuclear strike, but does not end with it. Soviets were always inferior to the West in military might, and - unlike the West - actually knew it. If you look at Soviet military policies and doctrines, they were mainly centered around a major defensive war, and an occasional "pacification" or low-scale direct intervention in a proxy war. This was furthermore compounded by the Marxist doctrine, according to which proletarian revolutions in capitalist states were only a matter of time, so all that is needed is to survive until such time they happen, and fund various subversive movements (all kinds - from anti-war protesters to black supremacists to communists proper) to bring the date closer.
If I had to bet on who would use a nuclear weapon first given the opportunity, between US and USSR, I'd definitely pick US (heck, they actually did that before!).
You jest, but that kind of thinking actually happened, once. Team B argued that the Soviet Union had developed a new submarine detection system that didn't depend on sound. When faced with the fact that nobody had found anything like it, they argued that this only proved the point: since the detection system didn't depend on sound, it could not itself be detected.
If your enemy has zero, and you have any number greater than zero, you have a significant advantage
Unless you believe the enemy has way more than you. Then it doesn't matter how much they really have.
We could learn a thing or two about capitalism from the Russians. We are retiring our fleet and will be hitching rides on Russian shuttles over the next 4 years. While I do think private and commercial space flight will play a major role in future space flight, I think NASA Is a bit optimistic in thinking that we'll have private rockets in place by 2015. I suspect we'll still be riding on Russian shuttles well past 2015.
Really, we can all blame Mao. There's no glory in being #2, but people will still try their best to avoid ending up as #3. Thanks to the mess Mao created with "the Great Leap Forward" (which stopped China in its tracks for an entire generation), the Soviet Union had no real incentive to get to the moon once it was obvious that the US would beat them to it, and the US had no real incentive to keep going to the moon once it was obvious that the Soviet Union wasn't even going to waste its time or money bothering.
The (mainly US-influenced) doctrine that "nobody" can "own the moon" (or even legitimately own a small, well-defined and populated part of it) is part of the problem, too. Had the US staked a claim to a 100km area surrounding each landing site, and pledged to respect similar claims from other nations, the late 70s and 80s would have seen a mad international space race to plant flags on the moon -- a race that would have almost certainly included countries like Britain (most likely forming its own Commonwealth Space Agency that included Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and other countries), France (probably being the dominant member of what ended up being the European Space Agency, but without Britain), India, Pakistan (possibly as a part of Britain's CSA), China, and everyone else.
The point when things started getting ugly would have been the late 80s/90s, when there were thousands of flags planted, but the main defenders of those claims were lawyers rather than armed soldiers on the moon. The US, Soviet Union, Britain/CSA, and France/ESA would have probably never challenged each other's claims in public, but you can bet there would have been lots of screaming and angry speeches at the UN if someone like Indonesia staked a claim for 100 square miles of land claimed by one of them in the late 70s, then never looked at again once the claim formalities were taken care of.At that point, the UN would have probably settled on a policy that required demonstration of active settlement and use to challenge adverse possession, and automatically allowed intruders to keep a small chunk of any claim that was undefended when they arrived.
Would it have been a good thing? Maybe, maybe not. But there would almost certainly have been a lot more people living and working on the moon than there are today (zero).