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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?"
That would imply that American ballistic missile program would have also went ahead of Soviet one. Which, I suspect, would mean some glowing rubble in place of Moscow and some other major Soviet cities.
I suppose I might as well start the game by saying nothing would have been much different. Getting first to the moon would still have been a matter of prestige, so why wouldn't that contest have happened? And would it change who got there first? IIRC the soviets weren't that close, having some issues with the willingness to back the project, and one of the main designers passing away. Here's a link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Moonshot
Would it really matter? I guess it helped us fuel other areas of advancement, but as far as space itself? All we've accomplished in the 42 years since we landed on the moon is sending out a bunch of probes and fancy RC cars. No doubt, the photographs from these endeavors are amazing and we're still acquiring knowledge. It's just too bad we've reached a point where we aren't willing to do anything that might put a person at risk of so much as chipping a fingernail, we've exhausted our shuttle program and are currently having to rely on transport from other nations, and are put off by spending any money on space at all, because we've got to save all that precious monopoly money to bail out corporations and foreign banks at a number that dwarfs the entire space program.
Don't get me wrong - I know that a lot of our advancements are being off-loaded to privacy industry and that we are making enough advances in other areas of technology and science so that whenever we really do make another massive push into space, we will be doing so from a more capable point (kind of like you might have been able to start a computer at the task of decrypting some data in 1980 and that same computer would still be trying to decode it in 2011, while a computer you got last month and set to the task of decrypting the same data would have finished by now).
However, can you really imagine people's responses in the last half of 1969 if you had told them "revel in this, because mankind won't touch the moon or any other soil or make it beyond our low orbit for the next fifty years"? They would have said you were a fucking lunatic.
I'm thrilled that the space race brought us the home computer and memory foam, but my mom was a little girl when we landed on the moon and I would love more than just about anything for us to have another world-stopping-all-eyes-on-television space-moment like that during my life time. I suspect I'll be long dead before that happens.
The first men in space was big as well but easily diminished because it was essentially a ballistic shot not a real space trip.
Vostok_1 flew a full orbit with a re-entry burn. Without that burn it would have flown many more orbits. Freedom_7 flew a simple ballistic trajectory.
If the US had been first to fly an astronaut I suspect the USSR would have been slightly more likely to make the first landing on the moon. They would have been more motivated, but their integration ability was (and is) pretty poor.I would argue that this is a reflection of top-down architecture in their politics and engineering culture. They are more likely to say we will build a single system to do X where the US would say we will build systems to do A, B and C; then we will put them together to accomplish X.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Anyway, the Americans were to focussed on giving nazi war criminals a cozy ride and failing miserably to realize that there was a reason the german lost the war, their tech sucked.
German tech did not suck ,they had rocket and jet propelled aircraft, radio guided bombs the V1 and V2, the finest tanks in the field etc.
What sucked was there procurement process. Unlike the allies each service had their own committees R&D and proving grounds and the secret of success was not to make a better mouse trap but get the ear of ah high ranking official (preferably Hitler) and keep pulling strings.
To quote the American investigators after the war:"Very defiantly we believe there were no other German proximity fuse is worth following up - there were more crackpot notions getting political support that we could have imagined" and "The device was made by a set of irresponsible inventors with no manufacturing connections. They would have been shut down without their political connections".
Their problem (aside from massive waste and duplication of effort and that Hitler cancelled and disbanded most of the German weapons research in 1940) was that their tech was too good but not appropriate to their situation Germany simply did not have the resources to make enough of it to win the war
(Sigh.)
When will people actually study space history rather than repeating urban legends?
The Apollo program was killed in the budget battles of 1965-67, when the Apollo Applications program was all but canceled and the Apollo Lunar Landing program was capped at Apollo 20. By the time we landed on the Moon, the production lines were already starting to shut down.
The idea that throwing spacecraft away was a bad one dates from the early 60's - in fact, even earlier there were some in NASA that regarded Mercury as nothing more than a cheap way to get medical information on man in space and a temporary distraction from the Real Thing - reusable space infrastructure. The first contracts for what became the Shuttle were signed on July 18th 1969 (while Apollo 11 was enroute to the moon), and had been budgeted for in 1968 (before Nixon was even elected).
At worst, Nixon gave the orders to pull the plug on a patient on advanced life support and already near death. If anything, the Shuttle program fared as badly as it did because of continued Congressional insistence that it be done on the cheap.