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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.
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?
This is revisionist crap.
ICBM tests were ballasted to give other groups in the US (not staffed by Nazis) a chance to launch the first US satellite.
Also, the US was fully committed to the space race by the time of Vostok 1, which is the actual event being discussed here.
The idea that early Soviet successes were part of some cunning ploy by Eisenhower is utterly retarded. The public perception of the Soviet threat helped carry Kennedy in the 1960 election, so you are supposing that Eisenhower would deliberately sabotage his own party and his own vice-president. I am calling bullshit on this one.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
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
You can't see the leftovers from the landing via telescope from earth. The resolving power just isn't good enough, even with adaptive optics. You can still find the retroreflector though, with the appropriate instruments, and there are a number of sites that not only can do so but do on a regular basis in order to track the earth-moon distance.
we would be on Mars by now getting groped by TSA guards.
:-P
Fixed it for you
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.
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.
Agreed. Detroit might be a slice of third-world wasteland today, but it used to be the economic engine of America.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Indeed. What the U.S. accomplished in those 4 years constantly amazes me, especially since we couldn't do a tenth of that today from lack of manufacturing capabilities, lack of national will and a spirit of sacrifice, not having leaders who are actually capable of leading and host of other declines of the past half century.
It seems to me today we couldn't get that kind of effort _started_ in 4 years.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.