Author Topic: What if Apollo had never happened?  (Read 24451 times)

Offline Blackstar

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Re: What if Apollo had never happened?
« Reply #20 on: 03/17/2013 01:13 pm »
Blackstar, you still think this is the same as what you believe?

Absolutely. I try to believe five impossible things before breakfast. Six on Sundays.

Offline Proponent

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Re: What if Apollo had never happened?
« Reply #21 on: 03/17/2013 03:11 pm »
Quote
And  why do you presume there were have been no lunar landing?  The plan  mentions one.

The boosters were not the same - the Saturns you mention were for LEO and circumlunar but a landing needed direct ascent and hence the NOVA.

The 1959 plan envisions a Nova.  Table V specifies that its configuration was to set in FY1962 and its first flight was to be in FY1968.

Offline Archibald

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Re: What if Apollo had never happened?
« Reply #22 on: 03/17/2013 06:06 pm »
The 1959 plan may have foreseen the NOVA, but politics would have balked at the cost. The smallest, evolutive Saturns could have been funded (C1 C2 > C3) - but with them only, the manned program would have been limited to circumlunar flight.
Kind of the Soviets developing only Zond / Proton and no N1-L3.
Han shot first and Gwynne Shotwell !

Offline Proponent

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Re: What if Apollo had never happened?
« Reply #23 on: 03/18/2013 08:38 am »
The 1959 plan may have foreseen the NOVA, but politics would have balked at the cost. The smallest, evolutive Saturns could have been funded (C1 C2 > C3) - but with them only, the manned program would have been limited to circumlunar flight.
Kind of the Soviets developing only Zond / Proton and no N1-L3.

A lunar landing would have been perfectly possible without Nova.  Von Braun's Project Horizon envisioned a lunar landing with staged in LEO using five or six smaller Saturns for each mission.

EDIT:  Added link.
« Last Edit: 03/18/2013 04:42 pm by Proponent »

Offline Gene DiGennaro

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Re: What if Apollo had never happened?
« Reply #24 on: 03/18/2013 01:37 pm »
Like others have stated, I think it depends on what is considered Apollo. Is Apollo strictly the lunar effort or is Apollo the Apollo/Saturn system?

If we consider Apollo to be strictly the lunar effort, I think the Apollo/Saturn system still would have existed, even the Saturn V. The USA's efforts would have been focused on space station building, thus Skylab would have flown on July 16, 1969 instead of Apollo 11. My opinion of course.

If the Apollo/Saturn system had never existed, well that's a different story somewhat. Assuming that neither the USA nor the USSR had any interest in boots on the moon, I think NASA would have had a space station that would have been very similar in appearance ( but not function) to the MOL. The USAF's MOL still would have been cancelled. NASA's workhorse would have been Gemini/Titan II and Titan III.

I think there still would have been the draw down in NASA funding after 1966. NASA would have still wanted a shuttle. The question is, would the USA had both a space station ( Skylab or something built from MOL modules) and a shuttle during the doldrums of the 1970s?
« Last Edit: 03/18/2013 01:38 pm by Gene DiGennaro »

Offline Rocket Science

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Re: What if Apollo had never happened?
« Reply #25 on: 03/18/2013 06:25 pm »
Lets not forget about Lunar Gemini...

http://www.astronautix.com/articles/bygemoon.htm
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Offline JohnFornaro

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Re: What if Apollo had never happened?
« Reply #26 on: 04/02/2013 12:55 am »
To the OP:  We wouldn't have the internet, because there would not have been an growing need for computer intensive collaboration outside of a single room and mainframe.
Sometimes I just flat out don't get it.

Offline luke strawwalker

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Re: What if Apollo had never happened?
« Reply #27 on: 04/02/2013 12:59 am »
G'day,

There's a popular thread here discussing what if Apollo had continued? Well, what about the reverse? What if Apollo never happened? 
Maybe Alan Shepard had been first Man in Space or Nixon become President what ever.

Would there be more or less activity in Space? Or maybe the same?

I think it may be better, or maybe little worse.

An interesting question and the subject of great speculation... but what happens really depends on your point of departure from history as we know it, and it just goes farther afield from that point on and such a major change would lead to a FAR different history than we experienced, so much so that rather quickly it would become impossible to say how things would have unfolded in this alternate reality...

Without Apollo theres no Saturn 5, no Shuttle and no ISS, at least in the current version.  NASA would remain a smaller organisation as Eisenhower envisioned it.

This is true.  Saturn I (C-1) was in well into development and first flew in late 1961.  F-1 was also well into development by that point.  J-2 was in early development.  So it's pretty reasonable to think that something akin to a Saturn IB would have come out of all this, at the least... and if a heavier rocket were needed, while it would likely not be the size of a Saturn V, the capability to produce an HLV was certainly there...

Kennedy himself regretted the high costs of Apollo and sought a partnership with the Russians, but was rebuffed by Khruschev... Politically I'm not sure that it would have floated, either, at that time, anyway... Later, by early 1964, Khruschev realized just how far behind the Russians were (they didn't even take the "moon race" seriously until that point) and Khruschev put out feelers about a possible "combined mission" with the US to the moon, but by that point, with Kennedy assassinated and LBJ in the White House, that ship had sailed and it was Khruschev who was rebuffed... Soon Khruschev was kicked out and replaced with Brezhnev, so one can speculate that even IF the US HAD been interested in pursuing such a mission, whether it would have happened for political reasons, either theirs or ours...

Without Apollo, the plan was a more gradual, phased, evolutionary approach to space travel, culminating in a lunar mission... whether that would have been funded at the levels necessary to ever happen is questionable-- that's always been NASA's fundamental problem-- reliable, sustainable funding... without the "national urgency" of a moon race, I think you're assessment is correct-- NASA would have remained a "backwater agency" as Eisenhower basically wished... What happens with subsequent events and Administrations after that gets a lot more cloudy IMHO...

Most Space money would go to the military. 
Not necessarily... Remember Eisenhower also warned of the "military-industrial complex" and was no fan of the arms race and the huge military buildup and expenditures... he understood that a lot of it was necessary, but he saw that ultimately it would cause problems... Unquestionably money would have continued flowing into milspace projects pretty much as happened in our history, perhaps a slight increase, but I doubt it would have been very dramatic.  NASA spending, on the other hand, WOULD be substantially lower-- without a moon race, there would have been NO impetus to appropriate large funding to a "backwater" agency...

There would have been no affect on Mercury as that was a pre-Apollo project.

This is true... Mercury's main purpose was to "prove it was possible" to send a manned capsule into low Earth orbit and bring it and the passenger back alive, and assess the ability of people and machinery to do useful work in space (photography, experimentation, etc). 

NASA would have properly got the go ahead with Gemini but  without the Apollo rush the project may have taken longer and maybe with the version the that could land on land.

Doubtful...  at the time, APOLLO was the follow-on to Mercury... there WAS NO Gemini...  Gemini was started as the "Mercury Mark II" proposal to build an enlarged two-man Mercury capsule, with better systems and longer duration capabilities, to explore the capabilities of man and machine in orbit beyond what had been possible with the tiny Mercury capsule, with its very limited capabilities and duration in orbit.  Apollo, prior to the moon shot announcement, was to be an Earth-orbital capsule system to basically enable the delivery of crews into orbit for experimentation and later serve as a space station crew and logistics vehicle, and gradually be evolved into a lunar-capable version at some point after that.  When the "before this decade is out" lunar goal was announced by Kennedy, it became apparent that following Mercury with the "all up" Apollo, to be designed early on with lunar capability (in the block 2 version, to follow the preliminary block 1 version in which Grissom, White, and Chaffee died in the Apollo 1 fire) would be problematical at best... it would take a long time to get the Apollo designed, built, tested, and ready to fly, and then a whole program of research in orbit to investigate the problems and solutions for going to the moon would have to be done, leaving NO time to get it all done "in this decade".  SO, plans for the Mercury Mark II were revisited, and the Gemini program was conceived as an "ad-hoc" program run concurrently with Apollo development to study the problems of a lunar mission in LEO... which is exactly what happened. 

With no Apollo (or only the pre-moon-race Apollo designed as a LEO/space station ferry evolving into a lunar capable version later on) there would have been NO reason for Gemini at all... "LEO" Apollo would have proceeded in a gradual way, probably flying in the mid-late 60's, much as in our timeline... the entire Gemini program, in the lower funding priority "smaller NASA" without the moon-shot goal, would never even have happened at all...

However the USAF would have continues with Dyna-Soar and MOL.

There's no basis to claim this... Dyna-Soar's fate was NOT tied to the moon goal or lack thereof... it was a completely seperate effort.  Before Apollo, ALL the military branches wanted "manned spaceflight".  The Air Force had the greatest 'claim' to space being part of or at least an extension of their operating sphere, and even coined the term "aerospace" to link the two... Dyna-Soar's cancellation had NOTHING to do with Apollo; MacNamara didn't see the program as useful, and cancelled it.  To soften the blow, MOL replaced it.  Later he cancelled MOL for the exact same reasons-- little/no use, as a manned platform, as the Russians later found out with their Almaz military space stations, is not a particularly good intelligence platform, ESPECIALLY for highly sensitive spysat cameras... unmanned spysats could do the job MUCH better and cheaper... by the time MOL and Almaz were developed, they were obsolete... Almaz flew a handful of times, but was cancelled by the Soviets as well...

The Soviets would have continued with Soyuz and Salyut because of their military applications.

See above... And the Soviet military was largely opposed to Soyuz, as they saw little military value in it, even when Korolev and later Mishin (after Korolev's death) were proposing military variants of Soyuz specifically to the military to gain their support, since the Soviet military is inextricably linked to and involved in the Soviet and now Russian space program... Salyut grew out of the Almaz space station, the design that Chelomei had proposed for the Soviet version of MOL... The support for the various competing Soviet designers was constantly in flux... the chief designers like Chelomei and Korolev and later Mishin were constantly in a state of competition, with their stars rising and falling with the whims of politics-- and often with similar but competing systems from BOTH funded (or underfunded as the case may be) resulting in needless duplication, waste, and lost time and effort... Chelomei had the military space station program pretty much to himself, until his political enemies aligned against him and basically forced him to give up sole control of his Almaz design and cooperate with Mishin's bureau to design the Salyut... Basically Mishin used the Almaz hull to house his systems for the Salyut, and redesigned it to use the Soyuz as the crew vessel.  This delayed Chelomei's pure military version, Almaz, by a few years... Ultimately Almaz flew a couple times and was judged not worth the expense and trouble, and the Soviets, like the US before, preferred unmanned spysats over manned ones, for obvious reasons...

I would expect a bit of a Space race but for orbital operations.

You mean like Skylab and Salyut??  Perhaps... I'm sure there would have been "competition" but a space race for space stations?? I'm not so sure...

I guess it's possible, maybe even probable, without the lunar competition.  The competition between Skylab and Salyut was somewhat subdued because by that point the US had clearly won the moon race and Apollo was WELL into its wind-down and termination phase, and the Soviet moon-race effort had been a disaster (N-1 failures, Proton failures, Kamarov's death on Soyuz 1, etc).  The Soviets grabbed onto  the only goal they had left that they could "beat" the US to-- a manned space station- and ran with it... of course it could be argued that it contributed to the deaths of the three cosmonauts on Soyuz 11 who first visited Salyut 1... or not-- it was a flaw in the spacecraft design, which might have occurred or not occurred essentially at random, and was later corrected.  But the "rush" to get a Salyut in orbit ahead of Skylab couldn't have helped matters, either...

Without a moon goal "competition", I guess it's likely SOMETHING would have ended up being "competed" over to be first...  I guess the first orbital manned station is as good as anything...

By the early 70's there would have been American and Soviet space stations, probably both civilian and military.

As mentioned, the military stations were of dubious value to both sides... while they MIGHT have been experimentally flown, (indeed were in the Soviet Union) I think the outcome would have been the same-- perhaps MOL and Almaz flew a handful of missions, produced lackluster, expensive, results and complicated operations compared to unmanned spysats, and then been abandoned and cancelled.  Civilian stations-- I could see the US, without the expensive goal of a moon race, doing a long-term program similar to Salyut-- a series of LEO civilian manned stations for research...

The Shuttle was supposed to be the do all monopoly space launcher, so without that commercial American launchers would have started a decade earlier,


There's NO basis to say that... Shuttle was a step in the wrong direction, sure, and nearly took ALL expendable launch vehicles with it, true enough... but at the time there was NO "commercial" launch industry as we think of it today... comsat operators contracted with NASA to perform the launches that orbited their satellites... Without the shuttle, it's likely that Atlas, Delta, and Titan launchers would have an expanded role, and would likely have developed into more efficient or cost-effective variants... but the whole "commercial space" structures as we see now-- who can say...

Remember that most if not all the "commercial" space development we see NOW is funded largely by NASA being an "anchor tenant", via programs like COTS and commercial crew... without those, the "market" for manned LEO capability and large swaths of the "commercial launch industry" beyond unmanned comsats essentially disappears...

a competitor to Ariane. 

Ariane got a HUGE boost by the shuttle being repeatedly delayed, and increased satellite construction and launch costs due to shuttle, even with the "discounted price" offered by NASA below cost for shuttle comsat launches back in the early days... Thus was the SHEER FOLLY of using a complex, expensive MANNED spacecraft to haul unmanned satellites better launched by simple unmanned expendable launch vehicles...

Basically, the missteps and costs and delays caused by shuttle contributed in no small part to the success of Ariane by creating or at least expanding the market for their launch services... business that would likely have remained in the US had there been no shuttle and the subsequent upsets that the shuttle caused for comsat launches...

The USAF would have properly ordered the EELVs  or something similar a decade earlier too. 

Possibly-- clearly SOMETHING else would have taken the place of shuttle... probably an "evolved" version of the then-existing launchers, which would be hard to speculate on... We know that it's likely that Saturn I or some derivative vehicle or evolved version would be performing whatever LEO manned missions would be occurring, and that likely the Titan III would have been serving the Air Force needs, supplemented by Atlas/Centaur and possibly Delta...  I think that without the shuttle "upsetting the applecart" by "eliminating" (or nearly so) expendable launch vehicles, that we'd have seen a more gradual step-by-step improvement program in the existing rockets-- IE Titan III, Atlas Centaur, and Delta.  Gradual improvements would have been ongoing and made more sense.  In that sense, they could perhaps be called "EELV's" but their development over time would likely have been somewhat dissimilar to the current EELV's-- some things would tend to push the designs in that direction, other things would have pulled them away.  Remember also that the EXISTING EELV's as we have them rely on technologies or situations that developed DUE TO SHUTTLE, IE the work done on the STME (cheap expendable version of SSME) during the National Launch System development and Advanced Launch System work, which became the RS-68... and thus when chosen for Delta IV resulted in the dumping of the kerosene Delta of the original versions in favor of an all-new hydrogen-powered version.  Similarly, Atlas V relies on RUSSIAN RD-180 engines; without those perhaps the design would have switched to a single F-1 at some point, or some other kerosene engine or combination thereof...  It's hard to say, but it's CLEAR they would have evolved VERY differently without Saturn V and shuttle than they DID in our history...

Communications satellites, weather satellites etc would still have happened

Yes, no doubt...

but perhaps robotic exploration of the Solar System would have been more subdued. 

Hard to say... the same arguments have gone on for decades, essentially since the beginning of the space age... the same old arguments would apply-- the greater cost efficiency of unmanned exploration versus the greater "capability" of manned exploration, and the "perceived" fact that a smaller NASA budget overall would automatically mean a proportionately smaller unmanned exploration budget... but this is somewhat inaccurate I think... it's all a question of priorities... I think it's at least as likely that unmanned exploration would be rather unaffected by lack of Apollo (other than perhaps the Ranger, Surveyor, and Lunar Orbiter programs which would undoubtedly be MUCH difference, and I'm sure that certain experiences and things learned from those missions and mistakes made during those missions would have induced changes in the rest of the unmanned programs by their absence... as to exactly how that would have played out, it's impossible to say.  BUT, I would tend to think that the Mariner missions would likely have played out much as they did, perhaps with a bit more early on "teething problems" (from lessons not learned on Ranger, Lunar Orbiter, or Surveyor), and that Pioneer and later Voyager would pan out pretty much as they did... and subsequent missions (other than the absolute FIASCO created by trying to use shuttle for an unmanned outer solar system probe launcher, as evidenced by the incessant delays and development problems induced by the shuttle on the Galileo mission, and the hobbling of Hubble by trapping it in a poor-observation orbit (LEO) serviceable by shuttle with its limited capabilities, and of course the diversion of funds from Hubble (which indirectly caused the mirror problem that nearly blinded it early on) and which also hobbled Galileo and many other missions of the time...

I won't argue that there would be MORE money for unmanned exploration, I seriously doubt that... BUT I think that there would be more money freed up for unmanned programs without the expensive shuttle development and operations costs, even with "smaller, cheaper" NASA... I think unmanned exploration would be as much a priority as it has been historically, and thus would be largely unchanged from what we know...

With both American and Russians  Space Station complexes I'm not sure there would have been an ISS but there may have been for the same political reasons that occurred after the fall of the USSR. The space nations may have decided to replace thir aging stations with a new international one ,


A reasonable assumption... of course any such space stations, especially from the US perspective, would be VERY VERY different from the ISS as we know it... without the shuttle, it's FAR likelier that the US would have orbited something similar to Salyut, which like the Russians would eventually evolve into something much like Mir... there would have been no huge Skylab without the Saturn V to launch it.  There would have been no ISS as we know it without the Shuttle driving the module and component design.  Some sort of "Super-Mir" type follow-on to the Russian Mir and US "near-Mir" type stations would be the most likely design for an "ISS"... Module size would be dependant on the availability of an HLV (or lack thereof) and its capabilities...

but as the USA would have a couple of decades experience in space stations, it would be completed a lot earlier.

Likely-- the shuttle was a HUGE drag on ISS development and assembly-- had an HLV been available and larger ground-integrated modules been used to build up the station in fewer launches, it could have been assembled MUCH faster than the 13 YEARS it took as a matter of history... but it wouldn't be the ISS "as we know it"... it would be something completely different.  Even if using the equivalent of the EELV's or something similar, ISS could likely have been built faster, but it would have required automated rendezvous and docking (ARD) and manuevering capabilities on each module or section (similar to how the Russian modules launched aboard Proton were added to the station). 

Basically, the ISS we got was designed around shuttle.  Without the shuttle, the ISS would have been very very different...

By the 1990's there would be powerful commercial rockets, well tested space vehicles and orbiting complexes.

Perhaps... perhaps not... and their numbers and sizes, and the "powerful commercial rockets" would be very questionable as well...

The lure of the Moon would still be there and the century coming to a close.

Probably-- but the impetus, the MOTIVATION to spend the large sums of money to go there, would probably be no more of a priority or no more forthcoming than they are RIGHT NOW with the way things are... as the Constellation program found out...

All the hardware for some sort of moonshot would be available, even its it only a flyby.

Sorta like now??  (or soon, anyway, if Orion is completed and SLS is actually developed and flies??)  Just because the "equipment is available" DOES NOT mean that we're any closer to a mission actually occurring.  WITHOUT FUNDING *NOTHING* will happen, as we're finding out. 

The Russians COULD have put together an EOR lunar mission using the Soyuz variant they used for Zond decades ago already, but haven't.  The US HAD the equipment bought and paid for and ready to go for Apollos 18, 19, and 20, but cancelled the missions anyway to save money. 

SO, just because the CAPABILITY exists, it DOES NOT NECESSARILY follow that the mission WILL take place...  FUNDING IS EVERYTHING! 

I expect someone would have had a go at the moon perhaps as a private venture. Maybe Dennis Tito would have been the first lunar explorer rather then the first space tourist.

ta

Ralph

HA!  Fancy powerpoint engineering and adventurist and rich aerospace afficianado "angel investor" grand proclamations to the contrary, let's just say "I'll believe it when I see it"...  Going to the moon is FAR harder and more expensive than most of these "commercial outfits" seem to want to think... I don't think it's impossible, but I think that coming up with the money to develop the capability to do it is going to be an EXTREMELY difficult thing to do... where's the PROFIT in it??  This is the fundamental problem with most of these "commercial venture" grand proclamations... there is little/no justification or profit in it to make it a reality...

I'll believe it when I see it...

Later!  OL JR :)
NO plan IS the plan...

"His plan had no goals, no timeline, and no budgetary guidelines. Just maybe's, pretty speeches, and smokescreens."

Offline fregate

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Re: What if Apollo had never happened?
« Reply #28 on: 04/02/2013 01:03 am »
If Apollo had never happened the Soviet Union would have reached the Moon first.

No, the Soviets weren't going there until we were going.

But their obsession with grabbing 'firsts' means they would have thought of it sooner or later, if they weren't fantasising about it already.
...
Voskhod was a slightly-modified Vostok capsule with two men packed into the same space. 
...
As a matter of fact, Voskhod was a slightly-modified Vostok capsule with three men packed into the same space. And one of the crew members was spacecraft designer - K.P. Feoktistov
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Offline luke strawwalker

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Re: What if Apollo had never happened?
« Reply #29 on: 04/02/2013 01:29 am »
G'day,

Apollo set the standard so high it was never repeated. my guess is some sort of moonshot would have occurred by now. Maybe as a private venture.
Apollo convinced people that Space exploration was so expensive Mars was out of reach. If the Moon had been explored by a mixture of private and government expeditions , similar to Antarctica or the UnderSea, human missions to Mars may seem more realistic. If a competitive Space launch industry had started a decade earlier maybe Mr Musk would now be building interplanetary spaceships now not Earth to orbit launchers.

ta

Ralph

It wasn't that Apollo set the bar so high-- it was the expense of doing it, and the fact that the sort of funding required simply wasn't sustainable.  Some extend that argument to the fact that had the goal not had the "in this decade" phrase added to it, then perhaps a more sustainable, gradual, lower-cost-per-mission rocket and vehicle and mission mode might have come out of it, but I'm not so sure... at any rate, lunar missions are going to be expensive and difficult to whatever your space program happenst to be doing in LEO...

The fallacy was in that shuttle was going to be SO MUCH CHEAPER.  We now know that was COMPLETELY WRONG-- shuttle cost as much as Saturn V, with a FRACTION of the capability...  but that's water under the bridge.  The real opportunity is in doing things a different way. 

Given the "Apollo never happened" basis of the question, I think that basically our space program would have largely mirrored what the Soviets did throughout the 70's and 80's... just with more flair and fancier equipment...

As for this whole "commercial/NASA cooperation" postulation, ESPECIALLY as it pertains to lunar missions, I think you're taking a modern phenomenon, the fairly recent development of the commercial space industry per SpaceX and OSC via the COTS and commercial crew program, and "back-projecting" it onto the situation as you perceive it had Apollo not happened... That's not a particularly realistic thing to do.  The situation that has allowed the "commercial space" companies to rise and do what they've done so far is VERY MUCH a product of the events as they've unfolded since the 70's and the beginning of the shuttle era.  Remember that basically NASA has been OPPOSED, in deed if not in word, to "commercial space" until fairly recently... "Commercial space" has been trying to get off the ground in one form or another basically since the 80's.  I don't think the industry was positioned to exist or work outside of NASA before that... even the major NASA contractors relied on NASA to "put it all together" prior to that point, and fund it all... "going it alone" as a "commercial" launch provider simply wasn't an option back then. 

If you would have tried to form a commercial space launch company up against NASA in the late 70's or early 80's, you would not have gotten ANY help from NASA-- in fact, you'd have been facing some very STIFF competition... This remained true well into the Goldin era at NASA...

You mentioned Dennis Tito as the first possible "commercial lunar tourist" or something-- remember that Dan Goldin did everything in his power to prevent Tito's flight to ISS... ultimately he was flown as a "Russian guest" and restricted to the Russian segments of ISS... Dan Goldin did a LOT to stifle, stimy, and otherwise block or prevent commercial space from gaining a toehold or becoming "competition" for NASA.  Only after he left was this really reversed...

For these reasons and others I think your postulated "NASA/Commercial cooperation" lunar missions/etc is basically a complete fantasy... at least up until the fairly recent history-- IE MAYBE it would have happened say 5-10 years faster than it did with the shuttle still operating, but some massive NASA/commercial cooperative lunar mission??  I don't think it's anything more than daydreaming... 

Later!  OL JR :)
NO plan IS the plan...

"His plan had no goals, no timeline, and no budgetary guidelines. Just maybe's, pretty speeches, and smokescreens."

Offline luke strawwalker

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Re: What if Apollo had never happened?
« Reply #30 on: 04/02/2013 01:52 am »
If Apollo had never happened the Soviet Union would have reached the Moon first. The affect on the Cold War would have been huge; the world would have seen how the USSR had achieved the first satellite, dog, man and woman in space, the first spacewalk and now the first manned exploration of another world. Can you imagine the PR boost that would have been for communism? How many allies would the Western world have lost as they sought to build relations with the ever-progressing Soviet superpower?

As for the impact on American spaceflight, two things would have happened. The proportion of military-civilian emphasis on space projects would have been higher in the military's favour, to counter the threat of Soviet space dominance. Whilst civilian exploration would have focused more on planetary probes to ensure that Western technology was reaching out further than Soviet technology, even if Western people were not.

ALTERNATIVELY...

The Soviet Moon landing could have been a financial disaster that drove the USSR to bankruptcy soon after the massive PR boost and actually ended the Cold War even sooner and even more in capitalism's favour.

Not likely... the Soviet response to Kennedy's announcement of the moon goal was an overwhelming YAWN!  The Soviets simply didn't take it seriously, or thought it was some sort of colossal misdirection aimed at getting them to waste precious time, manpower, and money on a distant goal while the Americans worked on more practical applications of space technology closer to Earth.  I'm sure some in the Soviet government also felt they had such an overwhelming lead that they could beat the Americans easily, but this wasn't in line with reality...

Basically, the Soviets didn't even really focus on the "moon race" until 1964... and by that time, basically it was too late.  The Soviets also had a program that was highly divided and competing with itself, with various "chief designers" competing for favoritism and approval and funding for their various projects and programs, many of them needlessly duplicative or competing with one another rather than contributing to a single effort or goal, or an integrated program with various parts from different designers working together to achieve the single goal... for instance, the Soviets at one point had SEVERAL moon programs going AT THE SAME TIME... Korolev had his N-1/L-3 program, Chelomei had the Proton and his own lunar complex vehicle in develoment, plus they were both vying for the lunar lander, which was a completely different "complex" (spacecraft stack) for the mission from the lunar orbital program!  It would have been about like developing a completely different spacecraft in the US to orbit the moon on Apollo 8, and then a completely NEW spacecraft and lander design for Apollo 11, while doing "Gemini around the moon" at the same time! 

At the same time, the Soviet effort, after having squandered 3 years after Kennedy's announcement "picking the low fruit" of various space firsts using their existing Vostok spacecraft and modifying it heavily into the Voskhod spacecraft to upstage the more capable Gemini missions, rather than focusing on developing new capabilities by focusing on Soyuz... N-1 started development late, and the effort was underfunded.  Glushko and Korolev had a HUGE falling out, with Glushko pushing for an all-hypergolic powered rocket (which would have been even more enormous and less capable than even N-1 was, and N-1 was the size of a Saturn V with much higher thrust at liftoff, but only capable of launching HALF the payload of Saturn V...)  Glushko had a lot of influence, and his and Korolev's falling out, despite Khruschev's personal efforts to get them back together, set the entire effort back.  Korolev went to a new engine designer, one with NO previous experience in designing rocket engines (Khrunichev) and Glushko and Chelomei ended up teaming up on Proton, and presenting a hypergolic alternative to N-1, the UR-700, and created competition and political division of the funding and effort, delaying and hurting N-1 development.  The underfunding issue also was the MAIN reason for the problems of N-1-- they couldn't afford to build a test stand to live fire the first stage, cut corners on the quality control of everything, including "batch certification" of the engines for N-1 (which were built in "lots" and only one live fired-- if ONE passed, the whole group was certified for flight!)  Of course these issues would come back to haunt the N-1...

While the N-1 team was HIGHLY confident that the N-1 WOULD have worked successfully on the next launch just before it was cancelled, the simple fact is, without Apollo to "compete" with, the Soviets wouldn't have spent the money and time and effort to develop the N-1/L-3 lunar complex on their own... The Soviet military was ambivalent at best and downright hostile and completely opposed to the N-1/L-3 program at worst... without Apollo there would have been NO N-1/L-3...  hence no Soviet lunar landing... 

Later!  OL JR :)
NO plan IS the plan...

"His plan had no goals, no timeline, and no budgetary guidelines. Just maybe's, pretty speeches, and smokescreens."

Offline Art LeBrun

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Re: What if Apollo had never happened?
« Reply #31 on: 04/02/2013 02:03 am »
If Apollo had never happened the Soviet Union would have reached the Moon first.

No, the Soviets weren't going there until we were going.

But their obsession with grabbing 'firsts' means they would have thought of it sooner or later, if they weren't fantasising about it already.
...
Voskhod was a slightly-modified Vostok capsule with two men packed into the same space. 
...
As a matter of fact, Voskhod was a slightly-modified Vostok capsule with three men packed into the same space. And one of the crew members was spacecraft designer - K.P. Feoktistov
Only Voskhod 1. To make it possible: no pressure suits or ejection seats.
1958 launch vehicle highlights: Vanguard TV-4 and Atlas 12B

Offline luke strawwalker

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Re: What if Apollo had never happened?
« Reply #32 on: 04/02/2013 02:19 am »
If Apollo had never happened the Soviet Union would have reached the Moon first.

No, the Soviets weren't going there until we were going.

But their obsession with grabbing 'firsts' means they would have thought of it sooner or later, if they weren't fantasising about it already.
...
Voskhod was a slightly-modified Vostok capsule with two men packed into the same space. 
...
As a matter of fact, Voskhod was a slightly-modified Vostok capsule with three men packed into the same space. And one of the crew members was spacecraft designer - K.P. Feoktistov

And only flown twice IIRC... once with the three man crew including Feoktistov to grab the record for THREE cosmonauts ahead of the Gemini's two-man crew... then they launched it again with the inflatable airlock for Leonov's spacewalk first ahead of White's on Gemini IV... which only allowed for a crew of two due to mass constraints with the extra tanks and airlock attached...

Voskhod was always a very risky vehicle that Korolev tolerated as a political necessity, certainly not an "evolutionary" step for vehicle design... there was NO escape provisions for the crew during ascent, period... the ejection seat was deleted to make room to cram a crew of two or three inside... and if the landing rocket package between the capsule and parachute malfunctioned on landing, the crew could be injured by the jolt of landing...

Later!  OL JR :)
NO plan IS the plan...

"His plan had no goals, no timeline, and no budgetary guidelines. Just maybe's, pretty speeches, and smokescreens."

Offline Archibald

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Re: What if Apollo had never happened?
« Reply #33 on: 04/02/2013 12:10 pm »
Quote
cloudy

That's the perfect way to put it. Little chance for a lunar landing, perhaps a flyby at best, and even that, God know if that would have picked attention of any president past Kennedy.

The Saturns - the way I see it, the F1 results in a "gap" between the C2 and the C3 (which in turn leds to the C4 / C5 / C8 monstrosities)
No F1 = biggest rocket remains the C2 with 22 tons to Earth orbit (which can eventually be doubled by the addition of Titan SRMs). 40 tons to orbit is 1/3 of a Saturn V.

What may have happened: the F1 would have been funded as an experimental engine only, then the combustion instability issues would have killed it.

As for the X-20 - even without McNamara the Titan III makes the orbital variant pretty expensive for a Mercury-class ship.
IMHO best way for DynaSoar to survive would be to remain was as an experimental X-15 follow-on boosted by a Titan II.
No orbital creep past 1961-62 (what Boeing called the Streamline - skip the suborbital / experimental step and jump straight to the orbital / operational variant. Bad idea !)
Somewhat ironically, without Apollo peak funding and without Gemini NASA may very well fund a couple or trio of DynaSoar.  :D
Han shot first and Gwynne Shotwell !

Offline psloss

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Re: What if Apollo had never happened?
« Reply #34 on: 04/02/2013 12:39 pm »
with no early-60's "draw-up" for the lunar landing goal there would have been no subsequent need for a draw-down. I believe NASA would have ended up with roughly the same budget in the 74-75 timeframe (that budget remained stable, accounting for inflation, through the late 80s, indicating that was the national consensus level for NASA funding), but there would have been a gradual buildup to that level, rather than a massive spike followed by a draw-down.
This would make more of the 'what-if' Apollo posts more interesting; few seem to want to worry about the funding curve, even though it's the central issue.

Offline JohnFornaro

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Re: What if Apollo had never happened?
« Reply #35 on: 04/02/2013 01:18 pm »
Remember Eisenhower also warned of the "military-industrial complex" ...

To no avail, and Eisenhower retired quietly from the public stage.

Quote
MacNamara didn't see the [DyanaSoar] program as useful, and cancelled it.

Prematurely, without having previously understood how the program was "optimistically" overscoped to begin with.
Sometimes I just flat out don't get it.

Offline JohnFornaro

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Re: What if Apollo had never happened?
« Reply #36 on: 04/02/2013 01:20 pm »
... few seem to want to worry about the funding curve, even though it's the central issue.

The central issue remains, as always, the purpose for providing a funding curve in the first place.  Even fewer people worry about this.
« Last Edit: 04/02/2013 01:20 pm by JohnFornaro »
Sometimes I just flat out don't get it.

Offline Proponent

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Re: What if Apollo had never happened?
« Reply #37 on: 04/02/2013 03:16 pm »
The Saturns - the way I see it, the F1 results in a "gap" between the C2 and the C3 (which in turn leds to the C4 / C5 / C8 monstrosities)
No F1 = biggest rocket remains the C2 with 22 tons to Earth orbit (which can eventually be doubled by the addition of Titan SRMs).

By uprating the H-1 engines, a significantly larger payload could have been put into LEO without an F-1.  The Saturn C-3 defined in the Silverstein report of December 1959 mentioned increasing first-stage thrust either by replacing the central four H-1s with an F-1 or by uprating all of the H-1s to deliver 250,000 lb of thrust each.  I don't have my copy of the Silverstein report handy, but if memory serves its LEO payload was to have been 80,000-100,000 lb.

The Project Horizon report of 1960 defines a Saturn II which was somewhat similar to the C-3 and could have put 76,000 lb into LEO.  The first stage was to have been powered by eight H-2 engines, each with a thrust of 250,000 lb.  Details are found in the two volumes of the Horizon report available for download from the relevant Wikipedia page. Details of the Saturn II in particular come from page 20 of Volume I (page 26 of the PDF).

But what I find most interesting are exactly the scenarios where rockets never get much larger than the Saturn C-2.  At that size, you can begin to imagine they would have found uses outside of manned missions and therefore might have been sustainable indefinitely, unlike the Saturn V-sized monsters.
« Last Edit: 04/02/2013 03:18 pm by Proponent »

Offline Archibald

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Re: What if Apollo had never happened?
« Reply #38 on: 04/02/2013 05:19 pm »
Great, didn't knew one can extract so much payload of the S-IB stage and eight H-1.

Quote
But what I find most interesting are exactly the scenarios where rockets never get much larger than the Saturn C-2.  At that size, you can begin to imagine they would have found uses outside of manned missions and therefore might have been sustainable indefinitely, unlike the Saturn V-sized monsters.

Proton or Ariane 5 size payload ?
Han shot first and Gwynne Shotwell !

Offline Galactic Penguin SST

Re: What if Apollo had never happened?
« Reply #39 on: 04/02/2013 06:02 pm »
Great, didn't knew one can extract so much payload of the S-IB stage and eight H-1.

Quote
But what I find most interesting are exactly the scenarios where rockets never get much larger than the Saturn C-2.  At that size, you can begin to imagine they would have found uses outside of manned missions and therefore might have been sustainable indefinitely, unlike the Saturn V-sized monsters.

Proton or Ariane 5 size payload ?

Wiki quoting various sources gives 21.5 mt to LEO and 6.8 mt to TLI - indeed very close to today's largest rockets like Proton and Ariane 5. I think the later Saturn IB (with Centaur for higher orbits) has a similar performance with one less stage.
Astronomy & spaceflight geek penguin. In a relationship w/ Space Shuttle Discovery. Current Priority: Chasing the Chinese Spaceflight Wonder Egg & A Certain Chinese Mars Rover

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