Blackstar, you still think this is the same as what you believe?
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.
And why do you presume there were have been no lunar landing? The plan mentions one.
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.
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.
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.
Most Space money would go to the military.
There would have been no affect on Mercury as that was a pre-Apollo project.
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.
However the USAF would have continues with Dyna-Soar and MOL.
The Soviets would have continued with Soyuz and Salyut because of their military applications.
I would expect a bit of a Space race but for orbital operations.
By the early 70's there would have been American and Soviet space stations, probably both civilian and military.
The Shuttle was supposed to be the do all monopoly space launcher, so without that commercial American launchers would have started a decade earlier,
a competitor to Ariane.
The USAF would have properly ordered the EELVs or something similar a decade earlier too.
Communications satellites, weather satellites etc would still have happened
but perhaps robotic exploration of the Solar System would have been more subdued.
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 ,
but as the USA would have a couple of decades experience in space stations, it would be completed a lot earlier.
By the 1990's there would be powerful commercial rockets, well tested space vehicles and orbiting complexes.
The lure of the Moon would still be there and the century coming to a close.
All the hardware for some sort of moonshot would be available, even its it only a flyby.
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.taRalph
Quote from: SalemHanna on 03/16/2013 12:47 pmQuote from: Jim on 03/16/2013 10:57 amQuote from: SalemHanna on 03/16/2013 08:09 amIf 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. ...
Quote from: Jim on 03/16/2013 10:57 amQuote from: SalemHanna on 03/16/2013 08:09 amIf 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.
Quote from: SalemHanna on 03/16/2013 08:09 amIf Apollo had never happened the Soviet Union would have reached the Moon first. No, the Soviets weren't going there until we were going.
If Apollo had never happened the Soviet Union would have reached the Moon first.
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.taRalph
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.
Quote from: ARD on 03/16/2013 06:15 pmQuote from: SalemHanna on 03/16/2013 12:47 pmQuote from: Jim on 03/16/2013 10:57 amQuote from: SalemHanna on 03/16/2013 08:09 amIf 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
cloudy
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.
Remember Eisenhower also warned of the "military-industrial complex" ...
MacNamara didn't see the [DyanaSoar] program as useful, and cancelled it.
... few seem to want to worry about the funding curve, even though it's the central issue.
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).
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.
Great, didn't knew one can extract so much payload of the S-IB stage and eight H-1. QuoteBut 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 ?