A space program "what-if"/alternate history

In My Humble Opinion
1

I have absolutely no idea which category this belongs in so mods, please move as you see fit.

If, for whatever reason, there had not been a cold war with its spin-off space race, where do you think human-kind would be now, space-wise?

I believe that the drive to explore off earth would be there regardless but, without the cold war context would humanity have taken things more slowly and methodically, with us having our first moon landing 20 years later?

Would our efforts have been built upon a Chesley Bonestellesque space infrastructure of rotating space stations or would skylab-like things orbiting the moon have preceded the landings?

I personally find these questions fascinating and intriguing as hell (and probably completely pointless) but I am curious to see what others think.

2

Good question (but I suspect there isn’t a SQ-style answer). Going into space, and especially to the moon, was a massive undertaking. Without the cold war, what would have motivated us to do this? (And where would that put us today with respect to all the satellites that our communcations rely on?)

3

Probably a bit too much speculation for GQ. Let’s give IMHO a shot.

4

The Space Race was pretty much entirely driven by the Cold War. Tsiolkovsky, von Braun, Goddard - none of the early 20th Century rocketry pioneers could get any significant government backing for their research, much less a mega-billion dollar moon shot program. Even after World War II, after the U.S. scooped up von Braun and other experts in Operation Paperclip, they were stuck working on sub-orbital ballistic missiles until the Sputnik shock threw the U.S. space exploration effort into overdrive.

IMHO.

5

Yes, I believe this is true. It’s pretty much what James Webb, NASA administrator during most of those early years, wanted to do. He only partially succeeded, in that he did guide NASA to doing a lot of basic science in the way of robotic space exploration that paved the way for some of the magnificent unmanned missions that followed, but Kennedy was determined to execute lunar missions on the aggressive timeline that he had publicly committed to. So when the Apollo program ended, there was no follow-up plan, and it all pretty much dead-ended.

6

Without the cold war to drive things along, I’m not sure that we ever would have gone to the moon.

Big rockets came out of weapons. If you are just tinkering for learning’s sake, you end up with things like Goddard’s early rockets. It took WWII to inspire the Germans to create the V2. If you don’t have a cold war and don’t have a need to send huge rockets carrying nukes over to the Soviets (and for them to do the same to us) then the military focus becomes short range missiles instead of the Saturn V. You aren’t getting anywhere near the moon on a short range missile.

There are plenty of uses for satellites, so I’m sure those would have been developed with or without a cold war, eventually. And once you have a rocket capable of lifting a satellite then you start reaching for the moon, but I think that everything would have been delayed enough that smaller robots would have been developed long before we sent human beings to the moon. We would probably be well into the 2000s before we managed to send a robot to the moon.

In this alternate reality, I’m not sure that we would have ever devoted enough money into the development of something like Skylab. Some Evel Knievel type daredevil would probably hold the high altitude record for some sort of rocket plane that would play in the same ballpark as the real-world X-15.

Getting to space is hard. No country has ever done it without a huge backing from their government, and even then only three countries (U.S., Soviet Union, and China) have sent their own crewed vessels into space. Only a handful of other countries even have the ability to put something into orbit.

Sure the U.S. has private space vehicles now, but that was built on the shoulders of the U.S. space program, and even though there are several “private” space companies now, those companies wouldn’t be in the space business if they hadn’t had some major help from the U.S. Government. NASA paid for over half of SpaceX’s rocket development, for example, which arguably is a good thing because SpaceX was able to provide solutions significantly cheaper than if NASA had done the work themselves. But the point is, without NASA, there would be no SpaceX.

The Space Shuttle did a lot of classified military work. And even SpaceX has military contracts funding at least part of their work.

If you take away the military funding, everything goes away. There isn’t enough money left over for a serious space program of any sort.

7

I’m a cockeyed optimist… I note we went to the moon just as early as it was conceivably feasible to do so. The Wright Brothers flew, just about as soon as engine technology permitted. I am of the opinion that humankind does these things early, nearly as early as it is even basically conceivable.

Yes, a military threat spurred things…but a “prestige” race would have worked nearly as well. Sputnik wasn’t only scary because it was a way of delivering bombs; it was an insult to US pride, and that alone would have led to a US space program.

The only reason we don’t have a Mars program is that the tech just isn’t up to the task. The second it is, we’re going.

8

I read somewhere that von Braun was all set to put something into LEO. The technical capacity was there, but he was forbidden to waste time on that. Only Sputnik allowed him to do it. I cannot think that the US would have put much money into space without the push from the Soviets.

Now Arthur C. Clarke had imagine comsats back in something like 1945. I think they would have come eventually given the obvious utility, but I really don’t think there would have been much of a space effort otherwise.

9

I would like to think or hope that, without the cold war, we would have landed on the moon at some point in the late 20th, early 21st century. When, however, would’ve depended on whether the no-cold war world was also a no-WW II (or even no-WW I) world.

10

The Wright Brothers flew just about as soon as privately developed car engine technology advanced to the point where it was physically possible to mount it on an airframe that could carry its own weight aloft, and to the point where it was cheap enough that bicycle repair shop owners could afford to buy it out of pocket.

The technology to get a human to the Moon just wasn’t being developed, at all, by private industry. And it wound up being a tad more expensive than the average bicycle repair shop owner could afford.

And, yes, Sputnik wasn’t just a military threat, it was a blow to American pride. But both of those factors arose from the Cold War. Without an existential rival to militarily counter and to one-up psychologically and propagandistically, I don’t think the space program would have advanced anywhere near as fast, and I doubt we would have ever gone to the moon.

Even building on the technology and success of the U.S. Apollo program, no one has gone back since, not even uber-billionaires like Musk and Bezos, who clearly would love to.

11

The problem with the Space Race was that it was a dick waving contest rather than a serious attempt to create a space industry. But of course it did also mean a rapid development of space technologies. However it’s impossible to know where politics, society, the economy, science, or even countries borders would be without the Cold War. The Cold War has defined the US - it would be a radically different country without it. Probably a better one, but maybe worse. But if the alternative timeline assumes WW2 still happened then rocketry would certainly exist and I think we’d have artificial satellites in orbit, and missions to distant planets. But not sure we’d have put someone on the moon. Maybe it might have happened in the 80’s or 90s.