If you like this subject, I highly recommend the show For All Mankind (on Apple TV).
I don't want to spoil the premise, but it's an amazing alternate history along the consequences of investing in science.
I don't want to spoil the premise, but it's an amazing alternate history along the consequences of investing in science.
I think the thing about For All Mankind that makes me sad is how it conveys the potential that the 60s really offered but failed to deliver on, in terms of progressivism, equal rights, womens roles in the workplace. Of course it’s a work of fiction, but science fiction has always been a mechanism for exploring different socio-political evolutions and it makes me feel like we missed something important that we’re only just on the cusp of today.
Anyway, my 2c
Not everything is perfect at all - there are very serious problems - but the country (and world) is transformed since before the Civil Rights Movement, and civil rights have spread to others (LGBTQ+ and disabled people, for example).
It's the people against civil rights who want you to quit, to believe you are powerless, that it is all for nothing. Maybe they want to believe it too! :)
That only started in the last two decades and in many places it's still a far cry away from being properly established.
Plenty happened in the four decades before that. Look up Stonewall, for example.
> it's still a far cry away from being properly established
That doesn't mean nothing happened. People can get married, and most of the country supports that!
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Ronald_D._Moore#Star_Tr...
I remember reading Stephen Baxter's "Voyage" in the 90s, in which Kennedy escapes his assasination, the Apollo program ends rather differently and NASA subsequently stretches/evolves the hardware to put a crewed mission on Mars, rather than building the Shuttle. It's been a long time, but I think I recall enjoying the geeking out on the equipment and little historical details.
(I've since read the novel has been widely criticized as plagiarizing the Cox/Murray book on Apollo history, which I read 20 years later and is an amazing achievement.)
It's an extremely presentist view of the 1960/70s.
spoilers
The idea that the US of the period would have cared about putting minorities on the Moon because the USSR did it is a fantasy.
The USSR's first female cosmonaut flew in 1963, two years after Gagarin's first flight. By contrast the first US female astronaut didn't fly until 1983, 22 years after the first US manned spaceflight.
The US of the 1960s didn't go for copy cat tokenism, their response to losing the Moon race would have been to start the Mars race. It's a sad indictment of current American mentality that this blindingly obvious escalation wasn't the response of the writers of the show. It's a side effect of living in a country which hasn't been able to build anything more complex than a sports stadium in 40 years. We have no new ideas and neither does our fantasy.
end spoilers
What are you writing this on? If you flew out to L2, what would you see? Etc. Seriously, what forum are you in?
A glorified BBS.
>If you flew out to L2, what would you see?
Nothing much since the 1960s plans of massive space stations never materialized.
So says someone on the Internet. We can make whatever claims we want if we don't have to back them up. That's the point of the JWST: gather evidence to back up claims.
The original cost of James Webb was meant to be $500m and it was meant to launch in 2007.
The actual cost was $9.7b and it launched in 2021 and still isn't fully operational.
We don't know how to build things any more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope#Cos...
Landing on the moon was just what had to be done in order to enable entering the moon base race.
For a show that should have accuracy at the start, this was unforgivable given the need for strong women role models in tech.
(There is probably also a tendency in general to make it all about NASA which, while obviously central to the whole effort, heavily depended on the aerospace industry and their network of subcontractors.)
For me it demonstrates what is possible if we continued to employ the risk taking attitude of those early space programs.
It seems being risk adverse makes human progress very slow and expensive.
Alternate history is fun, but maybe best not taken too seriously.
The alt history takes the, unlikely due to inferior technology, path that the last ditch Soviet launch right before Apollo 11 (a launch that did in fact happen, but failed), succeeded. The show seems to make it clear that this was influenced largely by luck as the Soviets had not done any sort of "dress rehearsals" to the moon like NASA had.
For All Mankind to have a successful Soviet Moon landing, things happened differently before that launch. I thought the show would be interested in exploring what those things are, but it never was the case. As for OP, presumably they're talking about Vladimir Komarov: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Komarov
His death during Soyuz 1, the first space casualty, could perhaps be a hinge between our universe and For All Mankind.
Let's look at the timeline: Saturn V was rolled out onto the launchpad in May of '66, maiden flight in November '67. In February '66, they tested the Apollo CSM.
Meanwhile, N1 made it onto the launchpad in November '67, but wasn't tested until February '69. Even assuming Korolev's survival could have moved up the dates, there's not a lot of time here between test flights to crewed missions. The LOK wasn't even flying until December of 1970, on a Proton rocket since N1 wasn't ready. But even assuming N1 had had its first test flights in '68, how long do you think it would have taken to go from that, to testing LOK, to actually landing someone on the Moon? Probably more than a single year.
Finally, let's look at something entirely unrelated to the troubled N1 program: the matter of rendezvous. It was important enough to master that Protect Gemini was devoted entirely to getting rendezvous working as smoothly as possible. The US conducted the first rendezvous in December '65, first docking in March '66, and several more successful tests with Gemini after that (all manned missions), as well as a rendezvous in Earth orbit with Apollo 7 in October '68 and lunar orbit with Apollo 9 and 10 in March/May '69.
Meanwhile, the first rendezvous/docking by the Soviets was in October '67, by unmanned crafts that used more fuel than expected, and their follow-up attempt with Soyuz 2/3 in October '68 failed to rendezvous after running out of fuel to maneuver. Their first success with manned rendezvous wasn't until January '69.
It wasn't impossible that the Soviets could have gotten extraordinarily lucky on numerous fronts if he hadn't died, but I wouldn't call it realistic, or in fact reasonable.