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Incredibly pat historical occurrences

when you think about it, the entire "Moon race" of the 60's what essentially a game of fools, fueled by some incredible pat historical coincidences.

1 - 1961 While the Soviet Union has no manned lunar program whatsoever, JFK decides nonetheless to beat them to the Moon - just in case.

2 - the soviets do not take Apollo seriously because they - rightly - feel JFK did not realized the expense of Apollo, and will back down.

3 - 1963: the Soviet analysis nearly comes right. JFK now has doubts about Apollo, and balks at the cost. He tries to back down... and then he gets shot in Dallas, turning him into martyr.

4- LBJ replaces JFK and "secures" Apollo funding. He will reap the benefits of JFK bet, as he is president until late 1968.

5- The soviets now realize Apollo won't stop and is serious stuff. So in August 1964, Krushchev allocates half the needed funding, which is scattered among infighting rocket scientists (Glushko, Korolev, Chelomei). Then Krushchev is thrown out three months later, adding further chaos and delays.

6 - By 1969 the Soviet have an incomplete lunar stack (N-1 and Soyuz). The complete thing won't be ready until 1972 at best. The CIA informs NASA about this.

7 - Because the soviets have been thoroughly beaten, JFK goal is met, and now Apollo is only an expensive embarassment risking astronauts lives. Apollo 13 is the final nail in the coffin: both Nixon and NASA gets cold feet.

8 - Meanwhile the soviets reason that while Apollo beat them, they might be the first to build a lunar base. So the L3 program continues running until 1972 to gain some limited experience for the much improved L3M and the following DLB lunar base.

9 - while the CIA knows about the old L3, the L3M and DLB are unknown to them. With the soviet claiming they never had a lunar program, NASA decides the race is over, and turns back toward LEO

10 - the shuttle is started in 1972. Yet the Soviets once again do no believe in it, and continue with their L3M and DLB lunar programs until May 1974, long after Apollo stopped ! In the end Buran and Energiya programs will start only in 1976...

So, in a nutshell: Apollo was started over the non-existing threat of a Soviet lunar program.
The Soviets correctly guessed JFK would back down on Apollo cost, except JFK martyrdom and LBJ ensured Apollo would not stop.
And when the Soviets finally got a viable lunar program running (after 1964, up to 1971-73, with the L3 and L3M) then Apollo was already dead !

The irony...
 
The story of Buran, the soviet shuttle, is equally stupid and unbelievable.

In 1972 NASA asked a Princeton University economic think tank (Oskar Morgenstern) to asses the economic viability of the Space Shuttle. The economists got their numbers completely wrong, and the Shuttle was a true heresy as far as space market goes. It was a money pit.

Fast forward to 1974. Nobody in the entire Soviet Union can make sense of NASA economic case for the Shuttle. The paranoid soviets reason "It doesn't make any sense at all. So it is only a pretext. NASA is a pretext. Probably for the military. So what could be the military role of the Space Shuttle ?"

The soviet put their best mathematician, Keldysh, on the case. Keldysh finds that the Shuttle will lift-off from Vandenberg AFB, California, then land after a single orbit, also at Vandenberg. The U.S military indeed plans such mission: the reason is to launch big spy satellites, the KH-11s, into polar orbit.
Keldysh, however, realize that the Shuttle Vandenberg-to-Vandenberg trajectory pass above Moscow. The horror ! He has an eureka ! moment. "Dang. The shuttle is a freakkin' space nuclear bomber. Fly above Moscow, open the payload bay, drop a Minuteman or Polaris warhead on the Politburo and zaf ! Decapitation strike, and game over. what's more, the shuttle is half an aircraft, half a rocket. That is, it is bastard child of a B-52 and a Minuteman. We protected Moscow from B-52s with SAMs. We protected Moscow from Minuteman with the ABM-135 system. But the shuttle might sneak between these two defense layers and raze Moscow. Dear Lenin !" Keldysh rushed to Brezhnev and told him about his finding. Brezhnev freaked out, and from this moment, Buran was a go, and even an aerodynamic clone of the Shuttle, just in case.

Ain't that stupid ? Yet it is no conspiracy theory. It is from the reference book about Buran. There !

https://books.google.fr/books?id=VRb1yAGVWNsC&pg=PA55&dq="brezhnev""shuttle""keldysh"&hl=fr&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjUpebJs73cAhUMbBoKHaZXDwkQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q="brezhnev""shuttle""keldysh"&f=false
 
One last for the evening. About LBJ and Apollo. It just occurred to me, LBJ just couldn't lose. Nixon, however, was screwed whatever happened.

Just consider the following

Scenario 1 LBJ out on November 1968, NASA lands a man on the Moon before that date. Johnson out of the White House, but on a triomphant note.

Scenario 2 LBJ win again in November 1968. Whenever NASA lands a man on the Moon, it is a triumph for LBJ.

Scenario 3 Hubert Humphrey replaces LBJ. Same for him: a Democrat Triumph.

Scenario 4 Nixon in the White House. Yet Nixon is still screwed, and pretty badly with that, because... a) Apollo is JFK baby. b) Nixon hates JFK. c) he lost in 1960 and JFK did Apollo. d) JFK is a martyr, so Nixon can't even complain.

Scenario 5 On top of that: Apollo cost $22 billion, 1 billion per flight, 120 billion in today's dollars.
Either
A - Nixon decides to continue this folly, and the Democrats laugh their arses at the expensive burden they bequethed to him.
B - Nixon shut down Apollo... and goes to History as the evil, dull bean counter that killed the lunar program after only a handful of missions (4 or 5 landings).

(note: scenario 5, b) is what actually happened... and even if johnson started winding down Apollo by 1968, Nixon is still seen by 95% of people as (you guess) the evil, dull bean counter that killed the lunar program after only a handful of missions.)
 
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Archibald said:
when you think about it, the entire "Moon race" of the 60's what essentially a game of fools, fueled by some incredible pat historical coincidences.
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Another point you don't mention is that the moon race was meant to be a non-war proxy war between capitalism and communism, yet the successful American Apollo programme consisted of NASA seizing on one design, throwing money and it and ruthlessly crushing all the alternative proposals, while the Soviet effort consisted of multiple competing designers with their own ideas building different rockets simultaneously. So completely backwards. Also, the fact that the Apollo programme has become a cause célébre for corporate project management types, despite being organised exactly how you wouldn't want the average business project to be organised (relying on having a pipeline of infinite money, and stopping as soon as this dried up).

On the shuttle, there's that rumour (though officially denied) that the Soviets tried training a laser on Challenger for the STS-41-G mission in 1984 as a brinksmanship exercise. Even the mere possibility that could have happened sounds crazy, more like something out of Moonraker than real life.
 
Another point you don't mention is that the moon race was meant to be a non-war proxy war between capitalism and communism, yet the successful American Apollo programme consisted of NASA seizing on one design, throwing money and it and ruthlessly crushing all the alternative proposals, while the Soviet effort consisted of multiple competing designers with their own ideas building different rockets simultaneously. So completely backwards.
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You mean that Apollo was a model of communist-like project, when the Soviets took a rather capitalist approach - kind of lower bidding among many proposals / competitors.

Never thought about it this way, and it certainly add even more irony to the entire story...

The Soviets had a major military laser facility at Shary Shagan (the name sounds like a joke) but their program was more dead than alive. Except for neoconservatives and Edward Teller, who used it as a pretext for SDI, hammering that argument, ad nauseam. When a group of american scientists visited the facility in 1989, they found it was mostly an empty shell.
 
Valentin Glushko was a major builder of rocket engines, but he wanted to get full control of rocket production as well. He spent his entire life chasing two dreams a) getting to the top of the soviet space program and b) build a lunar base with all the resources.

As of 1973 in the Soviet Union nobody wanted to build a Shuttle as the aviation and rocket ministries hated each others.
So Glushko stepped in, killed the N-1 lunar rocket he hated so much, and proposed Energiya in its place... if he was given all the resources to build it, all the competing design bureaus (OKB) of Mishin and Chelomei.

While Glushko hated the Shuttle and had no interest in Buran, he needed Buran to get Energiya funding. Glushko real interest was to use Energiya to build a lunar base. Somewhat ironically, Mishin wanted to do the same... but with the N-1 Glushko hated. So Glushko got Mishin sacked, the N-1 killed, Energiya approved.
Then Glushko shamelessly borrowed Mishin L3M, adapted it to Energiya, and rebranded that LEK, and he proposed his lunar plan to Brezhnev and the Politburo, in 1976 and 1978. http://www.astronautix.com/l/leklunarexpionarycomplex.html

... and then the entire strategy backfired against Glushko.

Because they said "Energiya, yes, to launch Buran. A lunar base ? we are not interested." So Glushko had to get Energiya flying, and Buran, and then he lost a decade. In 1988 he tried again to propose his dreamed lunar base... and then he died.
http://www.astronautix.com/e/energialunarexpedition.html
 
Kubrick rightly denounced the father of the H-bomb, Edward Teller, as Dr Strangelove - that is, a complete whacko. And surely enough, Teller was borderline crazy when you think about it.
(Project PACER: how I got fed up with tokamaks and lasers, and learned to detonate H-bombs to reap the benefits of thermonuclear fusion straigt ahead - detonating a bomb in a underground lake to get steam for turbines, and electricity out of the turbines. What could possibly go wrong, really ? )

Yet the man who invented the neutron bomb, Samuel Cohen, was even beyond Teller. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_T._Cohen

Dear God. Remember that line by Sarah Connor in Terminator 2, when she ponder shooting the inventor of the microchip

Men built the hydrogen bomb, not women... men like you thought it up
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It is no surprise she was so angered.
 
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I don't really know what this thread is about, but:

I've always thought the Dubya presidency would never fly in a timeline; there's too much incompetence, misfortune and misfortune exacerbated by incompetence there for it ever to fly. Would be dismissed as a Demwank. Also, a guy becomes president, and invades his father's old unfinished war, against a dictator that tried to take out said old man some years later? That'll be regarded as sort of Barney the Dinosaur Ameriteen wikibox melodrama level stuff, if it's fictional.

Mario Cuomo's twice passing up a presidential contest is not something you could write convincingly without deep psychological/character research to back that up. In 1988 certainly, the nomination is his if he wanted it. (Senator Simon is not running against Cuomo; Dukakis/Sasso are about 70% likely to pass up on that) Difficult to write those kind of things.

1980s star moderate, Bill Bradley, who could have been the running mate in both '88 and '92 if he'd wanted it, deciding to eventually run a quixotic outsider campaign from the left against the actual '92 running mate choice would not go down well in a timeline.
 
Roger II said:
I'm now wondering about a TL where he does run.
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In 1988?

He absolutely has the nomination down if he wants it. The field wouldn't be cleared, but it would be clearish. Gephardt is still in the mix given his long dedication to the race, but not as a convincing candidate; Gore, Jackson; but that leaves Gephardt as the sole northern candidate up to Super Tuesday. I don't see Dukakis running; more likely is him freeing up the real ambition in that campaign, Sasso, to work on the Cuomo campaign.

I think the New York governor wins both Iowa and New Hampshire, and then Gephardt's campaign is flat broke. MC effectively has the nomination done by Super Tuesday, but probably puts the cap on it with a win in Illinois just after, where Jackson fails on his home turf, and Senator Gore does not, cannot, translate his southern wins into anything meaningful.

I think it takes a lot of heavy lifting on the part of the Bush campaign to concede the general election - I won't say too much on this as I have a timeline about this election on a long boil - but I mean, there's no way on earth Cuomo is doing worse than, or as bad as, Dukakis. And having the nomination completely wound up by March is nothing to sniff at.
 
I mean, the butterflies in either direction are massive-either Cuomo wins and has a very different end to the Soviet Union(unless his policies let it stagger on or reform) and probably different policies on things that could lead to Gulf War I, or he loses but he loses more respectably and as a moderate and there's no overhanging specter of "unelectable liberal" that Dukakis created and which probably affects some policy debates in the Democratic Party.
 
Elektronaut said:
Mario Cuomo's twice passing up a presidential contest is not something you could write convincingly without deep psychological/character research to back that up. In 1988 certainly, the nomination is his if he wanted it. (Senator Simon is not running against Cuomo; Dukakis/Sasso are about 70% likely to pass up on that) Difficult to write those kind of things.
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It's hard to write a convincing 'he just doesn't want to be President'-style figure as TLs are bound by the same kind of laws and judgement as fiction in that if someone is surging or looks like they're heading for the top, they have to either fail spectacularly or succeed. No room for your Cuomos and Alan Johnsons.
 
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