I think there's a lot of mileage to be gained in marrying alternate history with science fiction now rendered anachronistic by the march of history; it opens itself up to a wealth of potential stories and alternate history settings to be explored.
I like this. In the 50's my mom got a wonderful book I still have. Paul Berna actually wrote two books -
Treshold to the stars and
Continent in the Sky.
The pitch: France gets his own Apollo / Elon Musk mix and proceeds to the Moon in the year 197X (note the X) thanks to a giant technological breakthrough - nuclear powered, thundering flying spheres (not flying saucers, oh please).
Quite astoninshingly, the space base (called
Suzan base) is located in a real world, remote village (Ousse-Suzan, hence the name !) only 20 miles away from where my Mom lived in south-west France. It is quite, remote area with sand dunes and pine trees, sparcely populated, hence the why they placed the space base there, particularly nuclear rocketry.
The story is classic child adventure, Tintin style, the kid is the narrator whose father is working at the space base and the kid, of course, enjoys it hugely. He ends as a stowaway to the Moon in book 2 - Continent in the sky.
Note that Paul Berna wrote the story in 1954, and placed it in the year "197X" - the X was deliberate.
By 1955 both NERVA
nuclear thermal rocket (heat the hydrogen with the reactor) and the Orion
nuclear pulse ship (blast a steel plate with small
nuclear explosions) were being started, and as Tintin show, everybody's and his dog thought the space race would entail
NUCLEAR rockets, one way or another.
And then Sputnik and Laika and Gagarin and Apollo come from out of nowhere, with big chemical rockets (the horror, the horror) and by 1969, just like this, boom, MAN ON THE MOON. And then nothing happened until the 2020's and Elon Musk. THE END.
WTF ?