Alternate paths American space program could have taken.

[Bill Phil]

59 minutes ago, DECQ said:

Check how USSR was spending on its space program, and how much to spend USA, and barely barely caught up with the Soviets. How can you be so stupid, if the Soviet Union have the means for a long time people would be on Mars ...
Just do not forget that WW2 significantly affected the USSR, but the USA is almost imperceptible this war, and 20 years later launched a Russian R7,and rich America ?. In theory it was a marvel that the Russian could break through first into space. All of you are not ashamed to discuss competition between the two countries, where one flourished and earned in the war while becoming a superpower, and the other after the war and the loss of more than 20 million of its citizens do not really recovering  and send a man into space? What a disgrace...

You should be grateful to the Soviet geniuses of the time that the race has begun ...

They had heavier nuclear weapons, necessitating more powerful rockets. Putting something smaller than a warhead on the rocket, though, allowed it to orbit.

[wumpus]

2 hours ago, DECQ said:

Check how USSR was spending on its space program, and how much to spend USA, and barely barely caught up with the Soviets. How can you be so stupid, if the Soviet Union have the means for a long time people would be on Mars ...
Just do not forget that WW2 significantly affected the USSR, but the USA is almost imperceptible this war, and 20 years later launched a Russian R7,and rich America ?. In theory it was a marvel that the Russian could break through first into space. All of you are not ashamed to discuss competition between the two countries, where one flourished and earned in the war while becoming a superpower, and the other after the war and the loss of more than 20 million of its citizens do not really recovering  and send a man into space? What a disgrace...

You should be grateful to the Soviet geniuses of the time that the race has begun ...

My understanding was that the US published a timeline for launching Vanguard and when Korolev saw this he could see that Soviet rockets were ahead of the Americans and that by reducing the size of the Sputnik down to bare minimum, he could beat them into space (actually he beat them to launch.  It would take a number of humiliating failures before the US launched into space).

Sputnik had a twofold shock on Americans.  First, it beat "American Exceptionalism" over the head with a brutal, potentially nuclear tipped weapon.  We were no longer "the best at everything" and could be beaten technologically by a nation effectively prostrate by war.  The second effect was to really drive home that the USSR could launch nuclear weapons into space and rain them down anywhere in the US that they choose (without the long drawn-out war that it took to get the US Navy the airfields it needed to nuke Japan).

This twofold shock had two effects: the first is obvious and the point of this thread.  The US became committed to the space race.  Judging from the launch attempts after Sputnik it wasn't completely clear that the US would continue to make satellite attempts, and certainly wouldn't make them at the frequency that they did.  Von Braun (for better or worse) would not be let near a rocket unless national security would be at stake.  And finally, the whole moon shot was only necessary to prove that the US finally get a first after watching the USSR triumph again and again.

The other huge effect that is often forgotten was Sputnik's effect on US science education.  Science education went from an afterthought to a vital part of national security (how it managed to fall after just how critical the scientists at Los Almos were, let alone the army of technicians in four other areas were is beyond me.  Human stupidity is endless).  Not only that, this sudden increase kept on going at least through the space race and probably continued to the end of the cold war (my mom got a government raise for "all science jobs" in 1967, she was a computer programmer).  A good proxy for determining the importance of science education is looking for creationism (and presumably climate denialism as well now), to see if the classroom considers science more important than superstition.

The Apollo program required something like 50,000 employees, mostly engineers (I'm guessing.  I suspect that in 1960 you might need a few draftsmen per engineer, something completely beyond my experience).  Somehow you would need to train all of them (preferably without losing 50k engineers driving technology in the rest of the economy).  Without the shock of Sputnik, I doubt their would be that many of them.  KSP makes you think of NASA's response to the USSR's space program.  But don't forget the educational side as well.

[fredinno]

On 2016-05-06 at 6:25 AM, DECQ said:

Check how USSR was spending on its space program, and how much to spend USA, and barely barely caught up with the Soviets. How can you be so stupid, if the Soviet Union have the means for a long time people would be on Mars ...
Just do not forget that WW2 significantly affected the USSR, but the USA is almost imperceptible this war, and 20 years later launched a Russian R7,and rich America ?. In theory it was a marvel that the Russian could break through first into space. All of you are not ashamed to discuss competition between the two countries, where one flourished and earned in the war while becoming a superpower, and the other after the war and the loss of more than 20 million of its citizens do not really recovering  and send a man into space? What a disgrace...

You should be grateful to the Soviet geniuses of the time that the race has begun ...

Well, the military absorbed a lot more of the cost in the form of the Soyuz/R-7 rockets/UR-200.

And the Soviets didn't have to pay their employees as much

Also, I doubt the Soviets could ever get to Mars. Its space program was "military first" due to being merged into the military. This culture was shown in the Buran, Almaz, Mir-2....

[Emperor of the Titan Squid]

On 5/5/2016 at 5:47 PM, RocketSquid said:

Actually, thanks to Gemini, the USA had a pretty significant advantage in terms of man-hours, and plus, the USSR would've had several problems *COUGH LARGEST NON-NUCLEAR COUGH EXPLOSION IN HISTORY COUGH* with their moon rocket regardless of what the US did. They would get there first, but likely only by default.

Um, no, it would be an asteroid impact.

Can we talk about the impossible and really awesome plans that wre made, like the STG plan, and the project orion?

[RocketSquid]

11 minutes ago, Emperor of the Titan Squid said:

Um, no, it would be an asteroid impact.

Can we talk about the impossible and really awesome plans that wre made, like the STG plan, and the project orion?

Okay, the largest nonnuclear manmade explosion. The fact that it was smaller than asteroid impacts means nothing. All nuclear bombs tested so far are less powerful than an asteroid impact.

And what was the STG plan?

[Emperor of the Titan Squid]

 This is http://www.wired.com/2012/04/integrated-program-plan-maximum-rate-traffic-model-1970/

Edited May 8, 2016 by Emperor of the Titan Squid

[kerbiloid]

The "electronic revolution" of 1970s splits the space era in half: before computers — "cannot do", after computers — "not required".
Probably only lesser details could change, as the robots make useless most of pre-1980s projects, while without robots those projects would stay dreams.

Edited May 9, 2016 by kerbiloid

[wumpus]

On 5/9/2016 at 2:59 AM, kerbiloid said:

The "electronic revolution" of 1970s splits the space era in half: before computers — "cannot do", after computers — "not required".
Probably only lesser details could change, as the robots make useless most of pre-1980s projects, while without robots those projects would stay dreams.

This can be a bit deceptive.  Both the US and USSR/Russian space programs branched off of military programs and tended to be dependent on military suppliers.  At least for NASA this meant a very slow (and expensive) design process.  The FAA has similar requirements for hardware and software (you better be able to justify and explain every single line of code) and I'd expect NASA to have similar requirements.  No idea where Spacex, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic fit in this scheme.

1969 State of the art computer: CDC 7600 (presumably the well-funded/high visibility Apollo program could get its hands on this.  Obviously it would stay in Houston). 10 MFLOPS  (Roughly the speed of the original Pentium computers of the mid 1990s).

1980 Shuttle flight computer: IBM-AP-101, basically an embedded S/360.  Used (64k) core memory (like the CDC7600, even though DRAM was invented in 1969). .5 MIPS  - Note that this is more or less the specs of the Apple 2 on sale at the time (of course it used DRAM).

1990 Shuttle flight computer (upgrade): Now with 1M DRAM.

Problems get compounded when you leave the ozone layer and magnetosphere and suddenly have to deal with harsh radiation (ECC protected and scrubbed memory is a must.   You *will* have bits flipped).  Space rated semiconductors are typically built on a sapphire base and thus rare and expensive (I think there are some 32 bit CPUs available for space.  Hardly state of the art, but a 5 stage pipeline and 32 bit addressing is a *long* way from the Shuttle computers).  FPGAs must be a godsend to spacecraft designers.  Not only do they solve the "single digit production run" issue (don't even ask what it costs to make just one modern chip), they also allow mission control to re-write around any blocks damaged by radiation in flight (assuming you can make a safe "safe mode".  Early reports suggest ASTRO-H couldn't).

[Kryten]

4 minutes ago, wumpus said:

This can be a bit deceptive.  Both the US and USSR/Russian space programs branched off of military programs and tended to be dependent on military suppliers.  At least for NASA this meant a very slow (and expensive) design process.  The FAA has similar requirements for hardware and software (you better be able to justify and explain every single line of code) and I'd expect NASA to have similar requirements.  No idea where Spacex, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic fit in this scheme.

Currently the FAA are banned from applying safety regulations to commercial spaceflight other than for the safety of non-participants. Stuff like Blue's NS test program are only for their own internal purposes, not legally required; they could put people on it tomorrow if they wanted.

[kerbiloid]

10 minutes ago, wumpus said:

1969 State of the art computer: CDC 7600

I mean more modern computers and wireless communications which made MOL / original Almaz crewed stations ineffective in comparison with unmanned satellites, and giant orbital stations with 50-100 crew members as well .

So, after them all space programs have been scaled down from multi-manned ships to unmanned satellites.