[FPSPACE] Alternate history

[DSFPortree at aol.com]

A modest elaboration on this morning's email, offered for your amusement -

For the past several years I've been subjecting various friends to an attempt 
to rescue Apollo from its gloomy fate. It's an exercise in alternate history. 
Such things are generally poo-poohed by serious scholars. Lucky for me, I'm 
not one of those. :-)

It's amazingly hard to save Apollo. The U.S. domestic and foreign political 
situation was all against it. I consider making the Russians better competitors 
to be cheating, in part because I don't believe in making more than one 
significant change to cause my history to shy down a new path.

The best thing I've come up with so far is for Nixon to slip, fall, and die 
in the bathtub in June 1969. Spiro Agnew becomes President. He falls to Edmund 
Sixtus Muskie in 1972. (Historians call this the Era of Presidents with Weird 
Names.)

Agnew was not a terribly clever man. I imagine that he'd back Tom Paine's 
grandiose space plans and turn a lot of people against space. When Muskie 
declared that he would reject such schemes in favor of a conservative Apollo-based 
program, everyone praised his realistic moderation. 

And so, the Russians, piqued by our continuing moon & Skylab program, would 
continue work on their N-1 rocket and eventually get it right. The competitive 
dynamic shut off by Nixon would continue to drive our space program into the 
late 1970s. 

I don't take my history beyond about 1988 (the end of the second Rockefeller 
presidency). Even before that it ceases to become useful speculation and 
tumbles over into fantasy. And I haven't done anything to map out the Soviet 
N-1-based program.

David

David S. F. Portree
Science writer & historian
dsfportree at aol.com
Flagstaff Arizona USA

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