If Nazi's had not been defeated space timeline reasonable?

Hrm... That is a very different question. At minimum I would push the timeline back a decade because it was the V-2 that sparked the US and Soviet interest, and the worries that the other side was pursuing V-2 research spurred more research. Without that, it would've been a very back-burner pursuit, more the domain of hobbyists for quite some time.

 

Check out Roma Eterna, by Robert Silverberg, for a nice shot at that alternate history. Essentially just extrapolates what would happen if one small event had happened differently, Rome didn't end up falling, and goes all the way to present day. Interesting read.

As for the timeline presented in this thread? seems kinda silly, and hard to judge most of it without WAY more background.

Some parts are easier to pick on than others, though. In this timeline, we go from first man on the moon to a dozen people on a martian base in like 8 years. No effing way. Double whatever resources the US had, even give us the drive to do it, and not sure we'd be there today, much less 1972. Couple baby steps between first rocket in low earth orbit to sustainable (even short term) base on another planet...

 

Right, I had the same thought with "the domain of hobbyists" and a space program quite a few decades behind ours. I still think that would be true if no major conflict replaced WWII for a long time.

But where I did my turnabout was when I realized why that scenario was no more realistic than the OP. It's far more likely WWII would play out regardless before the mid-1950s with either the Russians, the Japanese, or both. (Check out my tortuous thought train in between your "Goering car crash" and "reticle" posts.)

There might not have been any V-2 research, but the simple distances involved would probably have spurred interest in long-range weapons. And then onto the space program, which means it wouldn't be off what we have now by more than a decade.

Still feel free to disagree, though.

 

That's an intriguing thought! I think the reasons they didn't were that they got lazy and decadent. With the means of long-distance communication they had (heralds on horseback), ruling such a huge empire must have been almost impossible so that from a certain size on it perhaps was destined to split up.
And when they had reached the critical size they stopped fighting others and started fighting within the empire, killing scapegoats first (slaves, POWs, christians and other fringe groups) but almost simultaneousely turning at each other as well.
It seems to me that they put large efforts into destroying instead of creating. Else they'd possibly have had steam engines and railroads by the year 400. (After all, the Greek and Egypts had already experimented with steam engines centuries earlier and the latter are known to have had batteries and the means to electrically galvanize metals)

 

In Cosmos, Carl Sagan suggested that ancient Greek civilization had the potential of getting us interstellar travel sooner than we're going to get it, by thousands of years, if only scientific progress hadn't been suppressed by elitists such as Pythagoras and Plato.

Rick Sternbach did a painting of a Bussard ramjet with a dodecahedron and Greek lettering that was used in the show and included in the book. A thumbnail of it is on this page.

 

Then I suggest one would have to amend this timeline to reflect the Nazis being involved in a long cold war with the US and/or the USSR. In light of the origins of WWII, as you and others have succinctly put it, the Nazis would have to keep the German people in a state of constant paranoia and hyper-angst in order to remain in power at all. The USSR at their eastern border as a constant existential threat (which indeed it would be) would be important for that condition, as would the USA's never-ending antipathy.

The other side of the coin is that an undefeated Nazi party possibly means an undefeated imperial Japan. This new speculative world is likely to be a VERY violent place with several enormous military industrial complexes competing for dominance in hot and cold wars. Wherner Von Braun would have plenty of opportunities to piggyback his exploratory agenda on the colossal funding of a Nazi ICBM program (just as he did in the USA after the war, just as Korolev did in the Soviet Union).

 

I remember that. Sagan certainly had his off days...

 

"What is certain is that Adolf Hitler never established the close connection to first-class scientific leadership that both Churchill and Roosevelt enjoyed. Indeed, by a peculiar irony, Hitler's decisive contribution to the age of atomic weapons was the fear he provoked in others of what he might do. Although that fear was crucial to Roosevelt's decision to make a bomb, the historical record shows that Hitler's Germany never even tried."

The New York Times: HITLER & THE BOMB
http://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/13/magazine/hitler-and-the-bomb.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

 

I am familiar with Stalin's Russia, up to a point. The Fifties do not particularly interest me, in general. I'm familiar with the "Forgotten War," of course and the Red Scare in the States and Elvis and whatever. But all-in-all I would be more of an observer, on this debate.

 

Space Shuttle: The History of Developing the National Space Transportation System by Dennis R. Jenkins, p. 2, first edition 1992, 1993.

 

I spent the weekend with my parents (both born in the late 1930s) and mentioned this thread. To my surprise they both completely agreed with the timeline suggested in this thread's initial post and would actually have judged the development to have been even faster.

Their reasons were utterly different from all of our speculations, though. They say that Wernher von Braun was the driving force behind all that. The Nazis themselves were not interested in rocket science at all. But von Braun wanted not continue his research from the theory to the practical use as a weapon and beyond that as a vehicle. Von Braun was famous and internationally acknowledged and so the Nazis did anything he wanted just to keep him (just for the prestige of having the best scientists).
When he saw no chance to continue in Germany (for reasons of there being no money, no raw materials and last but not least for having lost the war) he went with the winner - in a most literal way.
Without him, my parents reckon, the Nazis would have let the rocket programme die instantly as they had neither an interest in it not an understanding for the possibilities it offered.

The latter my parents deem to be a typical German character flaw. We have ingenuious ideas but never get through completely with them, so that others can exploit them.
They may be right with most German inventions like the fridge, the washing machine or the lipstick, but personally I am very glad that Oppenheimer and Co. built their nuclear bomb in America instead of over here, so that at least this weight is off my people's conscience.

 

It might have been mentioned before, but I always thought Robert Harris' Fatherland was a good what if scenario. Germany never lost the war and ruled over most of Europe, and thus the Nazi crimes were never uncovered and nobody knew the Holocaust ever happened.

HBO did a decent adaption of it starring Rutger Hauer, where we also got to see the Speer's and Hitler's architecture plans realized.

 

The latter isn't that far-fetched. The huge meeting hall Hitler started in Nuremberg was in ruins when last I saw it (about a decade ago). But they now restored it and put a roof on top. It's now a documentation center. It's a huge building. The outer rim is finished. The inner court was supposed to be covered by a huge roof to make a congress hall of unique dimensions.
This is what it was planned to look like:

This is how it looked a decade ago when it was used as parking lot for cars confiscated by the police (actually it looked far worse but I couldn't find a photo)

And now it looks like this:


I take it Fatherland is a book? Gotta read it (unless it's on the index, over here)

 

If Germany had won the war... Heinrich James Kirk would be in command of an interstellar Haunebu starship, at this time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haunebu

 

Actually I think we would be less advanced. Had Germany won, Korolev dies forgotten, or perhaps killed by SS men who didn't freeze to death.

Germany holds onto Europe, defeats the UK and invades it, and demolishes their war fighting capability.

Von Braun is then kicked to the curb, with the Nazi war machine focused on 'more important' things.

For the UFO crowd, maybe the Nordic Venusians came from a different alternate universe, and were trying to make up for past ills.

 

who needs Venusians when there's already a Daenicken?