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Bobby Kennedy wins in 1968--space program?

Neopeius

Neopeius

Admiral
Admiral
Hey folks! Need some help here.

I'm running my annual simulation of the space race, and by random chance, Bobby Kennedy escaped assassination, won the party nomination and trounced Nixon.

I know it's improbable, and in fact, it was a 20 to 1 shot in my system. But he did it. Now he's president.

So what do you think his attitude will be toward:

1) Vietnam and

2) the Space program?

Keep in mind, in this timeline, things have progressed a bit differently from OTL. The Soviets have done a bit better and have a space station in orbit as do the Americans. America is poised to launch an EOR Apollo mission while the Soviets are threating to do their own EOR this year.

There was no Apollo 1, but the equivalent of Apollo 8 burned up on reentry on Christmas of 1967. The Soviets have lost at least one cosmonaut (Gherman Titov) thus far.

Both sides are operating spaceplanes--the Americans have an X-20 derivative in operation. The Russians have an experimental raketoplan.

Both sides are spending more on space than historically, largely because the competition has been closer.

I'd love your thoughts. Thank you.
 
Way too many changes in the Timeline. The decisions of too many people are involved that were made over half a decade.

Too difficult to have a What if... discussion.

Dynasoar was cancelled in 1963.

Space station was still in the conceptual stage in 1968 as was Skylab.

A better question would be if Robert Kennedy had survived the assasination attempt, would he have pulled out of Vietnam and this money spent on the post-Apollo space program that NASA really wanted.

If this happened, would the Soviet have continued to refine the N1 and would they have flown to the moon.

Would there have been a space race to establish a permanent moonbase and manned flight to Mars in the mid-1980s.

But your Timeline is so out of sequence, that it is really hard to speculate what would have happened.
 
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Nixon hated/despised JFK, viewed Apollo and all subsequent planned space-missions as "Kennedy's program", and proceeded to wreak havoc upon it. Bobby Kennedy would have had the opposite view, and at least supported the continuation of his brother's legacy. Unfortunately, he would have had politicians such as Proxmire, Mondale, etc. (and an easily-manipulated public) trying to remove funding to further their own agendas.

The one thing that might have altered a steady tailspin of the space program from that point, if Vietnam War ended and was no longer sucking a giant hole through the economy, NASA supporters possibly had a better opportunity to fund the remaining Moon Missions and Skylab(s).
 
I don't know if the disintegration of the Apollo 8 mission capsule would have given NASA pause in continuing future Apollo flights. If they would wipe off the tears and then go on to launch Apollo 9 at its scheduled time. Or would months have been spent on an accident investigation and Apollo missions would have been grounded?

Please explain what you mean by a Soviet space station? Do you mean Salyut or something like Mir? For a United States space station, do you mean Skylab or the 12-person Saturn-launched module designed by McDonnell-Douglas? This 12-person 30-foot wide module would grow to the 50-person space base and then the 400-person space hotel. Or do you mean a Skylab that had been launched higher in Earth orbit? Or do you mean the United States Air Force's Manned Orbiting Laborary (MOL)?

On the Soviet side, their space program was in disarray mostly from a clash of personalities and competing programs using up scarce financial resources. Vasily Mishin was no Sergei Korolev. He didn't have the political savvy to negotiate the Soviet political landscape or provide the leadership of Sergei Korolev. People mistakenly believe that the Soviet space program was centralized and had a common goal. They are not aware that it was composed of squabbling design bureaus who had very different ideas of how things should be accomplished.

Further, the N1 rocket that Korolev designed had a complicated array of 30 rocket engines on its first stage using the Kuzentzov NK-15 engine and later the NK-33. From what I have read, the piping was so complicated that it was damaged on the way to Baikonur because of transport by rail.

Sergei Korolev hated Valentin Glushko who had a near monopoly on rocket engines in the Soviet Union. This is because Glushko testified against Korolev in Stalinist times that sent Korolev to a Gulag in the 1930s. In addition, the rocket engine that Glushko offered to Korolev, the RD-270, burned unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (UDMH) and nitrogen tetroxide (N2O4). Propellents which are toxic. There was also the fear that an explosion at Baikonur would have rendered the launch site toxic for ten to twelve years. In addition, Korolev insisted on using high grade fuels such as kerosene, oxygen, and hydrogen.

Therefore, Korolev bypassed Glushko and went to Nikolai Kuznetzov who had experience with designing jet engines for aircraft but not rocket engines. The NK-15 was his first rocket engine. It was small and underpowered and therefore the N1 required a complicated array of rocket engines and complex piping to feed these engines kerosene and oxygen fuel.

Then there is Vladmir Chemolei who didn't like the N1 either and felt the Soviet Union should use his Universal Rocket (UR)-700 for a manned lunar mission that was in development simultaneously with the N1, but unbuilt. This design used Glushko's RD-270 that was so objectionable to Korolev.

After the two devastating explosions of the N1 in 1969, Chemolei continued to lobby hard for the use of his UR-700 for a manned mission to the moon. Which was a Moon direct launch vehicle and used an entirely different moon lander than the N1. Chemolei continued to work on his moon hardware even though it had been decided to continue to back the N1.

Chemolei did receive funds to adapt the UR-700 for a manned mission to Mars. The new rocket was designated UR-700M.

So the Soviet Union had two competing manned space programs going on similtaneously in addition to the military-initiated Salyut program.

Some authors have suggested that the N1 was fatally flawed from the start and would have never been made to work while others believe that given time Mishin would have been able to solve the technical problems that plagued the project.

Due to the secrecy of the project and lack of funding, very little testing was done of N1 components prior to assembly as a launch vehicle. Other authors and historians have suggested that N1 components had severe quality control problems.

Mishin was replaced by Valentin Glushko in 1974. Glushko threw out the N1 and began to work on an entirely new rocket design that was named Vulkan "Volcano", that would later evolve into Energiya, for a manned mission to the Moon to establish a moonbase called Zvevda or "Star" in Russian. The first mission would fly in 1980.

Some authors have suggested that the Soviets could have gone to the Moon first using Chemolei's UR-500 "Proton" rocket. This would have entailed four launches to Low Earth Orbit and the assembly of the vehicle in Earth orbit. Unfortunately, the "Proton" was still an unproven rocket in 1968 and had its share of launch failures before becoming the most reliable launch system in the world. Further, LEO assembly had not been tried. Chemolei and Glushko believed that direct launches were the safest and orbital assembly was too dangerous and uncertain. Unfortunately, direct launches require heavier lift launch vehicles such as Vulkan or Chemolei's UR-700.
 
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Orne said:
Nixon hated/despised JFK, viewed Apollo and all subsequent planned space-missions as "Kennedy's program", and proceeded to wreak havoc upon it. Bobby Kennedy would have had the opposite view, and at least supported the continuation of his brother's legacy. Unfortunately, he would have had politicians such as Proxmire, Mondale, etc. (and an easily-manipulated public) trying to remove funding to further their own agendas.

The one thing that might have altered a steady tailspin of the space program from that point, if Vietnam War ended and was no longer sucking a giant hole through the economy, NASA supporters possibly had a better opportunity to fund the remaining Moon Missions and Skylab(s).
Click to expand...

That's possible. Though I wonder if these funds might have been used for additional LBJ-initiated "Great Society" social programs if a new Democratic administration had taken office.

President Richard Nixon did appoint VP Spirow Agnew to the Presidential Space Task Group in which they hammered out the very ambitious and costly Integrated Manned Spaceflight Program.

http://altairvi.blogspot.com/2008/03/integrated-manned-space-flight-program.html

http://altairvi.blogspot.com/2008/11/chemical-alternative-to-nuclear-shuttle.html

Bobby Kennedy was criticized as a political opportunist for his opposition of further escalation of the Vietnam War. Though in the JFK White House, JFK was opposed to the commitment of US troops to Vietnam. So there is some uncertainty of what RFK would have done in Vietnam.

I also wonder if Bobby had the charisma of his brother to continue the same level of enthusiasm for the space program?
 
Shawnster said:
What type of simulation is this?
Click to expand...

It's done in semi-annual turns. There are five people on each national team representing the political leader and various factions. On the American side, it's NASA, unmanned NASA, NRO and DOD. On the Soviet side, it's Suslov, OKB-1, OKB-52 and OKB-586. The two teams have quite dissimilar rules, actually.

Every year, sometimes twice a year, we get together and play 2-4 six month intervals. History has diverged significantly from our timeline since 1957 :)
 
Neopeius said:
It's done in semi-annual turns. There are five people on each national team representing the political leader and various factions. On the American side, it's NASA, unmanned NASA, NRO and DOD. On the Soviet side, it's Suslov, OKB-1, OKB-52 and OKB-586. The two teams have quite dissimilar rules, actually.

Every year, sometimes twice a year, we get together and play 2-4 six month intervals. History has diverged significantly from our timeline since 1957 :)
Click to expand...

Well now you are introducing a significantly diverged Timeline since 1957. :confused: If things started changing in that year the United States might have decided to build a rotating space station like Von Braun's "Space Wheel". At that time, they were thinking that Moon and Mars spacecraft would be assembled in orbit using the space station as a base of operations. So why don't you map out the events of this divergent Timeline up to 1969 and then ask us what Bobby Kennedy would have done with this space program.

The Soviet's may have decided to back Vladmir's Chemolei's plan to use the UR-700 for a manned mission to the moon.

Korolev may have survived his surgery and Vasily Mishin may not have ever been put in charge of the N1 project.
 
Herbert said:
Neopeius said:
It's done in semi-annual turns. There are five people on each national team representing the political leader and various factions. On the American side, it's NASA, unmanned NASA, NRO and DOD. On the Soviet side, it's Suslov, OKB-1, OKB-52 and OKB-586. The two teams have quite dissimilar rules, actually.

Every year, sometimes twice a year, we get together and play 2-4 six month intervals. History has diverged significantly from our timeline since 1957 :)
Click to expand...

Well now you are introducing a significantly diverged Timeline since 1957. :confused: If things started changing in that year the United States might have decided to build a rotating space station like Von Braun's "Space Wheel". At that time, they were thinking that Moon and Mars spacecraft would be assembled in orbit using the space station as a base of operations. So why don't you map out the events of this divergent Timeline up to 1969 and then ask us what Bobby Kennedy would have done with this space program.

The Soviet's may have decided to back Vladmir's Chemolei's plan to use the UR-700 for a manned mission to the moon.

Korolev may have survived his surgery and Vasily Mishin may not have ever been put in charge of the N1 project.
Click to expand...

Those are all things that might have happened. That is not how they happened in our simulation, however. :) Things are as I initially described them. Check the initial post--it has all the important differences.

I did once write a pretty straight alt-hist fic in which Korolev dies a year early and the Soviets get to the moon in 1969.
 
One of the great myths of history is that JFK was a great supporter of the space program.

He only came to set the goal of putting a man on the moon to upstage the Soviets. In fact according to T.A. Heppenheimer's books about the development of the space shuttle, JFK said

"If it weren't for the Russians, we wouldn't be wasting all this money on space"

RFK wouldn't done no better.
 
Dayton3 said:
One of the great myths of history is that JFK was a great supporter of the space program.

He only came to set the goal of putting a man on the moon to upstage the Soviets. In fact according to T.A. Heppenheimer's books about the development of the space shuttle, JFK said

"If it weren't for the Russians, we wouldn't be wasting all this money on space"

RFK wouldn't done no better.
Click to expand...

Carl Sagan said that the Apollo program was all about Cold War politics and had nothing to do with the advancement of science.

I wonder if the US had pulled out sooner in Vietnam under an RFK administration that more funds might have been channeled to the space program to regain national prestige?

The Integrated Manned Space Program Plan that President Nixon's Space Task Group had the mission to set up a permanent moonbase and manned mission to Mars in the mid-1980s.

I was able to fnd an archive of the original documents so I am researching the details right now of what future mission they planned with Apollo hardware.

When the Soviets heard about the shuttle, Dr. Keldysh of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and others were convinced that it could be used as a nuclear bomber. The emphasis of the Soviet space program became creating a Soviet clone of the space shuttle and a launch vehicle based on Glushko's Vulkan moon rocket. Glushko's plans for the permanent moonbase Zvezda never came to pass.

I wonder if the disarray of the Soviet space program under Vasily Mishin and the problems of the N1 rocket were known to Nixon?

I am reading a book by Brian Harvey that I highly recommend titled Russian and Soviet Lunar Exploration. Harvey believes that Soviets would have been able to solve the technical problems that were plaguing the N1 and they would have had a successful launch in 1974. He disagrees that the quality control issues were that bad and doesn't not agree that the N1 design was fatally flawed. He agrees that the political squabbling and the poor administration skills of Vasily Mishin doomed the project.

So I am thinking that after the explosion of N1 in 1969 that destroyed one of the launchpads at Baikonur, Mishin should have been fired and replaced by either Chemolei or Glushko or the space program placed under the control of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces. I believe that either firing Mishin or bringing in the military would have eliminated the squabbling that plagued the project.

Anatoly Zak has the fascinating web site Russian Space Web:
http://www.russianspaceweb.com/

David S.F. Portree's Romance to Reality: Moon & Mars Plans
http://web.archive.org/web/20060209092749/http://www.marsinstitute.info/rd/faculty/dportree/rtr/

Mark Wade's Astronautix:
http://www.astronautix.com/

Marcus Lindroos' Space Page:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070810014534/www.abo.fi/~mlindroo/Space.htm

The alternate history Deepcold: The Secrets of the Cold War in Space (1959-1969)
http://www.deepcold.com/index.html

NERVA-powered Mars vehicle
http://www.bisbos.com/rocketscience/spacecraft/nerva/nerva.html

If Neopeius reads the content of these pages and the two other blogs by David S.F. Portree in an earlier post, I am confident that he can come up with a Timeline of what might have happened.

My thread at the Federation Reference BBS where I am developing information on the NERVA-powered Re-Usable Nuclear Shuttle
http://federationreference.prophpbb.com/post1441.html#p1441
 
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Shawnster said:
How would an RFK presidency impact a "Star Wars" space program?
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I believe that a Strategic Defense Intiative-type space program would have been rejected in an RFK presidency. Anti-Ballistic Missile defense is contrary to Mutual Assured Destruction or MAD that kept the peace between the US and USSR. The argument given was that the Soviet Union would be encouraged to launch a pre-emptive strike against the United States before such a system was completed. Another argument against the system was that it would launch another expensive nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union because no system would be 100% effective. The other argument is that technology had not progressed far enough to believe that the defensive system was reliable to stop an incoming attack. Critics of space-based defensive systems also point out that it only defends against ICBMs and not cruise missiles or bombers.

During the JFK administration, two ABM defense systems were considered using missiles to intercept ICBMs. The "Sentinel Program" and the "Safeguard Program", both of which were cancelled.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Missile_Defense#The_Sentinel_Program

The same arguments were made in the 1980s concerning President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) commonly referred to as "Star Wars".

It was also argued that SDI was contrary to the "Outer Space Treaty" of 1967.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty

So I believe that the chances are slim to none that RFK would have supported "Star Wars" presuming of course that such a system was affordable or technically feasible.

In 1972, the United States and the USSR signed the Anti-Ballastic Missile Treaty. To actually deploy "Star Wars" the United States would have had to withdraw from the treaty.

The administration of President George W. Bush did unilaterly withdraw from the ABM treaty in 2002 and had been actively working on developing the Anti-Ballastic Missile Defense System.
 
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Is this the United States space station that you have in your Timeline?

3285648419_0bbd049e4c_o.jpg


This is a Saturn V-launched space station design by McDonnell-Douglas.
 
Herbert said:
Is this the United States space station that you have in your Timeline?

3285648419_0bbd049e4c_o.jpg


This is a Saturn V-launched space station design by McDonnell-Douglas.
Click to expand...

Something like that. It's primary purpose is as a fuel depot so as to minimize the down time if one of the lunar mission Saturn Vs fails.
 
Neopeius said:
Herbert said:
If Neopeius reads the content of these pages and the two other blogs by David S.F. Portree in an earlier post, I am confident that he can come up with a Timeline of what might have happened.
Click to expand...

Thank you for the links!
Click to expand...

You're welcome. Like I said, I am currently researching this information for the Federation Reference Series timeline project.

You will want to take a look for information concerning the Apollo Applications Program (AAP), also known as Apollo Extension Series (AES), and the Integrated Manned Spaceflight Program on the United States side.

On the Soviet side, you will want to take a look at information concerning N1/L3, Zvevda moonbase.

Soviet Manned Lunar Program
http://www.myspacemuseum.com/sovspac1.htm

Federation of American Scientists Soviet Manned Lunar Program Page
http://www.fas.org/spp/eprint/lindroos_moon1.htm
 
Thanks much. I've actually done a lot of research over the past six years. I've been in and out of Astronautix like crazy. It's so wonderful how much information has been released lately. I have Boris Chertok's book on the Soviet program which is very new and exciting.

My focus is the early unmanned space program so I'm not as familiar with the late 60s.

My website is www.sdfo.org/stl if you'd like to see some of my history.
 
Dayton - JFK opted for the space race race against the Soviets because the goals were easier to attain, and more politically acceptable, than civil rights, etc. (The huge infusion of Apollo money into the industrial infrastructure was no small thing either.) My comment was that RFK likely held the opposite view of Nixon pertaining to the space program, and would have continued the 'legacy' that his brother established for that reason if nothing else. As events might have transpired in an alternative history extending through the early seventies, I have my doubts that support would have extended past the planned Apollo 20 mission.

Public claims to the contrary, Agnew was under personal orders from Nixon to gut the space program (and in this he was relentless); the only project that was salvaged from all the NASA plans was the space shuttle, because Casper Weinberger, Nixon's director of OMB, thought it was a necessity.
 
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