but that's another element I tried to mention in my initial post... In the alternate Time line created by Starling stealing the Aeon's technology... He could have improved Nixon's game to the point that there was no Watergate scandal and no impeachment. Of course there have been term limits to the presidency since the 50s so that means that Nixon would have served Jimmy Carter's term and LBJ would have faced off against Walter Mondale in 1980 if would have been ready for a presidential application 1/2 a decade earlier than we all knew him to think he was.
Um. Ford's term, you mean, with Nixon leaving office (if not otherwise arrested) after the 1976 election, and whoever might run then would serve in this alternate 1976. (Given the circumstances of that election I don't believe there's any way to guess who, Republican or Democrat, would have been nominated, much less won.)
And that's why the space program was building DY-100 Freighter class star ships in the mid nineties ( a model is seen in Raine's office.)... All because Nixon wanted to be more important than Kennedy, proving the old Vulcan adage: Only Nixon could have gone to Mars.
Well ... except that the historical Nixon never demonstrated more than a minor passing interest in the space program. If he saw it as a way to be More Important Than Kennedy, he didn't demonstrate it in setting any kind of agenda for his staff or, really, doing more than hanging around triumphs like Apollos 11 and 12. Very few --- in fact, I would say no except that I can't locate the citations for such an absolute word --- space decisions in the Nixon administration were made anywhere near the Oval Office; they were handled on lower levels and the President, essentially, occasionally briefed on what there was.
Also note that historically there were good reasons for the space program to not go on an endless Drive For Mars! after Apollo reached the Moon. First and foremost, the drive had been slowing since 1965, because it was a huge consumer of time, men, and budget, for extremely limited economic or strategic benefit and only modest (and, truth be told, dubious) prestige or diplomatic benefits. Going back to rapid increases for a goal that's decades farther in the future, given what a close-run thing the original goal was, would challenge the President's political capital for a modest and very deferred benefit.
Furthermore, by 1972 the United States was suffering economically from the effects of the Vietnam War and the Great Society spending, and the collapse of the Bretton-Woods agreement; there simply wasn't money to put into Vast New Programs. Add to that the collapse of the L-1011 and the Boeing Supersonic transport, and the worthless advice on What To Do In Space being given by NASA administrator James Fletcher and National Space Council fanboy Spiro Agnew and it's remarkable that the Shuttle was kept afloat at all. DY-100s would require a very different 1960s and 1970s in their background.
