Much hoopla was made of the fiftieth anniversary of Sputnik a couple months ago.

I haven't seen anyone mention that a half century ago today, the first Vanguard mission, the American response to Sputnik, was a spectacular (and televised) failure on the launch pad, which simply heightened the concern we had about the Soviets being ahead of us in space ("Our rockets always blow up"). I wonder if history might have been much, or any different had it succeeded?

Well, I have to wonder if we would have won the race to the moon if we didn't have the sense of urgency that we were doing it to honor John Kennedy. What if Kennedy had survived the assassination attempt?

BBB

Well, I have to wonder if we would have won the race to the moon if we didn't have the sense of urgency that we were doing it to honor John Kennedy.

And I have to wonder if we'd have been better off in the long run (i.e., now) if we hadn't had a "race to the moon."

If I remember correctly, Vanguard was only built at all because of turf wars between the US Navy and the US Army; the latter already had a workable design before Sputnik. I wonder how things would have turned out without that sort of empire-building?

Here's one possible scenario. The US Army is allowed to get on with their work; as a result, their satellite is launched before Sputnik. As a result of this, Kennedy never makes his famous speech, and Apollo never happens, but what does happen is what most visionaries of the early 1950s anticipated; a gradual progression using reusable spaceplanes (remember Dyna-Soar?), and ultimately culminating in a working LEO station, with later on a Moon mission and then a Moonbase. We'd probably have got to the Moon by now - but in this alternate universe we'd be there to stay.

Apollo was a fifty-billion-dollar sidetrack. It's taken us forty-five years to get back on track.

By "us", of course, I mean the human race in general.

Or we launch before Sputnik, the Soviets pitch a hissy fit about unauthorized overflights (this is before Francis Gary Powers and the U-2 shootdown), Eisenhower backs down, and the whole orbital thing is put on hold for a decade.

Mind you, I still think this would be better in the long run that what we got, since we'd have focused on improving things like Dyna-Soar until you couldn't KEEP them out of orbit, and then have dealt with the treaty situation from a position of utter dominance. The Soviets could build ICBMs as well as we could; I'm not convinced they could have followed X-15/X-20/etc.

Or we launch before Sputnik, the Soviets pitch a hissy fit about unauthorized overflights (this is before Francis Gary Powers and the U-2 shootdown), Eisenhower backs down, and the whole orbital thing is put on hold for a decade.

Mind you, I still think this would be better in the long run that what we got, since we'd have focused on improving things like Dyna-Soar until you couldn't KEEP them out of orbit, and then have dealt with the treaty situation from a position of utter dominance. The Soviets could build ICBMs as well as we could; I'm not convinced they could have followed X-15/X-20/etc.

Or we launch before Sputnik, the Soviets pitch a hissy fit about unauthorized overflights (this is before Francis Gary Powers and the U-2 shootdown), Eisenhower backs down, and the whole orbital thing is put on hold for a decade.

Mind you, I still think this would be better in the long run that what we got, since we'd have focused on improving things like Dyna-Soar until you couldn't KEEP them out of orbit, and then have dealt with the treaty situation from a position of utter dominance. The Soviets could build ICBMs as well as we could; I'm not convinced they could have followed X-15/X-20/etc.

Sorry for the triple-posting. No feedback from my other browser, so I moved over to Safari and found that all the posts were silently accepted. Rand, feel free to delete two of them (and this).