When last we left alternate history, it was 1996, aiming towards 1999. Space station IV has been built; construction of Clavius and AristarchusBases on the moon began in earnest in 1994. The one-million-pound payload Neptune has just been retired, replaced by the twice as powerful Uranus. The Shuttle II is in its last days, about to be replaced by the Orion II cargo spaceplane and the Orion III passenger spaceplane (each using the turboramrocket-powered Orion I booster). There is a space station in orbit around Venus, a base on Phobos and the beginnings of a permanent base on Mars in the form of Lowell Base. The path from here to 1999, when the scenes in Earth orbit and on the moon were supposed to be set, is both clear and fairly short, so there’s not a whole lot to say.
From 1994 to 1999, Clavius base goes from groundbreaking to operational. The only way this could be feasible is with a massive spacelift operation, with pre-assembled buildings, building segments and equipment launched from Earth to LEO atop Uranus boosters. Transfer from LEO to lunar orbit would be by use of ion engines or similar extremely high Isp electrical propulsion systems. In order to provide power, a combination of on-site generation (via nuclear reactors) and remote transmission would be used. The Solar Power Satellite prototypes are not economically competative with the terrestrial commercial nuclear reactor program… but they are a fantastic way yo provide vast amounts of power to cislunar tugs. These would be composed of large, lightweight truss structures with microwave receiver mesh tht intercepts the power beams from the satellites and converts that radiation into electrical power. Ion and/or plasma engines use the massive power available to boost the payloads. But even with hundreds of megawatts to even gigawatts of power, acceleration is slow, so the massive payloads slowly spiral out of Earth orbit, taking months to reach lunar orbit. Once there, they are intercepted by lunar “taxis” that lower the payloads to the lunar surface. This is accomplished with high-thrust nuclear engines for the final landing, but LOX/aluminum powder slurry engines – crude and inefficient, but using propellants plentiful on the lunar surface – are used for braking out of lunar orbit and for much of the descent.
The thousands of workers needed on the lunar surface are sent from Earth via Space Stations II and IV, transported up on Shuttle II and Orion III vehicles. From the space stations they are transported to the moon via Aries Ia and Ib moon ships.
The first structures build are the preliminary housing facilities (inflatable “domes” initially), followed by improved landing facilities.. Once the facilities are in place to safely house the work crews and provide for efficient cargo operations, the massive subterranean operations begin. While hundreds of thousands of square feet of facilities are being dug out underground and built up using locally produced materials, such as nuclear melted regolith castings, facilities are rapidly built up on the surface. Here greeenhouses – using natural sunlight for thee two-week-long day, artificial lights for the two-week-long night – grow plants and algae for oxygen production, carbon dioxide scrubbing and food production. By 1999, Clavius and Aristarchus Bases are officially self-supporting: in the event that transport from Earth were cut off, the bases could survive idefinitely.
By 1999, facilities are in place that will process lunar regolith into constituent elements. However, it remains more efficient to process more pure sources. So numerous geological expeditions are sent out to find veins of valuable ores and meteorites. Of great importance are carbonaceous chondrites (needed for the carbon) and subsurface ices (needed not for rocket propellant, but for the maintenance and growth of the artificial biospheres). In support of this, numerous satellites orbit the moon, scanning the surface for gravitational, magnetic and chemical anomalies. One of these satellites detects, in 1999, a magnetic anomaly at the crater Tycho. One of the many geological expedition groups examines the site, and rapidly build a small base there and excavates a large “pit.” Due to the experience such groups have had, and the tools and techniques at their ready disposal, the pit, which is begun late in a lunar evening, is completed within the span of the lunar night. The discoveries at the pit are quickly classified. The new President, inaugurated just a few months earlier, is faced with a set of issues no President has had to face before, and makes decisions informed by a confidential report put together by the head of the NCA based on a hastilty-organized trip to the moon and a visit to the Tycho discovery.
This would seem to get us from 1968 to 1999, along one of an infinite number of paths. This particular path ends up with the USSR still a going concern, due in part to Nixon pulling out of Vietnam several years early. This has led to communism being a more powerful and aggressive force around the world. At the same time, the US has begun the true conquest of the universe, with *thousands* of people living off-world. The US – and world, except for countries that live solely on oil – economy would be substantially bigger than “our” economy, due in part to the space program, but more due to cheap electricity provided by a healthy nuclear industry. The space program would be a much vaster effort than in our world, and by this point would be about as difficult to cancel or curtail as Medicare or Social Security is in ours.
I have ideas about secondary topics for the “2001” world, but this closes out the basic story of “how we get there.”