Sep 182011
The future of American manned spaceflight as NASA saw it, from the vantage point of 1970. An “integrated program” was foreseen, with no major funding cuts or changes based on politics. While the timeline is not calibrated… the Mars landing was expected to occur in 1986.
Good times.
The “Viking” and “Grand Tour” missions at least took place, though the designs were slightly different from what’s depicted here. The “nuclear shuttle was meant to haul cargo from low Earth orbit to geosynchronous in order to lower cost.
11 Responses to “Behold The World Of Tomorrow… Yesterday!”
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This would make a wonderful poster, with the date and publication number prominently displayed.
Well, we did get all of the “planetary” stuff (Mariner 9, Viking, Landsat*, Voyager).
The “Shuttle” looks like the one shown here:
http://sites.google.com/site/spaceodysseytwo/stg1969/stsotv2.jpg
* Assuming they mean Earth, not Mars, orbit
Correction; the “High Data Rate Orbiter” isn’t Landsat, it’s the Orbiting Astronomical Observatory (OAO-1), and it did end up looking almost exactly like the drawing, right down to the antenna and solar panel layout:
http://library01.gsfc.nasa.gov/gdprojs/images/oao_i.jpg
It was launched in 1966.
Oh, the pity of it all.
If memory serves, there were three scenarios for the manned Mars landing and 1986 was the ‘nominal’, with 1982 being the ‘optimistic’ and 2000 the ‘pessimistic’. The foot note to the 2000 date was that this was not foreseen as credible because it would mean a major breakdown of the plan… if only they had known š
Wasn’t it already realistic though, because Saturn V production had been stopped quite a while before and would have had to be reconstituted to support the Mars flights? The Shuttle they pictured probably couldn’t have supported orbit/construction of a number of the vehicles the chart showed, it’s more like a crew transport.
> Saturn V production had been stopped quite a while before
1968, as memory serves.
> The Shuttle they pictured probably couldnāt have supported orbit/construction of a number of the vehicles the chart showed,
True. Those other programs would have required a revived Saturn V production line, unlikely by 1970.
I meant “already unrealistic” in 1970…
This is from Dr. James Hansen’s essay: Technology and the History of Aeronautics.
It is important to underscore one last, essential point. Just because the history of technology involves technology, it does not mean that technical factors always take precedence. In the real world, so-called “soft” and “mushy” things like politics and culture, like what bankers think can make them money or what activists say may harm the environment, often override good technical or engineering logic. And they should. Some might say that is why an American SST has never flown. That is why in the history of the American space program, all the thoughtful and well intentioned talk about “the next logical step” has almost never led to it. After launching a man into space via Project Mercury, NASA said that the next logical step was to establish a permanent manned presence in low earth orbit, but instead the country landed men on the Moon. After going to the Moon via Project Apollo, the next logical step was to build an earth-orbiting space station along with a space shuttle to service it, but instead the Nixon Administration decided that the country could not afford both and could manage temporarily with just the shuttle, even though the space station had always been the shuttle’s main reason for existing. After the shuttle, surely the next logical step was to build a space station, but once again the country found reasons to postpone building one.
Clearly, logic does not determine the history of technology; and technologically “sweet” solutions do not always triumph over political and social forces. Historical logic, if we even want to use that phrase, is not the logic of engineers and scientists; it is the logic of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. In that all-too-real fantasy land, Tweedledee explains logic to Alice: “Contrariwise, if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.” Tweedledee’s logic is the only kind the American space program has ever known, or probably ever will.
Tellingly, the unmanned program pretty much stuck to the schedule outlined.
Looks like automation outperformed humans here just like in many other fields.
Not that I’m one to pass up a vacation at L5 town.
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