The leadup to the 1988 elections is one of the nastiest on record. The three main Democrat contenders, Michael Dukakis, Jesse Jackson and Al Gore, rip each other to shreds in the primaries. Gore is the only one with a space-friendly campaign; while lukewarm on space militarization, he claims a desire to continue exploration efforts, and to push hard on the Solar Power Satellite program. In contrast, Dukakis is lukewarm on space exploration, and downright hostile to space militarization; and Jackson wants to cancel all space militarization and effectively curtail space exploration efforts, with the intention of redirecting those funds to social welfare programs.
Jackson is knocked out of the running early on, finding that the public has no desire to see the space program end. Gore generally leads in the polls; he is the stronger campaigner, and has the more space-positive message. But a few mis-steps dog his campaign. A series of TV and radio ads attempt to tar Dukakis with a policy he had enacted in Massachusetts of weekend furloughs for prisoners, a policy that resulted in tragedy when one such prisoner committed murder while out and about. Gore’s campaign runs a series of negative attack ads which backfire badly. Jackson, already effectively out of the running by this point due (according to opinion polls) largely to his anti-space stance, uses his powers of agitation to raise a stink against the ads, and against Gore (who he is particularly angry at for having very effectively shot him down over space). The end result is that Gore campaign slips, falters, and falls behind.
President Dole runs a particularly lackluster campaign. Coupled with the slow economy, this results in a narrow loss to Mike Dukakis. In January of 1989, Dukakis and his VP Gary Hart take office. At the same time, the Democrats take control of the House, and nearly the Senate.
In Real Life, the President elected in 1988 witnessed the end of the Soviet Union. In the 2001 timeline, this does not happen. In this timeline, the Soviet Union is spending vast sums on their space exploration and weaponization program, several times more than IRL; however, here this does not bankrupt the Soviets. Partially this is due to the different global situation… with more Communist satellites basically paying tribute to the USSR, the Soviet economy is improved; additionally, as in the US, the active space program inspires the Soviet public, and spurs innovation. The domestic Soviet economy is more productive.
Additionally: the Soviet leadership is more hardline and paranoid than IRL. After Brezhnev dies in ’82, he is replaced by Andropov; when Andropov dies in ’84 he is replaced directly by Gorbachev (IRL Andropovs choice to replace him; in this timeline, Chernenko, already terminally ill, is seen as too frail to stand up to the Americans in the struggle to come). Gorbachev introduces his perestroika (“restructuring”) policies in early 1985. The goal is a revival of the Soviet economy and culture… even though things are cruising along, the Communist Party can see that the vast expenses on the military and space are not supportable long-term. At the same time, no alternatives seem to present themselves to the threat of the US in space. But on Earth…
Communism is slowly expanding around the world; all of eastern Asia is communist, about a third of sub-Saharan Africa, several Latin and Central American nations have installed communist governments, and open and bloody civil wars are rampant. Italy is Communist; West Germany is teetering, and American Polaris missile submarines are kicked out of Britain by the Labour-led government (Thatcher having been booted from her role as Prime Minister due to the disastrous effect of the coal miners strikes of ’84… here far worse than IRL due to the fact that nuclear power has led to coal being that much less valuable).
The result of this is a serious sense of cognitive dissonance on *both* sides. The Americans see the world with a sense of dread due to the growing Communist world, yet they are clearly leading the way into the future by conquering the heavens.The Soviets see the world as belonging to them, with a single world Communist government being the goal and the expectation, and yet the Americans are building an armed camp right over their heads.
By 1990, the Moon has a population of more than a thousand, more than 90% of whom are Americans. The US has sent several missions to Mars and has established a permanent base on Phobos, with Lowell Base on the surface of Mars in the early stages of assembly. The USAA has visited a number of near-Earth asteroids, and has begun moving several smaller ones towards Earth (with the intent of using the Moon to help swing them into a high orbit about the Earth). Unmanned probes have flown past every planet save Pluto, and several orbiting robots circle Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and one is heading towards Neptune. Cytherian Station One circles Venus, providing safe accommodations for the occasional manned missions to the hellhouse world. Plans are in place for massive bases at Aristarchus and Clavius. Two vast radio telescopes have been built on the farside, away from the blare of terrestrial radio transmissions. Solar Power Satellite prototypes have proven technically successful, though clearly more expensive than ground-based nuclear; still, construction begins on a full-scale Manhattan-sized satellite in geosynchronous orbit. The raw material for the bulk of the structure is aluminum, production of which has begun on the moon. Transport of the raw aluminum to lunar orbit is via crude hybrid rockets made locally, using oxygen cooked out of the soil, and aluminum powder. The two are mixed together to form a slurry; pumped into a combustion chamber, the mix burns spectacularly hot. But the exhaust product is of course aluminum oxide, which is a solid at distressingly high temperatures. So additional oxygen is pumped into the aft end of the combustion chamber; the rocket exhaust is composed of aluminum oxide dust and superheated oxygen. Performance is pitiful and reliability is poor… but it’s good enough to launch several tons at a time into lunar orbit. The booster itself is built largely from lunar aluminum. The cargo rockets are collected in lunar orbit and sent to geosynchronous with nuclear-ion tugs. It’s slow and uneconomical, but it works. Still, two vast magnetic launchers are planned to replace these clunky boosters. In support of these planned projects, new satellites are to be launched in the coming years that will focus like never before on mapping the subsurface geology of the moon using gravitational and magnetic sensors.
And on top of all that, Earth orbit from LEO to GEO is loaded with weapons platforms. Nuclear powered free-electron lasers and neutral particle beams form the bulk of the American defensive systems, with individual platforms numbering in the hundreds to perhaps a thousand (numbers being hard to come by, since Neptune launches tend to split off any of a number of sub-payloads, most of which are officially undefined). The American ICBM leg of the nuclear triad has evaporated; the Titan and Minuteman missile silos now sit empty, having been replaced by orbiting nuclear weapons platforms. However, the US Navy has four dozen Ohio class ballistic missile submarines, and the USAF still operates a fleet of aging B-52s and a hundred B-1As, all armed with stealthy subsonic cruise missiles.
All this of course costs. While the civilian space efforts are starting to become profitable on their own, the military programs are simply vastly expensive. And while the Soviet leadership is perfectly happy to launch their own space weapons, they make much use of propaganda claiming that *all* of the American space efforts are military. This has an important impact outside of the US. Within the US, the Soviets use somewhat less obvious propaganda; their agents and sympathizers in the entertainment and news media propagate memes that convince some people that if only the money spent on space were spent on Earth, problems such as poverty and unemployment could be fixed; or that the Soviets only want peaceful relations, but US militarism is a threat to the world. For the first time since the late 1960’s, this sort of thinking gains a level of prominence within the US.
President Dukakis seems to support at least part of this thinking. The US economic slowdown has seen the unemployment rate shoot upwards to almost 3%. Dukakis argues that military space spending should be slashed and the money used to bolster welfare programs. In 1990, the US Federal budget is produced that reflects this policy. As a result, space spending as a whole is cut, social welfare spending explodes; but within a year is is clear that what has transpired is that tens of thousands of high paying high tech lobs have been sacrificed for food stamps. Rather than bolstering the economy, unemployment rises and tax revenues decline. The response is a proposed raise in tax rates.
The Presidential election of 1992 becomes a mandate on the space program as a whole. The slashed military space budget has had a negative impact on the civilian efforts – as many expected, since the two are so closely interlinked. The first Uranus booster is scheduled for launch in early 1992, but the changes in government policy have put the Uranus project in mothballs. Even the production facility is shuttered.
Dukakis’ popularity tanks in early 1992, with protests and riots of the kind not seen since the 1960’s; the Democrat party actually replaces Dukakis in the primary. For once, the Republicans and the Democrats send candidates before the electorate who can both be declared “space cadets.” So in 1993, a new President takes office who was, for the first time, a true proponent of the space program in all its aspects…
To be continued