My little alternate history was dreamed up to try to come up with a more-or-less believable timeline that led from the April of 1968 as remembered by actual history, to the 1999 as envisioned in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. This means that the two endpoints are known and fixed, but the stuff in between is unknown and flexible. There are an infinite number of paths that lead from A to Z, so my path is, even if it is judged to be Accurate, Awesome and Reasonable, just one of many that could be dreamed up. My own little story here focused on the Big Picture, with the US President, International Relations and the Space Program being the main things.
There are a vast number of smaller stories that fit in, but don’t drive the timeline as much. Still, such things might be of interest to some… certainly to *me.*
Here’s one: commercial aviation.
History starts to diverge in 1968, and really starts to take off after July, 1969. At that time in the US, the Boeing 747 was just about to enter service, and the Boeing 2707 SST was still a forward-moving project. It was eventually cancelled IRL in 1971 after Congress cut off funding. But in the alternate timeline, the change to a more robust space program is, by 1971, starting to have some subtle changes to society and technology at large. Additionally, the Kennedy Watergate Scandal has hit the Democrat Party worse than the IRL Nixon Watergate Scandal hit the Republicans, since the RFK scandal dealt with numerous party officials and the party machine. A result of this is that the voices of the likes of William Proxmire, one of the primary opponents of the SST program, are somewhat muted. As a result, in this timeline the funding for the SST program is not cut. The prototypes are completed and fly successfully; the 2707 goes into production and a number of airlines buy and operate them.
A side effect of this is that the British-French Concorde ceases operations *years* earlier. The Concorde was a relatively tiny aircraft compared to the 2707 (about 100 seats compared to 277), and was insanely expensive. So long as it was the *only* SST out there, it was a prestige aircraft, but in a world with a much less expensive 2707, it would simply be ridiculous to keep flying it. But even though the British had insanely nationalized their aerospace industry, it seems unlikely that they, the French or Airbus would simply let the US *own* supersonic transport. So it’s fair to assume that European competition to the 2707 would arise within a decade or so.
And the 2707 would of course begin to show its age by the early 1980s. With the advances in aerospace that would necessarily follow from the beefed-up space program, much more efficient SSTs would be possible in the 1980’s. So I suggest that the Boeing 2717 would enter service in the mid ’80’s.
The Boeing SSTs would see competition from not only other SSTs (not only a hypothetical Airbus SST, but also a McDonnell-Douglas SST and a Tupolev SST better than the rushed Tu-144), but from aircraft improving on the SST. A Lockheed hypersonic transport enters service in the 1990s.
Even with great advanced in aerodynamics, materials and engines, supersonic transportation would remain substantially more expensive than subsonic transport. By alternate 1999, the skies would be crawling with jetliners that look like jetliners we knew in 1999… but subtly different. Why not a latest generation 747 where the upper deck goes all the way back to the tail, providing an Airbus A380-like monster years earlier? With the cheap electricity provided by nuclear power and the reduction in use of middle eastern petroleum, why not jetliners fueled by hydrogen, methane or propane? Blended wing bodies? Flying wings? It’s just barely possible that someone might even have a nuclear powered commercial aircraft, though I think that making that politically practical even in the alternate timeline would require a whole new type of extremely safe reactor. Something like the hafnium isomer “reactor” or cold fusion would seem a good fit… except for the little problem that these technologies just don’t seem to work. But in a world where nuclear power is not irrationally feared and repressed as in ours, who can say…
Next: Computers