If you were alive when 2001: A Space Odyssey was in theaters, you might have thought it didn’t really go far enough. After all, in 1958, the US launched its first satellite. The first US astronaut went up in 1961. Eight years later, Armstrong put a boot on the moon’s surface. That was a lot of progress for 11 years. The movie came out in 1968, so what would happen in 33 years? Turns out, not as much as you would have guessed back then. [The History Guy] takes us through a trip of what could have been if progress had marched on after those first few moon landings. You can watch the video below.
The story picks up way before NASA. Each of the US military branches felt like it should take the lead on space technology. Sputnik changed everything and spawned both ARPA and NASA. The Air Force, though, had an entire space program in development, and many of the astronauts for that program became NASA astronauts.
The Army also had its own stymied space program. They eventually decided it would be strategic to develop an Army base on the moon for about $6 billion. The base would be a large titanium cylinder buried on the moon that would house 12 people.
The base called for forty launches in a single year before sending astronauts, and then a stunning 150 Saturn V launches to supply building materials for the base. Certainly ambitious and probably overly ambitious, in retrospect.
There were other moon base plans. Most languished with little support or interest. The death knell, though, was the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which forbids military bases on the moon.
While we’d love to visit a moon base, we are fine with it not being militarized. We also want our jet packs.
“Never ceases to amaze me how far the human imagination outstrips human capability”.
It’s a comment I read in relation to the video on YouTube. Imagination is a faculty that is usually not well understood, even by those who use it to dumb down others, but this step is already extremely harmful.
What harm are you referring to here?
I answer with a slightly different angle. This is my opinion, for which being such I am not looking for approval. A large percentage of the time we take is occupied by automatisms, a part of these are necessary to tire less, a part is neutral in the sense that there are no contraindications but not even personal evolutions, and then there is the third part that could be defined as pernicious and substantially consists in receiving without filters what is imbued with the culture and society in which you are immersed. I am not saying that the latter are only evil, they are the result of countless beautiful and ugly stratifications, the problem is that those who ride them use them for their comfortable and relying on this sort of unawareness that is inherent in mankind. If with my imagination I go to the moon, I can see on earth and my fellow men and the heap of automatisms and mechanics with which you walk on earth on paths traced by others, but to do this I must overcome an obstacle that is given by the fact that the observation from the satellite makes me lose the reference points that now I no longer surround myself, and in my opinion there are not many who manage to accept it because it places in an initial state of soul.
“In the last sentence of my previous message there is a word missing so it is not understandable.
“…and in my opinion there are not many who can accept it because it puts you in an anguished state of mind”.
The Army Ballistic Missile Agency (now Marshall) was robbed.
We could have had a Redstone orbit a tiny craft even before Sputnik. The Soviets wanted what was called Sputnik III to be first—but a beeping beachball and the mammoth R-7 gave them the edge.
Some history—read page 110 of this declassified paper:
https://up-ship.com/blog/?p=29654
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_I
Worse, the pad used to launch Explorer I had a bloody Air Force Thor put on it as a way to re-write history. That has since been corrected—but Trump wants an Air Force man as NASA chief.
Lastly—don’t buy into the SLS bashing.
This is what a rocket is supposed to look like:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zctTKdQcmVA
At least Elon did get his payload door open:
https://x.com/kerballistic07/status/1935559963574747268
We can’t even colonise the Moon let alone the Mars
If the Chinese decide to build a military base on the moon, contrary to the Outer Space Treaty, how could we stop them? They’ve already shown they aren’t interested in international treaties with their actions attempting to nationalise the South China Sea.
I guess it would go much like the early episodes of AppleTV’s “For All Mankind”.
FWIW – China acceded* to the treaty in 1983/84.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty#List_of_parties
Joined after signing was closed.
The USA isn’t too fond of treaties either. The difference is, we usually write them, so we can add in a line “the United States doesn’t have to do this lol”
First we would need to watch and see if they don’t stop themselves. It’s not as easy as putting a boat in the little pond outside their front porch
Nobody has ever walked on the moon
However, several people have have awkwardly jumped and shuffled around the moon.
And tripped.
We’re Americans.
We brought cars to the moon, had some nice drives.
It’s got to piss the Metric system people off.
Cars parked on moon have imperial bolts.
Probes that left the solar system have imperial bolts.
What will the aliens think?
No we’re not americans.
OK.. we ARE subjugated by Americans (with the help of our politicians), but still though.
The aliens would think “… so amazingly primitive they still think imperial units are a pretty neat idea.”
Of course, anyone who attended a school and took history classes in a halfway-decent education system would not need to be reminded that, back then, many other countries were still using imperial units. All but one has since outgrown them.
Interestingly, the only country to have put men on the moon is also the only one that had a significant industrial manufacturing base survive WWII.
Units had little to do with that, but now that everyone else in the world has moved on, that mighty industrial base has dwindled to a tiny fraction of its former glory, now eclipsed by countries that were economically insignificant at that time. But perhaps that’s just a coincidence.
The funny thing is that both the petrol-based car and the rockets have their roots in Germany. Well, mostly.
The Chinese had fireworks a thousand years ago, the Russian teacher Tsiolkovsky was a rocket pioneer.
Then there were the infamous V2 rockets, of course, a rather shameful German invention I think.
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Tsiolkovsky
That’t not correct nor fair, a baby isn’t a full human yet and its brain needs to develop to become a human.
But even given that, some people are just born with a bad character (and some with an overly ‘good’ one), and raising a human in just the right way can suppress the nastiness, but it’s still there, and in some types of people you can’t suppress it enough to not have it affect their surroundings.
Bit of a counter-troll, the truth nonetheless:
The metric-based international yard and international pound were adopted by the United States National Bureau of Standards effective 1 July 1959.
In Australia, the international yard and pound were instituted through Statutory Rule No. 142 of 1961, effective 1 January 1964.
The UK adopted the international yard and pound for all purposes through the Weights and Measures Act 1963, effective 1 January 1964
The international yard equals 0.9144 meters and the international pound equals 0.45359237 kilograms.
Since the adoption of the international yard during the 1950s and 1960s the inch has been based on the metric system and defined as exactly 25.4 mm.
So you see, the US/Imperial standards are in fact defined by metric.
🎶And nobody walks in LA🎵
The should all ‘Learn to Swim’.
Wasn’t anything but cost that scuttled space exploration. Drop the cost by a factor of a thousand and we will be polluting space with rich people
Polluting space with rich people is happening already and has been for several years. That’s all that Blue Origin has accomplished so far.
There’s a nobel prize in both physics and peace waiting for you if you can figure out how to keep them up there
However, I don’t believe space can be “polluted.” This is misanthropic thinking.
There is already hard radiation and dirty rocks and smelly comets and so on.
Any kind of human “pollution” can only make things better in a largely dead, non-sentient environment.
Terran microbes can breathe life into other planetary bodies, which at least saves life itself.
The Nazis have a secret moon base already, I saw a documentary about it!
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1034314/
Ah, that one. There’s another one, too, the not-so-secret DDR Mondbasis.
https://www.youtube.com/@DDRMondbasis/videos
;)
Clavius Base in “2001: A Space Odyssey” might not have been officially military, but the original subtext of the story was that there was MAJOR Cold War tension going on: the satellites glimpsed at the beginning were nuclear weapons platforms; the clenched-teeth polite smiles between USA and USSR representatives aboard Space Station V; the throwaway reference to “loyalty oaths” at the lunar conference; and a plotline mentioned in the novelization that a re-radicalized China had abandoned non-proliferation and was sparking a global arms race.
As an 8 year old Marine brat watching ‘2001’ in a Hiroshima cinema, I too assumed that we’d have a permanent base on the Moon 30 years hence. But, I couldn’t know then that 1) Nixon intended to cut the Apollo program short, given its association with Kennedy, leading to 2) we didn’t have a plan for making ‘2001’ real, and would have choked at the cost to execute one.
Good article and video on what might have been. Project Horizon and Lunex are probably one of many forgotten space dreams. I have never heard of either. The moon should remain as a non-political neutral territory . SciFi has also dreamed as to what might have been as well. Good thing there is no moon base. We’ll just start storing nuclear waste there and well what could possibly go wrong ?