Just another argument for NASA's building a better delta-winged, spaceplane-shaped mouse trap.
The emoji of someone who knows exactly how they intend to torment their audience and exactly how much fun will be had with their suffering.
A tragedy, as I love my nearly lenticular little flapjack. ...big flapjack? 15'-diameter of pancake re-entry goodness.
The only thing more insidious than an allohistorical space TL writer who knows what he intends to include is one who also knows what he intends not to.
The niche would be for nations with similar economic profiles and fiscal outlooks. One of the Euro's biggest issues has been imposing a uniform monetary policy and its negative externalities. Italy is the poster-child, as it's suffered massively in terms of competitiveness because the Euro is...
It would have been as suited as anyone, given the intense newness of everything related to space rocketry. An example would be Dr. Harvey Hall, who would wear a great many hates from 1945 to 1973, when he retired from public service as NASA's Chief Scientist for Manned Spaceflight. He was, by...
NASA wasn't created until mid-1958. The initial solution in the aftermath of Sputnik had been ARPA, which struggled from its birth to make headway against the ambitions of the Army and Air Force, both of whom were keenly interested in being the principal agency responsible for as much of...
Hey, the H3's still flying, so the Delta family is still going strong! H3 has about much in common with the N-I as the Delta IV Heavy has in common with the Long Tank Thor, after all.
Don't most pacts between nations involving compartmentalized state secrets start as just that, agreements between the principals? And saying than an agreement between the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has "no official standing" is burying the lede...
Oh, it's possible, but that applies to a great many things. But yes, Black Prince and a new(-ish) mash-up of stuff from the Anglo-French parts bin are different things. I should have been clearer about that. The latter still has massive political problems, but that's what butterflies are for...
I think this rather misstates the nature of Anglo-American atomic cooperation. The U.S. and U.K. were to be equals in the sharing of atomic information: The Hyde Park Memo was the entire point of that. Its misfiling was a historical accident -- Wilson Brown, ironically, fell for British...
Have you considered, per chance, applying to work at North American Rockwell? They've got this idea -- Star-Raker -- that needs exactly your kind of salesmanship...
I dug out my copy of A Vertical Empire in light of this thread, to refresh my own half-remembered thoughts. I was specifically looking for the quote about Anglo-American space cooperation being a nonstarter because of the UK's meager resources. Which led me to:
"Zuckerman" being Chief...
I've recently been rereading A Vertical Empire, and given how bomberphilic some of the Civil Service was, it might have hit the desk of someone who was of sufficient soundness to ensure the proposal was handled with the discretion it required. But yes, the ministerial response to a proposal to...
I think it's important to nail down exacting what's being asked here. As there's really two very, very different PoDs that this can cover: One is where the TFX tender is never made -- such as by Nixon winning in 1960 and butterflying McNamara becoming SecDef -- and the other is one where the TFX...
You know, someone should write a timeline about Robert Heinlein becoming enmeshed in the Navy's quite serious and sadly mostly forgotten space ambitions. I'm sure there are interesting things you could do with that. Cough, cough, shameless plug, shameless plug.
Except that IOTL, the Navy did...