Munich Shuffle: 1938-1942
- Thread starter Garrison
- Start date
We might still get Winkle Brown being the first man through the sound barrier.
Garrison
Donor
A partition of Poland but in Austria it will be more a matter of guaranteeing Soviet access to their zone in Germany.
But there's one thing consistent about any ATL after WW2 is that "Poland cannot into Space" 😋
Is it out of the question for the Western Allies to consider Austria as a part of pre-war Germany and make the entirety of Austria the sole Soviet occupation zone of Germany?
Garrison
Donor
The Soviets would not go for that, they want a piece of Germany proper. Honestly the major reason for having the Soviets reach Austria in narrative terms is to provide a link to the area of Germany they are going to be allocated, as I suspect neither the Czechs nor the Poles will be willing to grant them rights of transit. Courtesy of @Aichi72 I do have a post war map, but I'm planning to save that for when the war in the Pacific is over.
Soviets would demand a sector of Berlin as a minimum, for , if nothing else, propaganda reasons.
Garrison
Donor
And they will get one, though ITTL they will be the ones depending on the other side in the Cold War for continued access.
Bavaria would seem pretty logical for an occupation zone as it is right across the border, has some old revolutionary credentials dating back to the 1919 and it would be pretty funny if the Soviets get the area of Germany that is considered to be the birthplace of the Nazi Party.The Soviets would not go for that, they want a piece of Germany proper. Honestly the major reason for having the Soviets reach Austria in narrative terms is to provide a link to the area of Germany they are going to be allocated, as I suspect neither the Czechs nor the Poles will be willing to grant them rights of transit. Courtesy of @Aichi72 I do have a post war map, but I'm planning to save that for when the war in the Pacific is over.
At least Mengele didn’t get away with his atrocious war crimes ITTL.
Does someone knows the final of the Killzone 2? I'm kinda imagine two Polish soldiers arriving at the Chancellery, with Hitler with is back on them, and making is discurs similar to the game
I'm guessing Vietnam still goes red, because even after half a century of communist rule people still call the city Saigon in the country colloquially.
Soviet Union is definitely not getting Poland in its sphere of influence. It will however get Poland as a bitter neighbour with a long memory.
The surrender of von Braun et al to British rather than Yankee forces is not going to be the thing that puts the British missile/space operations ahead ITTL in my humble opinion.
What I see Author remarks foretelling as a more robust British space presence points more to a general prosperity of Britain in some form--be it by stronger Empire (doubtful!), Commonwealth federation (more plausible) or just the UK core being more economically strong, relative to OTL (and relative to the OTL US share of overall postwar capitalist prosperity perhaps being somewhat less). No one needed the genius of the German pioneers to succeed in rocketry IMHO; powers that could piggyback on their work could do well to take the benefit, but no one would be crippled by having zero access to it.
For reasons to be explained below, involving the promise of a path the British did actually take OTL being discouraged and disapproved by von Braun himself (using hydrogen peroxide instead of liquid oxygen as oxidant in rocket engines) setting him up as leader of the British program could actually set them back; but we can speculate that the upshot is not too much unlike what happened OTL in the Soviet Union--the Russians did not capture the leaders of the German program, having just one of the inner circle come forward to offer himself (at his wife's urging IIRC) but did capture some sites where a few V2 articles were to be found plus a number of low-ranking workers on the project, foremen and so forth. They were set up as one "sharasta" (prison camp devoted to some technical project) but the long term upshot was that the native Soviet engineers under Sergei Korolev proceeded largely on their own chosen path, observing what the Germans did, but as often as not taking their example as what not to do as using it to advance their own art. The rockets that did emerge as Soviet military missiles and eventually Korolev's R-7 that was the one to launch Sputnik, and in elaborated form eventually Vostok, Voshkhod, and ultimately Soyuz was largely Soviet in concept and detailed engineering.
My hope is that similarly in Britain, the British pretty much do what they could without any of the German information, and there is good reason to think that early generation rockets could in fact accomplish such goals as putting crewable-sized satellites into low Earth orbit. (The reason they can't be content with smaller satellites is that mid-1950s solid state electronics would be in its infancy, and vacuum tube based electronics would be very fragile versus the stresses and vibrations of rocket launch, so human crews would be necessary to actually operate in orbit, both to maintain what electronics there is and to substitute human control for tasks that in the 1960s both superpowers were able to trust to more robust, compact and less power hungry solid state systems. And this means that putting objects into orbit is merely the first hurdle an early program must overcome; they also have to figure out how to enable a spacecraft moving at orbital speeds to reenter the atmosphere and land its human crew safely, which both raises the minimum mass needed and poses a major technical challenge in itself on any scale.
One leg up the British have is the British Interplanetary Society, which tended to specialize in high concept theoretical evaluations and forward looking vision. OTL its member Arthur C. Clarke, famous for his science fiction work, first made a name for himself proposing placing crewed space station platforms up at geosynchronous orbit above the equator to achieve global radio relays--again, doing that with 1945 tech would require sustaining a crew of technicians to ride herd on the electronics.
The fact that the station orbits in vacuum does hold the door open for vacuum tube, aka "valve" in British terminology, tech that omits the glass tubes needed to keep the wire/grid elements in the necessary vacuum, which ought to go far to lower their weight and vulnerability to being smashed during launch, but the arrays of naked wire structures would still have to provide volume to separate the operations of each "valve" from its neighbors, and to allow technicians to observe which elements have failed and to reach in and plug in a replacement--some failures might be repairable in a workshop, but in addition to sending up continual ferry payloads each with food and other supplies to sustain the crews and eventually ferry individuals down to be replaced with new shifts, the supply rockets would also have to bring up replacement parts.
Honestly long before even the most precocious and heavily funded program could possibly place such a station so high up (about 1/10 of the distance to the Moon, around 40,000 kilometers from the planet's center) in such a hostile environment (in particular at that distance Earth's magnetic field would not shield them from Solar wind particles, nor the nearby "shadow" of Earth blocking half the sky's cosmic radiation background apply to speak of with Earth so far away) solid state systems would be evolving toward reliability and low mass and moderate to low power draw, so the project would be re-designed for such technology and eventually the need for maintenance crew would be eliminated in favor of planning to replace entire satellites of modest mass.
Recent posts have settled a lot of issues that seemed clouded with uncertainty. It was not clear to me for instance that there would be postwar missile programs, or at any rate they might have had to be revived from near total abandonment--apparently though they are going forward much as OTL.
That to me suggests either that 1) Japan's surrender is delayed so long that the Manhattan Project is able not only to accumulate and assemble the materials for Trinity, but also for a second operational Bomb (Fat Man plutonium implosion type) to actually use, either on a Japanese target or in a demonstration that tips the balance of Imperial Japan toward accepting surrender--perhaps if the timing does not allow a Fat Man, a Little Boy gun-type uranium bomb at any rate would be impressive enough (it was deemed so sure-fire, albeit badly inefficient, that no test was required)--or 2) the war ends with either no nuclear detonation at all, or with just the Trinity test shot.
Even in contingency 2, perhaps Uncle Sam will wrap up MP by pushing forward for at least a test shot and enough material and sustained infrastructure to demonstrate that the USA will sustain at least a token nuclear capability. This seemed to be in doubt to me if the Bomb were not in fact used in anger against Japan, but the implication of the posts is that nuclear development is generally going to go forward much as OTL, so I need not muster the arguments against it if it is happening anyway.
I say "token" capability because OTL even with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki being deemed the obvious silver bullet finally ending the war and cementing the US commitment to nuclear arms firmly, production of fissionable materials was remarkably slow, leading to it taking close to half a decade to accumulate less than 100 warheads. As the Cold War intensified, nuclear research was not only sustained but doubled down on, and this resulted in both the basic throughput of materials accumulation being accelerated even as improvements in weapon design greatly raised the efficiency of warheads, permitting far less material to accomplish bigger bangs (and allowing far smaller, lighter warheads that could be delivered over medium ranges by such aircraft as the originally British-designed "Canberra" and US designed B-47 "Tornado"). But in the years just after V-J Day OTL, the US inventory of very large "Fat Man" types that required specialized "Silverplate" B-29s to deliver a single bomb was measured in dozens, not the thousands we got used to later.
Without the A-Bomb getting the credit (however exaggerated) for ending this war and thus, double-edged sword, casting a shadow of massive doom over the peace, such as it was, missile programs might also be thrown into doubt. (Yet the implication is that by and large they get a similar priority to OTL). As things were OTL there was much naysaying and indeed earlier posts here in accurately dismissing the rationality of the German V-2 program (as OTL, though I think the net damage done by the earlier surge of V-2 strikes ITTL was less by far than OTL, desultory though that was as well) suggested to me this might be conventional wisdom in the immediate postwar period.
Denunciations of the folly of the dream of ballistic rocket artillery focused largely on the question of accuracy in targeting--unless one equipped each rocket-bomb with a kamikaze human pilot to adjust fine trajectory to come in on target, uncrewed missiles would go astray by miles.
OTL, of course, a possible answer to that objection is that the blast radius and sheer scale of devastation caused even by the earliest and least effective A-bombs (never mind orders of magnitude more that could be achieved with advanced designs) could compensate for considerable deviations from nominal ground zero.
Thus, the ballistic missile largely goes hand in hand with nuclear weaponry. To be sure early naysayers also underestimated the possibility of major improvements in accuracy due to more sophisticated guidance and control--with enough of that, ballistic rockets could be used for long range artillery (or very short range, as in bazookas/katushas/Panzerfaust type anti-tank rockets) with conventional warheads. But in delivering conventional warheads a rocket has a tough challenge to outshine long established conventional guns or airplane bombers.
If then we have programs in the USA, and apparently also in Britain (on whatever scale of political entity, Empire/Commonwealth/UK itself) for missiles in the 1950s, I am supposing this means that even if no A-Bomb is ever deployed to strike at an actual Japanese target (counting a demonstration in sight of the Imperial capital say to wipe out some ships just offshore, perhaps, as a borderline war deployment) still, enough leaders in enough rival powers take its potential for a future war very seriously and reason much as they did OTL where the demonstrations were all too real and deadly enough. Even without Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasted as OTL (and in a drawn out conventional war, surely those cities would suffer conventional bombing piecemeal instead) the writing on the wall must be clear enough.
Getting back to a specifically British rocket/space program, it is certainly gratifying to see Black Arrow mentioned by name, because contrary to the notion that von Braun et al are the trump cards, I do believe the OTL British track chosen of attempting to develop hydrogen peroxide based rocket engines is a very promising one, and if the OTL programs had received more generous funding and higher regime priority, I do think that among the advantages of pursuing a peroxide path is that it would be especially outstanding as an early generation approach. Eventually other alternatives would surpass it, but if earlier and especially earlier British accomplishments achieve some major milestones in ballistic missile operations and perhaps orbital space flight, the UK might commit to sustaining ongoing space operations as a routine thing, and gradually develop the more advanced alternatives--insofar as that is even necessary. For deep space operations, switching over to liquid oxygen has clear advantages, but for at least first stage boosters high test (actually, 100 percent pure is best) hydrogen peroxide may be good enough to stick with. And I suspect generally good enough to eclipse the alternative of hypergolic propellants, which I personally think should be avoided if they reasonably can be. Anyway for supreme performance with chemical combustion, it is pretty hard to beat hydrogen-fueled oxygen oxidized approaches--OTL the USA had that pretty well in hand on a small scale by the mid-1960s and the Soviets somewhat belatedly could do it pretty well a decade later.
In the interim, both USA and USSR developed hypergolic rockets in parallel, the US with the Titan II and onward series, abandoned for military purposes with development of solid fuel missiles which other Western powers also have come to rely on; the Russians continue to use hypergol militarily and in the Proton rocket--and in orbital space and beyond hypergolic systems have been a mainstay of maneuvering and upper stage thrust, whereas instead of pursuing such engines as the American RL-10, J-2 and SSME that use hydrogen, in the 1960s the Russians also improved performance of kerosene-oxygen engines, never matching the massive thrust of the US F-1 used on the Saturn V, but surpassing the specific impulse (a measure of efficiency and index of mass ratio of propellants required corresponding to effective nozzle exhaust speed) considerably largely by means of developing closed cycle systems of driving the propellant pumps.
I do think that an ambitious and well funded British program might beat both the US and USSR into orbit relying in the 1950s on moderately well advanced hydrogen peroxide based systems. This is largely because such engines would achieve given levels of specific impulse and thrust, up to the limits optimized peroxide can reach, at lower temperatures than their rivals with higher ultimate potential, and to an extent because the propellant would store in a smaller volume at higher density, and also because (like hypergols) everything stores near "room temperature" at Earth sea level.
This is qualified for both hypergols and peroxide of course--hydrazine based fuels for hypergols can freeze at moderately low temperatures while the nitric acid/N2O4 based oxidant will boil at temperatures often encountered in places like the USA (or even say Siberia in mid-summer).
And one of two tricks that makes hydrogen peroxide more stable is to store it at temperatures just above its freezing point, which is a bit lower than water's at 0 C/273 K. (The other trick is to realize near perfect purity, which is pretty counterintuitive but a fact--this is convenient if one can manage the investment of achieving it, because of course 100 percent purity is also the best option for using it as an oxidizer--it also maximizes the storage density, further improved by chilling it). So peroxide too has some temperature constraints, but maintaining a volume of it, even one loaded into a rocket propellant tank sitting waiting to launch, at say 275 K is much easier than trying to keep liquid oxygen from boiling off which it does above 100 K--that's -173 C or -250 Fahrenheit! This can be done of course, and in fact aside from being nearly the most effective oxidant possible and clearly the most effective practical one, LOX is also relatively cheap to acquire--von Braun's OTL design for the Army field short range ballistic rocket the "Redstone" used also to launch the suborbital first iteration Mercury capsules involved a system of trailer vehicles including a plant to extract liquid oxygen from the air on the spot of the mobile deployed launch site to fill up the missile's LOX tanks without having to haul the stuff from any central depot; the power costs of running such a plant (basically one just compresses air and cools it to precipitate the oxygen out, since nitrogen liquefies at an even lower temperature--yet far warmer than necessary to store liquid hydrogen, which is down around 20 K) are moderate versus the sort of plant and power and inputs needed to generate and purify hydrogen peroxide, which is thus far costlier per kilogram, and thus even more costly in terms of performance delivered.
But one of the wiser things Elon Musk says is that if you can reach a point in rocket operations where the cost of the propellants becomes a major part of the overall program costs, you are doing something fantastically well. In the 1950s, the challenges of delivering on the theoretical promise of engines relying on kerosene and oxygen, never mind either hypergols or hydrogen fuel, would remain daunting and actual delivered performance much degraded from theoretical possibilities, along with sadly poor reliability.
Choosing peroxide for the interim with advancing to more ambitious stuff later penciled in and developing in advanced research labs on the back burner would I think yield results equal to or superior to the best that could be done with more open ended advanced alternatives, and with better reliability and overall cost-effectiveness, and be good enough I think to put such modest goals as placing fairly large masses into low Earth orbit within reach perhaps well before 1957.
Of course there is absolutely no reason this IMH suspicion superior approach to early space achievements should be reserved for British minds and hands alone; I have wondered elsewhere whether the Soviets might have done far better to take this path in the 1950s, and nothing stops some Yankee firm or lab from trying it as well.
OTL though in addition to the fact that British development did in fact pursue high test hydrogen peroxide as rocket oxidant, we also have the deep and broad commitment of the Royal Navy to a strong submarine force, and among the items of Luftwaffe '46 style German Superscience loot the Allies will collect here is the Walter program of peroxide engines for submarines. I believe the British were working on that themselves anyway before and during the war, and OTL the Soviets took it up along with the RN. Now of course OTL the British program was abandoned after experiments with two subs, for reasons indicated by the acerbic nickname the sailors gave the HMS Explorer--"Exploder." The British subs did not actually explode or meet other major disaster but it was judged a near run thing, and at least one Soviet submarine came to grief thanks to a mishap involving a peroxide oxidized torpedo.
Especially in a world where nuclear power is on the agenda pretty much as OTL, with the British being early pioneers of the field and a more flush HMG determined to develop and use it, the days of peroxide sub
marines are numbered in that visionaries would look forward to the truly air-independent nuclear fission power plant of some kind--but if realism suggests that practical deployment is some decades off, it would be worthwhile to improve peroxide systems as interim expedients until the nukes become finally available. OTL the RN had to be cut back again and again and Britain abandoned mission after mission, but if the ATL ministries anticipate maintaining a higher level of deployment, they will need the advanced subs.
Against anyone pursuing peroxide, neither of the "tricks" I think will make HTHP more manageable, chilling it to near freezing nor achieving near perfect purity were known in 1945, and the latter is as mentioned hardly obvious--however, attempting very high purity despite apparent greater (rather than actually lesser) risk involved would be a goal for reasons of efficiency and highest performance.
Also the way to process medium-purity peroxide (industry had achieved mass production around 40 percent purity, the rest being water, IIRC, by this time) into near 100 percent is to freeze the mix and skim out the water ice that emerges--this naturally would produce the ultra-high test stuff at near freezing and maximum storage density, and it certainly is common sense that storing it that way not only gets best density but also creates a thermal buffer against fluctuations of spontaneous decomposition.
So, if the Admiralty decides to grasp the nettle firmly and develop peroxide energy storage for air-independent submerged operations of their subs, following the ambitious German example as well as their own inclinations, and resolves to make it workable with high quality engineering, the British military establishment should have a major investment in both R&D and material infrastructure in the stuff. Taking such a course should result soon in the discovery that high purity also makes it more stable, and meanwhile develop very good proficiency at finding and handling materials that minimize catalyst risk, while also developing systems that harness its power most effectively.
Britain is also, here as well as OTL, in the forefront of jet engine development. OTL one can read, in sources such as the rather famous book Ignition!, that von Braun considered and rejected HTHP for German rockets because of a nasty incident that claimed the life of one of his peers in the 1930s--but that fellow was trying to combine peroxide and fuel into a monopropellant, which is an obvious recipe for disaster to be sure. Meanwhile such a reader would be misled into thinking vB and company totally avoided the allegedly ultra-deadly stuff and that would be quite wrong--in fact the V-2 rocket engine was pumped by a turbine driven by steam (and oxygen) generated by catalyzing hydrogen peroxide--I am not sure of what purity, I am going to guess about 40 percent as that was what was "on the shelf." Thus every V-2 launched in fact used hydrogen peroxide for a critical role, in modest quantity to be sure--and the same was true of the first rocket to put something into low Earth orbit, Sergei Korolev's R-7, whose engines burned LOX and kerosene to be sure, but these propellants were again pumped by a decomposed hydrogen peroxide turbine. This highlights the role of turbines similar to those used in air-breathing jet engines, an art that deeper American pockets would eventually match and perhaps surpass British engineering at--but even today British jet engines and other applications of turbojet tech have a major share of global markets under such brands as Rolls-Royce.
In 1945 British jet design was at the cutting edge, and honestly if I wanted to boost British potentials by capturing some Germans or other I'd sooner gift them with the best German jet engine designers--because they accomplished what they could during the war with their hands tied behind their backs as the Reich lost access to crucial exotic materials the Allies always had ready to hand. But without any Germans British designers such as the pioneer Frank Whittle led the way.
These are reasons I think the British might indeed have a chance to reach space in parallel with the Yankees and Soviets despite lacking the extremely vast regime resources of either.
Of course the more progress an exclusively British program might make, the more their rivals might double down to pull ahead and stay ahead out of sheer jealousy (and while Americans might not fear the British would actually use rocket superweapons against them, it being a prestige thing only for them, the Soviets could well fear the Western powers planning a preemptive attack on them for real, based on their bitter experiences never mind the fervid anti-Communist rhetoric of the Cold War era).
Perhaps an American response would be to propose some kind of partnership, but it seems implicit in the recent posts that much as OTL, the US government here too will renege on the "gentleman's agreement" between FDR and Churchill that in return for shared tech in general and in particular HMG handing over their work on "Tube Alloys" to benefit the Manhattan Project the outcomes of this American-run program (incorporating some British and other Commonwealth scientists to be sure, along with their TA documents) would be shared with Britain. After such an experience, the British might need some serious wooing and then ironclad guarantees.
I can't take the idea that postwar the British will be too severely divided from Uncle Sam all that seriously though. Perhaps if they somehow go beyond the kind of Labour governments that party offered and actually align with the USSR--but that's silly. OTL in fact Britain postwar was closest to the USA, to a degree that might seem downright sycophantic actually, under Labour ministries, it was the Tories, on paper more closely aligned to the kind of conservatism dominating the US, who were most liable to balk at Yankee direction and whims and adoption of Made-in-USA weapons systems in favor of trying to strengthen an independent British system, at least until Thatcher changed the game up somewhat. On paper Labour was socialist, at any rate a member of the Second International, but in general SI parties worked out in practice to be essentially mainstays of a capitalist system, and this was especially true of Labour no matter how reddish the rhetoric of certain wings of the party might have gotten. Nor is there any plausibility I can see of a major shift in British grassroots sentiment to favor more radical leftism.
If in fact Britain is to prosper well enough to have the kind of money to spend on rocketry and space travel, I am pretty sure they have to stay pretty close to the USA in terms of policy preferences. This hardly guarantees any sort of merger of their space programs, and the barriers to such a thing are pretty high too.
What I see Author remarks foretelling as a more robust British space presence points more to a general prosperity of Britain in some form--be it by stronger Empire (doubtful!), Commonwealth federation (more plausible) or just the UK core being more economically strong, relative to OTL (and relative to the OTL US share of overall postwar capitalist prosperity perhaps being somewhat less). No one needed the genius of the German pioneers to succeed in rocketry IMHO; powers that could piggyback on their work could do well to take the benefit, but no one would be crippled by having zero access to it.
For reasons to be explained below, involving the promise of a path the British did actually take OTL being discouraged and disapproved by von Braun himself (using hydrogen peroxide instead of liquid oxygen as oxidant in rocket engines) setting him up as leader of the British program could actually set them back; but we can speculate that the upshot is not too much unlike what happened OTL in the Soviet Union--the Russians did not capture the leaders of the German program, having just one of the inner circle come forward to offer himself (at his wife's urging IIRC) but did capture some sites where a few V2 articles were to be found plus a number of low-ranking workers on the project, foremen and so forth. They were set up as one "sharasta" (prison camp devoted to some technical project) but the long term upshot was that the native Soviet engineers under Sergei Korolev proceeded largely on their own chosen path, observing what the Germans did, but as often as not taking their example as what not to do as using it to advance their own art. The rockets that did emerge as Soviet military missiles and eventually Korolev's R-7 that was the one to launch Sputnik, and in elaborated form eventually Vostok, Voshkhod, and ultimately Soyuz was largely Soviet in concept and detailed engineering.
My hope is that similarly in Britain, the British pretty much do what they could without any of the German information, and there is good reason to think that early generation rockets could in fact accomplish such goals as putting crewable-sized satellites into low Earth orbit. (The reason they can't be content with smaller satellites is that mid-1950s solid state electronics would be in its infancy, and vacuum tube based electronics would be very fragile versus the stresses and vibrations of rocket launch, so human crews would be necessary to actually operate in orbit, both to maintain what electronics there is and to substitute human control for tasks that in the 1960s both superpowers were able to trust to more robust, compact and less power hungry solid state systems. And this means that putting objects into orbit is merely the first hurdle an early program must overcome; they also have to figure out how to enable a spacecraft moving at orbital speeds to reenter the atmosphere and land its human crew safely, which both raises the minimum mass needed and poses a major technical challenge in itself on any scale.
One leg up the British have is the British Interplanetary Society, which tended to specialize in high concept theoretical evaluations and forward looking vision. OTL its member Arthur C. Clarke, famous for his science fiction work, first made a name for himself proposing placing crewed space station platforms up at geosynchronous orbit above the equator to achieve global radio relays--again, doing that with 1945 tech would require sustaining a crew of technicians to ride herd on the electronics.
The fact that the station orbits in vacuum does hold the door open for vacuum tube, aka "valve" in British terminology, tech that omits the glass tubes needed to keep the wire/grid elements in the necessary vacuum, which ought to go far to lower their weight and vulnerability to being smashed during launch, but the arrays of naked wire structures would still have to provide volume to separate the operations of each "valve" from its neighbors, and to allow technicians to observe which elements have failed and to reach in and plug in a replacement--some failures might be repairable in a workshop, but in addition to sending up continual ferry payloads each with food and other supplies to sustain the crews and eventually ferry individuals down to be replaced with new shifts, the supply rockets would also have to bring up replacement parts.
Honestly long before even the most precocious and heavily funded program could possibly place such a station so high up (about 1/10 of the distance to the Moon, around 40,000 kilometers from the planet's center) in such a hostile environment (in particular at that distance Earth's magnetic field would not shield them from Solar wind particles, nor the nearby "shadow" of Earth blocking half the sky's cosmic radiation background apply to speak of with Earth so far away) solid state systems would be evolving toward reliability and low mass and moderate to low power draw, so the project would be re-designed for such technology and eventually the need for maintenance crew would be eliminated in favor of planning to replace entire satellites of modest mass.
Recent posts have settled a lot of issues that seemed clouded with uncertainty. It was not clear to me for instance that there would be postwar missile programs, or at any rate they might have had to be revived from near total abandonment--apparently though they are going forward much as OTL.
That to me suggests either that 1) Japan's surrender is delayed so long that the Manhattan Project is able not only to accumulate and assemble the materials for Trinity, but also for a second operational Bomb (Fat Man plutonium implosion type) to actually use, either on a Japanese target or in a demonstration that tips the balance of Imperial Japan toward accepting surrender--perhaps if the timing does not allow a Fat Man, a Little Boy gun-type uranium bomb at any rate would be impressive enough (it was deemed so sure-fire, albeit badly inefficient, that no test was required)--or 2) the war ends with either no nuclear detonation at all, or with just the Trinity test shot.
Even in contingency 2, perhaps Uncle Sam will wrap up MP by pushing forward for at least a test shot and enough material and sustained infrastructure to demonstrate that the USA will sustain at least a token nuclear capability. This seemed to be in doubt to me if the Bomb were not in fact used in anger against Japan, but the implication of the posts is that nuclear development is generally going to go forward much as OTL, so I need not muster the arguments against it if it is happening anyway.
I say "token" capability because OTL even with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki being deemed the obvious silver bullet finally ending the war and cementing the US commitment to nuclear arms firmly, production of fissionable materials was remarkably slow, leading to it taking close to half a decade to accumulate less than 100 warheads. As the Cold War intensified, nuclear research was not only sustained but doubled down on, and this resulted in both the basic throughput of materials accumulation being accelerated even as improvements in weapon design greatly raised the efficiency of warheads, permitting far less material to accomplish bigger bangs (and allowing far smaller, lighter warheads that could be delivered over medium ranges by such aircraft as the originally British-designed "Canberra" and US designed B-47 "Tornado"). But in the years just after V-J Day OTL, the US inventory of very large "Fat Man" types that required specialized "Silverplate" B-29s to deliver a single bomb was measured in dozens, not the thousands we got used to later.
Without the A-Bomb getting the credit (however exaggerated) for ending this war and thus, double-edged sword, casting a shadow of massive doom over the peace, such as it was, missile programs might also be thrown into doubt. (Yet the implication is that by and large they get a similar priority to OTL). As things were OTL there was much naysaying and indeed earlier posts here in accurately dismissing the rationality of the German V-2 program (as OTL, though I think the net damage done by the earlier surge of V-2 strikes ITTL was less by far than OTL, desultory though that was as well) suggested to me this might be conventional wisdom in the immediate postwar period.
Denunciations of the folly of the dream of ballistic rocket artillery focused largely on the question of accuracy in targeting--unless one equipped each rocket-bomb with a kamikaze human pilot to adjust fine trajectory to come in on target, uncrewed missiles would go astray by miles.
OTL, of course, a possible answer to that objection is that the blast radius and sheer scale of devastation caused even by the earliest and least effective A-bombs (never mind orders of magnitude more that could be achieved with advanced designs) could compensate for considerable deviations from nominal ground zero.
Thus, the ballistic missile largely goes hand in hand with nuclear weaponry. To be sure early naysayers also underestimated the possibility of major improvements in accuracy due to more sophisticated guidance and control--with enough of that, ballistic rockets could be used for long range artillery (or very short range, as in bazookas/katushas/Panzerfaust type anti-tank rockets) with conventional warheads. But in delivering conventional warheads a rocket has a tough challenge to outshine long established conventional guns or airplane bombers.
If then we have programs in the USA, and apparently also in Britain (on whatever scale of political entity, Empire/Commonwealth/UK itself) for missiles in the 1950s, I am supposing this means that even if no A-Bomb is ever deployed to strike at an actual Japanese target (counting a demonstration in sight of the Imperial capital say to wipe out some ships just offshore, perhaps, as a borderline war deployment) still, enough leaders in enough rival powers take its potential for a future war very seriously and reason much as they did OTL where the demonstrations were all too real and deadly enough. Even without Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasted as OTL (and in a drawn out conventional war, surely those cities would suffer conventional bombing piecemeal instead) the writing on the wall must be clear enough.
Getting back to a specifically British rocket/space program, it is certainly gratifying to see Black Arrow mentioned by name, because contrary to the notion that von Braun et al are the trump cards, I do believe the OTL British track chosen of attempting to develop hydrogen peroxide based rocket engines is a very promising one, and if the OTL programs had received more generous funding and higher regime priority, I do think that among the advantages of pursuing a peroxide path is that it would be especially outstanding as an early generation approach. Eventually other alternatives would surpass it, but if earlier and especially earlier British accomplishments achieve some major milestones in ballistic missile operations and perhaps orbital space flight, the UK might commit to sustaining ongoing space operations as a routine thing, and gradually develop the more advanced alternatives--insofar as that is even necessary. For deep space operations, switching over to liquid oxygen has clear advantages, but for at least first stage boosters high test (actually, 100 percent pure is best) hydrogen peroxide may be good enough to stick with. And I suspect generally good enough to eclipse the alternative of hypergolic propellants, which I personally think should be avoided if they reasonably can be. Anyway for supreme performance with chemical combustion, it is pretty hard to beat hydrogen-fueled oxygen oxidized approaches--OTL the USA had that pretty well in hand on a small scale by the mid-1960s and the Soviets somewhat belatedly could do it pretty well a decade later.
In the interim, both USA and USSR developed hypergolic rockets in parallel, the US with the Titan II and onward series, abandoned for military purposes with development of solid fuel missiles which other Western powers also have come to rely on; the Russians continue to use hypergol militarily and in the Proton rocket--and in orbital space and beyond hypergolic systems have been a mainstay of maneuvering and upper stage thrust, whereas instead of pursuing such engines as the American RL-10, J-2 and SSME that use hydrogen, in the 1960s the Russians also improved performance of kerosene-oxygen engines, never matching the massive thrust of the US F-1 used on the Saturn V, but surpassing the specific impulse (a measure of efficiency and index of mass ratio of propellants required corresponding to effective nozzle exhaust speed) considerably largely by means of developing closed cycle systems of driving the propellant pumps.
I do think that an ambitious and well funded British program might beat both the US and USSR into orbit relying in the 1950s on moderately well advanced hydrogen peroxide based systems. This is largely because such engines would achieve given levels of specific impulse and thrust, up to the limits optimized peroxide can reach, at lower temperatures than their rivals with higher ultimate potential, and to an extent because the propellant would store in a smaller volume at higher density, and also because (like hypergols) everything stores near "room temperature" at Earth sea level.
This is qualified for both hypergols and peroxide of course--hydrazine based fuels for hypergols can freeze at moderately low temperatures while the nitric acid/N2O4 based oxidant will boil at temperatures often encountered in places like the USA (or even say Siberia in mid-summer).
And one of two tricks that makes hydrogen peroxide more stable is to store it at temperatures just above its freezing point, which is a bit lower than water's at 0 C/273 K. (The other trick is to realize near perfect purity, which is pretty counterintuitive but a fact--this is convenient if one can manage the investment of achieving it, because of course 100 percent purity is also the best option for using it as an oxidizer--it also maximizes the storage density, further improved by chilling it). So peroxide too has some temperature constraints, but maintaining a volume of it, even one loaded into a rocket propellant tank sitting waiting to launch, at say 275 K is much easier than trying to keep liquid oxygen from boiling off which it does above 100 K--that's -173 C or -250 Fahrenheit! This can be done of course, and in fact aside from being nearly the most effective oxidant possible and clearly the most effective practical one, LOX is also relatively cheap to acquire--von Braun's OTL design for the Army field short range ballistic rocket the "Redstone" used also to launch the suborbital first iteration Mercury capsules involved a system of trailer vehicles including a plant to extract liquid oxygen from the air on the spot of the mobile deployed launch site to fill up the missile's LOX tanks without having to haul the stuff from any central depot; the power costs of running such a plant (basically one just compresses air and cools it to precipitate the oxygen out, since nitrogen liquefies at an even lower temperature--yet far warmer than necessary to store liquid hydrogen, which is down around 20 K) are moderate versus the sort of plant and power and inputs needed to generate and purify hydrogen peroxide, which is thus far costlier per kilogram, and thus even more costly in terms of performance delivered.
But one of the wiser things Elon Musk says is that if you can reach a point in rocket operations where the cost of the propellants becomes a major part of the overall program costs, you are doing something fantastically well. In the 1950s, the challenges of delivering on the theoretical promise of engines relying on kerosene and oxygen, never mind either hypergols or hydrogen fuel, would remain daunting and actual delivered performance much degraded from theoretical possibilities, along with sadly poor reliability.
Choosing peroxide for the interim with advancing to more ambitious stuff later penciled in and developing in advanced research labs on the back burner would I think yield results equal to or superior to the best that could be done with more open ended advanced alternatives, and with better reliability and overall cost-effectiveness, and be good enough I think to put such modest goals as placing fairly large masses into low Earth orbit within reach perhaps well before 1957.
Of course there is absolutely no reason this IMH suspicion superior approach to early space achievements should be reserved for British minds and hands alone; I have wondered elsewhere whether the Soviets might have done far better to take this path in the 1950s, and nothing stops some Yankee firm or lab from trying it as well.
OTL though in addition to the fact that British development did in fact pursue high test hydrogen peroxide as rocket oxidant, we also have the deep and broad commitment of the Royal Navy to a strong submarine force, and among the items of Luftwaffe '46 style German Superscience loot the Allies will collect here is the Walter program of peroxide engines for submarines. I believe the British were working on that themselves anyway before and during the war, and OTL the Soviets took it up along with the RN. Now of course OTL the British program was abandoned after experiments with two subs, for reasons indicated by the acerbic nickname the sailors gave the HMS Explorer--"Exploder." The British subs did not actually explode or meet other major disaster but it was judged a near run thing, and at least one Soviet submarine came to grief thanks to a mishap involving a peroxide oxidized torpedo.
Especially in a world where nuclear power is on the agenda pretty much as OTL, with the British being early pioneers of the field and a more flush HMG determined to develop and use it, the days of peroxide sub
marines are numbered in that visionaries would look forward to the truly air-independent nuclear fission power plant of some kind--but if realism suggests that practical deployment is some decades off, it would be worthwhile to improve peroxide systems as interim expedients until the nukes become finally available. OTL the RN had to be cut back again and again and Britain abandoned mission after mission, but if the ATL ministries anticipate maintaining a higher level of deployment, they will need the advanced subs.
Against anyone pursuing peroxide, neither of the "tricks" I think will make HTHP more manageable, chilling it to near freezing nor achieving near perfect purity were known in 1945, and the latter is as mentioned hardly obvious--however, attempting very high purity despite apparent greater (rather than actually lesser) risk involved would be a goal for reasons of efficiency and highest performance.
Also the way to process medium-purity peroxide (industry had achieved mass production around 40 percent purity, the rest being water, IIRC, by this time) into near 100 percent is to freeze the mix and skim out the water ice that emerges--this naturally would produce the ultra-high test stuff at near freezing and maximum storage density, and it certainly is common sense that storing it that way not only gets best density but also creates a thermal buffer against fluctuations of spontaneous decomposition.
So, if the Admiralty decides to grasp the nettle firmly and develop peroxide energy storage for air-independent submerged operations of their subs, following the ambitious German example as well as their own inclinations, and resolves to make it workable with high quality engineering, the British military establishment should have a major investment in both R&D and material infrastructure in the stuff. Taking such a course should result soon in the discovery that high purity also makes it more stable, and meanwhile develop very good proficiency at finding and handling materials that minimize catalyst risk, while also developing systems that harness its power most effectively.
Britain is also, here as well as OTL, in the forefront of jet engine development. OTL one can read, in sources such as the rather famous book Ignition!, that von Braun considered and rejected HTHP for German rockets because of a nasty incident that claimed the life of one of his peers in the 1930s--but that fellow was trying to combine peroxide and fuel into a monopropellant, which is an obvious recipe for disaster to be sure. Meanwhile such a reader would be misled into thinking vB and company totally avoided the allegedly ultra-deadly stuff and that would be quite wrong--in fact the V-2 rocket engine was pumped by a turbine driven by steam (and oxygen) generated by catalyzing hydrogen peroxide--I am not sure of what purity, I am going to guess about 40 percent as that was what was "on the shelf." Thus every V-2 launched in fact used hydrogen peroxide for a critical role, in modest quantity to be sure--and the same was true of the first rocket to put something into low Earth orbit, Sergei Korolev's R-7, whose engines burned LOX and kerosene to be sure, but these propellants were again pumped by a decomposed hydrogen peroxide turbine. This highlights the role of turbines similar to those used in air-breathing jet engines, an art that deeper American pockets would eventually match and perhaps surpass British engineering at--but even today British jet engines and other applications of turbojet tech have a major share of global markets under such brands as Rolls-Royce.
In 1945 British jet design was at the cutting edge, and honestly if I wanted to boost British potentials by capturing some Germans or other I'd sooner gift them with the best German jet engine designers--because they accomplished what they could during the war with their hands tied behind their backs as the Reich lost access to crucial exotic materials the Allies always had ready to hand. But without any Germans British designers such as the pioneer Frank Whittle led the way.
These are reasons I think the British might indeed have a chance to reach space in parallel with the Yankees and Soviets despite lacking the extremely vast regime resources of either.
Of course the more progress an exclusively British program might make, the more their rivals might double down to pull ahead and stay ahead out of sheer jealousy (and while Americans might not fear the British would actually use rocket superweapons against them, it being a prestige thing only for them, the Soviets could well fear the Western powers planning a preemptive attack on them for real, based on their bitter experiences never mind the fervid anti-Communist rhetoric of the Cold War era).
Perhaps an American response would be to propose some kind of partnership, but it seems implicit in the recent posts that much as OTL, the US government here too will renege on the "gentleman's agreement" between FDR and Churchill that in return for shared tech in general and in particular HMG handing over their work on "Tube Alloys" to benefit the Manhattan Project the outcomes of this American-run program (incorporating some British and other Commonwealth scientists to be sure, along with their TA documents) would be shared with Britain. After such an experience, the British might need some serious wooing and then ironclad guarantees.
I can't take the idea that postwar the British will be too severely divided from Uncle Sam all that seriously though. Perhaps if they somehow go beyond the kind of Labour governments that party offered and actually align with the USSR--but that's silly. OTL in fact Britain postwar was closest to the USA, to a degree that might seem downright sycophantic actually, under Labour ministries, it was the Tories, on paper more closely aligned to the kind of conservatism dominating the US, who were most liable to balk at Yankee direction and whims and adoption of Made-in-USA weapons systems in favor of trying to strengthen an independent British system, at least until Thatcher changed the game up somewhat. On paper Labour was socialist, at any rate a member of the Second International, but in general SI parties worked out in practice to be essentially mainstays of a capitalist system, and this was especially true of Labour no matter how reddish the rhetoric of certain wings of the party might have gotten. Nor is there any plausibility I can see of a major shift in British grassroots sentiment to favor more radical leftism.
If in fact Britain is to prosper well enough to have the kind of money to spend on rocketry and space travel, I am pretty sure they have to stay pretty close to the USA in terms of policy preferences. This hardly guarantees any sort of merger of their space programs, and the barriers to such a thing are pretty high too.
I imagine we might actually see more. A stronger KMT and a smaller Soviet bloc means that the PRC needs the USSR more. The PRC needing them more means that the USSR-PRC relationship is going to more akin to the PRC being Russian clients/puppets. Not only does this suit the USSR more, the smaller Soviet bloc in Europe means, IMO, that the Soviets will be more invested in ensuring the existence of puppets/clients/'friends and allies' elsewhere.
Now, I recall Garrison saying that China wouldn't be Communist ITTL. But that doesn't forestall oh, say, the People's Republics of (Inner) Mongolia and (Inner) Manchuria. The fact that the Soviets would be simply replacing the Japanese as the Imperial Master is simply... A delicious piece of irony.
nbcman
Donor
Looks like the Soviets are going to miss out on a bunch of tech at sites like Peenemunde (rocketry) and Dyhernfurth (tabun). In fact, did the British or American forces that advanced into Poland up to the Bug River manage to capture the Dyernfurth site before the Germans managed to dispose of the tabun, the slave laborers, and the evidence?