Re: What if space instead of defense?

snip
You're missing an awful lot of the steps that have to happen, before a
technology becomes tried and evolved into an operational form.

Note that there were a LOT of levels, if you will, of airplane capability,
over decades, before we got the 707. This is at least as relevent to
spaceflight, as that is a harder thing to do.

So, absent WW2, you don't get rockets into orbit by 1957. Period.
Hell, absent WW1, we don't get a DC-3 by the 30s. Absent WW2, we don't
get any jets in service until the 50s.


I don't desagree. War brings inovation into production.

Danny Dot

Nothing like a war to bring inovation into the process. The
development
of
rockets done by the Germans would not be in place. We would be relying
on a
much more bearacratic processes to develop new idea (nothing like war
to
cut red tape).

OK, but still, even with V-2s as a juml start ( For both the US and
the USSR ), we only got a sattelite in 1957. Absent V-2s, and the
technolog8ical spurts of both World Wars, and you surely so NOT
get to space any earlier. In that case, I'd be very surprised in
you get a Sputnik by 1997.

Maybe the answer is: without war, we would have spent all of the
countless
billions to feed a huge buraucracy and still be sitting on the ground.

Maybe the real answer is, war was, and is a part of us, and ideas where
its disappears is about an alternate reality so different that the
people there aren't humans...

I can't say I disagree with this statement. Maybe the
fantasy-hypothetical needs to be a non-human race doesn't have wars :-)

Thats quite off topic to a newsgroup about space shuttles. HTH.

Returning to Planet Earth...

Andre


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