Charlie and I were talking about our first Brain Parade about manned vs. unmanned spaceflight (link) when Charlie proposed picking people’s brains for space programs that could have been but weren’t.

So the question I put to three science fiction authors (and one scientist) for this Brain Parade was:

If you had the power to ressurect a space program that was cancelled or never got off the ground which one would you choose?

My own answer is a bit sheepish and boring. All the space science missions that are currently being rolled back to pay for cost overruns in the manned space program. NASA says these cutbacks are temporary, once they balance the books funding should resume. I’m a bit skeptical of this myself, what are the chances of the manned space program not running into more cost overruns in the future? But I don’t feel like I have much right to whinge on this as I’m not an American taxpayer.

There, at least I kept it reasonably short. Here’s what our guest Brains had to say on the matter:

I only get one? Huh boy… I’m going to give you two, one manned and one unmanned.

For a manned program, the X-20 Dyna Soar.

For an unmanned program, I’d resurrect the old Soviet Vanera program and send more Vanera landers to Venus. There’s a lot still to be learned about Venus, and the Vanera program gave excellent returns. If that team could be brought back together (at least the remaining living members) some excellent planetary science could be done.

Bill Gawne is responsible for the operation of the science instruments aboard the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE)

The one where they sent chimps into outer space.

Jeffrey Ford

Choices, choices… I had a printout of the blueprints for the N-1, the Soviet moon rocket, up on my cubicle wall for a long time. I’ve also got a soft spot for the Anglo-Australian rocket program, BlueStreak, Black Prince, all that. And I remember when Skylab came down; I remember thinking, even as a kid, that that was a mistake. But, you know, I used to read stories written in the mid-60s, by serious and knowledgeable hard-SF writers, that thought we were going to have a man on Pluto by 1980. And I just don’t think that was evergoing to happen. It’d be nice if we had a cheaper way of putting dumb mass into orbit — what all those Atomic Age projects like the Orion and the NERVA-K were shooting for — but what we really need is for the stuff we do put up there to be as reliable as a Toyota and as efficient as a tree; not going to happen with twentieth-century technology.

David Moles

Oh, the Dynasoar! The U.S. could have had its first space shuttle in 1963. Not to knock JFK’s vision, but NASA has a history of abandoning slow incremental improvements in cost-to-orbit in favour of putting payloads on missiles at horrendous cost. There’s only one issue that matters in space development, and that’s the price tag of going the first two hundred miles. If instead of going to the moon, NASA had spent its money in the sixties on lowering cost-to-orbit by a factor of 100, not only would we be on the moon but we’d be living on the outer planets by now.

Karl Schroeder

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