If I could go back in time to the sixties, could I accelerate the space program?

Fifth grade me was an avid fan of all things space until I stumbled across some early pictures of Mars. In those pictures, it looked moon-like and uninteresting. About the same time, I discovered that the water world of science fiction Venus was actually a passable imitation of hell. I lost interest in space for many years and mostly avoided science fiction during that time.

Let’s suppose that many decades older me somehow finds himself in that ten-year-old body, with all the knowledge of the intervening decades intact. Let’s also say that the current me wants to change the world, accelerating the Space Program by many decades. Ignoring any paradoxes, I set to work. The first thing I need to do is come up with a plan. A ten-year-old from a working-class family isn’t going to have much impact initially, but even if I could, the headwinds I would initially encounter would be formidable. At ten years old, I would be too young to do anything about the demise of the Apollo program, even if I had a sophisticated understanding of how it happened.

The end of Apollo, sad as it was, was pretty much baked in before I would have even a remote chance of stopping it. LBJ pushed the program mainly to help industrialize what was then a solid Democratic south. What Apollo accomplished was, in his mind, secondary to putting good quality industrial jobs in southern congressional districts. The leadership of the House and the Senate at that time was also solidly southern and Democratic, the product of the seniority system and a southern political landscape where the Republican party was weak, and Democratic officeholders tended to get reelected until they died. That made it easy to steer federal money to southern districts.

Johnson made one political mistake that would bite the Apollo program in a major way. As a budgetary gimmick, he stopped Saturn 5 production in (from old and possibly faulty memory) 1967. He planned to restart production once he was reelected, but of course that never happened. I don’t think ten-year-old me could stop that move, though an Apollo 8 tragedy might well have an impact on the decision.

In any case, the south turned from solidly Democratic to mostly Republican and the seniority system mostly fell apart. Johnson didn’t run for reelection and his hand-picked successor lost to Richard Nixon.

All of that left the Space program vulnerable politically because it was concentrated in districts that had just lost a lot of political power. As political power shifted, it became necessary to spread the federal jobs across a lot more congressional districts and that was difficult with an already defined program like Apollo. It would be hard to justify moving Apollo jobs around to reflect the new balance of political power. However, new programs, like the Space Shuttle, could and had to spread the goodies around to reflect that new balance of power.

From the point of view of a useful space program, the Space Shuttle was worse than useless in some ways, though it did preserve some of the Apollo expertise and infrastructure and it did keep some semblance of a manned space program. The problem was that for the shuttle, as it was historically designed, to be anywhere close to financially justifiable, it had to fly often enough to take all US spacecraft to space. No room for any competition. So once NASA committed to the shuttle, it automatically became the enemy of any alternatives to the shuttle.

Knowing all of this, assuming it’s true, adult me in my younger self’s body would need to come up with a strategy to hopefully keep at least some Apollo hardware flowing while hopefully finding some way to derail the shuttle or at least the version of the shuttle that emerged from the many compromises and cost-cutting measures that historically brought it to production.

I would probably start by trying to become a science fiction writer early on. Writing was an anonymous enough activity that I could probably do it as a preteen as soon as I went back in time. I would have an enormous advantage in that I actually knew what the future, at least one version of it, would be like. I would have zero expenses, living at home, and would be able to bank any money I made, a pittance I know, but also a beginning. The first million is the hardest and of that the first couple of thousand are the most difficult of all.

More important than the money, I would be working to gain influence as a voice, though an anonymous one, in the science fiction and space communities. By the time key decisions got made, I might be able to steer them subtly away from the most destructive decisions of the shift from Apollo to the Space Shuttle.

What decisions would those be? First, whatever else happened, the US needed to preserve the ability to make Saturn Five main engines. That meant restarting production under some guise as soon as possible. Knowledge of how to build something doesn’t survive long after production stops. NASA tried to preserve as much as they could of how the production process happened, but a lot of subtle tricks were and remained in the heads of the manufacturing work force, which was spread out over a lot of subcontractors. Second, NERVA had to keep going, at least ticking over enough that the project could be restarted if a political decision was made to employ it. If we were going to Mars, nuclear fission rockets were the only realistic way to do it until fairly recently. Purely chemical rockets simply take too long.

Finally, the Space Shuttle as the monstrosity it became had to die before it was born. I would use whatever bully pulpit my writing gave me to push for the shuttle to stick with the original concept as a way to get astronauts and small amounts of cargo into space. At all costs, it needed to avoid incorporating hard-to-do air force requirements that the air force put out there but had no intention of using. It also had to avoid becoming a one-size fits all solution to getting into space, remaining one component in a system that also needed a dedicated heavy-lifter. More than any of the rest, though, it had to avoid the man and woman killer configuration of mounting the shuttle on the side of the fuel tank.

I doubt that as a mere writer, I would be able to stop any of those bits of insanity, even in the unlikely event that I became famous within the science fiction and space communities, but if I could I would be in a better place to start my main effort.

That main effort would not be in space. I know enough about the early history of personal computers that I would take the money I made from writing and from odd kid friendly jobs and play the early personal computer market like a fiddle, investing in companies I knew were going to be winners and shorting companies I knew would have serious problems. I would avoid betting too heavily on any one company because my actions over the years since I arrived might well change things around so that we might see different winners and losers. Still, in-depth knowledge of the personalities involved would probably let me make a ton of money in the early going.

Would I then invest in private space? Maybe or maybe not. If the shuttle as it existed historically made it into existence, I would probably not go into the space market immediately. The shuttle, awful choice though it was, would be a formidable competitor because it was heavily subsidized. It also had NASA behind it and NASA had a formidable reputation at the time. If NASA said your concept was flawed, it would be difficult to raise funding for it. Hopefully my knowledge of the future would give me enough money to self-fund, but that’s kind of iffy. It would be better to spread the risk over a number of investors, at least partly to gain political allies who stood to gain if I succeeded.

Through the end of the Cold War, around 1990, I would also face headwinds from regulators concerned about missile proliferation and the possibility of destabilizing the delicate balance of mutual assured destruction between us and the Soviets. Rockets that can reach space are also potential nuclear delivery systems.

I probably would want to preserve my money through the 1980s and wait until the early 1990s, until regulators realized that missile proliferation was a lost cause and that the Cold War was over. By that time, the Space Shuttle would almost inevitably have had one or more serious accidents that revealed its weakness and NASA would have lost some of its aura of omniscience on things involving space, which would allow me to spread the risk among investors. Hopefully by that time I would have earned a reputation as a canny investor, which would help.

When I did decide to go for a space program, I would probably follow somewhat the course that Elon Musk has plotted, starting out small and expendable, then working my way up the food chain. I don’t have Musk’s bipolar-fueled drive or his ability to motivate people or his intimate knowledge of how his spacecraft work, but I would set aside a few million dollars to live on if I failed, then go all in for a working private space program. Hopefully, if it all worked, I would get us back into space ten or fifteen years before Musk did. Hopefully also it would generate imitators.

And now a brief word from the marketing side of my brain: