Some alternate space timelines try to be "realistic" and fit within expected economic and political limitations, being slightly more (or less) advanced in capabilities than OTL. Others push the boundaries of realism or outright break them altogether (as if an ASB intervened) to create fantastical scenarios in which humans travel to the outer solar system by the year 2000.
I tried to compile some examples of alternate history (or alternate universe) scenarios regarding spaceflight, roughly sorting them by how ambitious they are. This is not meant to be an absolutely objective comparison.
Rarely do you get something like Kolyma's Shadow, in which spaceflight is less advanced or slower paced than OTL. Then there are timelines like Eyes Turned Skyward or Boldly Going that have something like an earlier large space station as well as a Moon base (something we don't have yet in OTL), yet still have events like budget cuts and program cancellations. Baxter's Voyage has humans landing on Mars in the 1980s but with compromises like probes to the outer planets being cancelled. Proxima: A Human Exploration of Mars is less compromising as there is a continuous stream of crewed Mars missions instead of a one-off.
In contrast to other timelines constrained by limited budgets, the recent online TV series For All Mankind involves a continued space race between the US and USSR which results in a "space boom" as launching into space becomes much cheaper. Thus allowing for the construction of large space hotels by the 1990s, the establishment of a helium-3 industry on the Moon, and a race to Mars with multiple participants. Some have called the rate of technological development in later seasons too unrealistic, but is there any way that spaceflight could have been made to be more affordable?
Then you have more outlandish scenarios like the retrofuturistic expectations of 2001: A Space Odyssey from 1968. Like For All Mankind, it has a space hotel and a Moon base, but it also expected a crewed mission to Jupiter by the titular year. Katniss218's alternate timeline in Kerbal Space Program (with the Real Solar System and Realism Overhaul mods) depicts crewed missions to Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune that seem to blow past any budgets NASA would have had at the time. A less restrictive Partial Test Ban Treaty and Outer Space Treaty in the Overheaven worldbuilding project somehow leads to the first human on Mars in 1976, and colonies throughout the Solar System by the 2020s, including a settlement of 10,000 people on Saturn's moon Titan. Lastly, Terminal Velocity is a fitting name for a speedrun in the KSP Realistic Progression mod (a career mode for RSS/RO) in which humans land on Mars around the time the first astronaut went into orbit in OTL (the Pluto mission is not part of the speedrun but is canon to Terminal Velocity).
I tried to compile some examples of alternate history (or alternate universe) scenarios regarding spaceflight, roughly sorting them by how ambitious they are. This is not meant to be an absolutely objective comparison.
Rarely do you get something like Kolyma's Shadow, in which spaceflight is less advanced or slower paced than OTL. Then there are timelines like Eyes Turned Skyward or Boldly Going that have something like an earlier large space station as well as a Moon base (something we don't have yet in OTL), yet still have events like budget cuts and program cancellations. Baxter's Voyage has humans landing on Mars in the 1980s but with compromises like probes to the outer planets being cancelled. Proxima: A Human Exploration of Mars is less compromising as there is a continuous stream of crewed Mars missions instead of a one-off.
In contrast to other timelines constrained by limited budgets, the recent online TV series For All Mankind involves a continued space race between the US and USSR which results in a "space boom" as launching into space becomes much cheaper. Thus allowing for the construction of large space hotels by the 1990s, the establishment of a helium-3 industry on the Moon, and a race to Mars with multiple participants. Some have called the rate of technological development in later seasons too unrealistic, but is there any way that spaceflight could have been made to be more affordable?
Then you have more outlandish scenarios like the retrofuturistic expectations of 2001: A Space Odyssey from 1968. Like For All Mankind, it has a space hotel and a Moon base, but it also expected a crewed mission to Jupiter by the titular year. Katniss218's alternate timeline in Kerbal Space Program (with the Real Solar System and Realism Overhaul mods) depicts crewed missions to Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune that seem to blow past any budgets NASA would have had at the time. A less restrictive Partial Test Ban Treaty and Outer Space Treaty in the Overheaven worldbuilding project somehow leads to the first human on Mars in 1976, and colonies throughout the Solar System by the 2020s, including a settlement of 10,000 people on Saturn's moon Titan. Lastly, Terminal Velocity is a fitting name for a speedrun in the KSP Realistic Progression mod (a career mode for RSS/RO) in which humans land on Mars around the time the first astronaut went into orbit in OTL (the Pluto mission is not part of the speedrun but is canon to Terminal Velocity).
Last edited: