How ambitious can alternate space histories get?

[Pipcard]

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).

 

[Interdimensional Nomad]

I recall reading somewhere on this site that the first rule of alternate history is that there's always a better space program. Which is mostly true, after all OTL leaves much to be desired in terms of space exploration, and us AH fans often seem to be a bunch of nerds who are easily interested by this stuff. And hindsight is 20/20; it's easy to look back and see how many missed opportunities there were to do better.

My dad and I have been watching For All Mankind together, and while he loved the first season as much as I did (he grew up in the 60s and 70s and especially loved its nostalgic value), he started to fall a little out of love with it by around the beginning of Season 3 or so because he said he was starting to have trouble suspending his disbelief at the speed of technological progress in the setting. I suppose I'm a bit more optimistic, because I'm still enjoying it just as much, and haven't really seen anything I consider implausible so far (besides the use of a NERVA engine in Earth's atmosphere), and perhaps even slow in some places. Surely by the 1980s, Jamestown could have had more than a couple dozen personnel? When they called it the "Jamestown colony" during the Sea Dragon launch at the end of Season 1 I was expecting, like, a base big enough to hold a town's worth of permanent residents.

I read The High Frontier by Gerrard K. O'Neill last year (published in 1976, it's perhaps retroactive AH) detailing a roadmap for how space exploration might go after the Apollo program, and well, it blows For All Mankind's predictions out of the water. It predicts a relatively quick return to the Moon and the establishment of a permanent base, for the purposes of mining the regolith and sending it into orbit as construction material via a mass driver (much cheaper than carrying it up from Earth). Meanwhile, a fleet of Space Shuttles (still in development when the book was written) build a number of space stations and orbital construction platforms, and eventually small colonies, often carrying their main fuel tanks into orbit to be built into these stations as wet workshops. By around 1995, the first proper orbital habitat (of the Island One design), self-sufficient and with a permanent population of 10,000, is completed at Lagrangian point L5 (chosen for its proximity to Lunar materials, which the habitat is built out of). Its primary purpose is to build orbital solar power stations, which beam energy to receiving stations on Earth via microwaves. Ten years after the completion of the first Island One habitat (around 2005 by this timeline), there could be ten more, along with the first Island Two habitat (1800 meters in diameter instead of Island One's 500). 7-10 years after that (so, early 2010s or so), the L5 colonies begin sending settlers and expeditions to the Asteroid Belt, seeking its resources and seeing better mining prospects there than on the Moon. Much of it is told from the PoV of a group of homesteader families from L5, travelling together in their homebuilt spaceships to settle the Belt. By around the mid 21st century, O'Neill cylinder habitats would exist, and the total land area of all the space colonies could be three times that of Earth's.

Not only did he argue that this future was realistic, he argued that it was necessary. That humanity was continuing to grow both in population and standard of living, and would cause Earth-based resources to run out, dooming us to Malthusian catastrophe unless space settlement and exploitation of space-based resources was carried out. And that with the current energy crisis and the near-future depletion of Earth's fossil fuel reserves, and knowledge of climate change, renewable energy is the only option for the future. And that solar power is the best option for this, and space is where solar power is constant and abundant, therefore orbital solar power is the best option for generating the energy that humanity needs. The first few chapters detail the problems faced by humans on Earth, and how such solutions are needed to solve them, and the rest details how to do so, and why he believes it's an achievable goal.

Is it plausible? Not really, from a present-day perspective. It assumes that the challenges of building kilometre-scale space habitats at L5 would be resolved quickly or are minor, and predicts a level of infrastructural growth that just seems implausibly fast from a present-day perspective. From the start of his predictions, he assumes the Space Shuttle, what's supposed to make the rest of his roadmap possible, would be able to do what they promised at the time it would be able to do; make 30-60 flights per year, and reduce the cost of orbital launches. IRL, each Shuttle averaged about 3 launches per year, and didn't reduce the cost of launches at all. Though I suppose he had no reason at the time to believe it wouldn't perform as promised, and he did write it at the tail end of the space race, a time of unprecedented progress in space exploration. He expected such a pace to continue, and even keep accelerating.

Overall, the book is very much a product of its time, written in the middle of the 1970s energy crisis, when fossil fuel supply was unreliable, and with predictions that oil and gas would run out within the next few decades, it seemed that this would be the new normal. Between that and the anti-nuclear movement, and the nascent environmental movement, there were few options that seemed plausible (it is when the SPS Program was being seriously considered, which O'Neill expanded upon). This is also when overpopulation was still seriously predicted and discussed (shortly after the peak in global population growth rate in the 60s), and with already-existing energy and resource shortages and fears of future food production capacity, it can be seen why he thought it necessary to settle and exploit space. He did recognize that it would be a massive undertaking, but from his perspective in the time that he wrote it, he considered it a realistic and necessary one if humanity was to survive and keep prospering.

 

[Navigator]

Apart from the OTL and 2001, I've never encountered any of these before but, from the brief summaries presented here, I would contend that a 'Project Orion' ATL would fit somewhere between Overheaven and Terminal Velocity (which I know as a 1994 espionage film starring Nastassja Kinski and Charlie Sheen). Their ambition, as expressed by Ted Taylor, was Mars by 1965, Saturn by 1970. The most important PoD in any plausible scenario is to eliminate NASA, the second best would be to keep both Attlee and Lockspeiser from any position which could retard development of space technology.

 

[lionhead]

I think one can easily replace the word "less ambitious" with " more realistic" and vice versa.

Since there is no reason to put OTL so far towards less ambitious. As if we are supposed to be as far as 2001: A Space Oddesy today but we were not ambitious enough to do it. Or, there is no point. Because why realistically go to the trouble to get to Jupiter? What is there? Probably nothing. Who is going to put their money and/or lives on the line to get there and find out? Nobody. Realistically

With that thought Star Trek space "history" is the most ambitious because by now we would have sleeper ships underway(although in other fields we are ahead OTL) and the warp drive is only 40 years away!

 

[Navigator]

we are supposed to be as far as 2001: A Space Oddesy today but we were not ambitious enough to do it. Or, there is no point. Because why realistically go to the trouble to get to Jupiter? What is there? Probably nothing. Who is going to put their money and/or lives on the line to get there and find out? Nobody. Realistically

2001: A Space Odyssey was co-written by a technologically aware scientist who had been an integral part of the development of space and the practice of science engagement since the 1930s. The projected developments were entirely in line with the consensus of the time. Nobody was going to the planet Jupiter, they were going to the  moons of Jupiter. That is once again part of the policy after NASA's 50 year manned spaceflight hiatus in low Earth orbit, due to the lack of ambition of the early 1970s.

 

[Pipcard]

Is it plausible? Not really, from a present-day perspective. It assumes that the challenges of building kilometre-scale space habitats at L5 would be resolved quickly or are minor, and predicts a level of infrastructural growth that just seems implausibly fast from a present-day perspective. From the start of his predictions, he assumes the Space Shuttle, what's supposed to make the rest of his roadmap possible, would be able to do what they promised at the time it would be able to do; make 30-60 flights per year, and reduce the cost of orbital launches. IRL, each Shuttle averaged about 3 launches per year, and didn't reduce the cost of launches at all. Though I suppose he had no reason at the time to believe it wouldn't perform as promised, and he did write it at the tail end of the space race, a time of unprecedented progress in space exploration. He expected such a pace to continue, and even keep accelerating.

The promise of lower costs to orbit has often been a motivator in space development for several decades. As the Space Shuttle did not live up to expectations, there were some attempts in the 1990s to create a more economical reusable launch vehicle. However, these were mostly Single Stage To Orbit (SSTO) designs, which are much harder to develop as the entire mass of fuel tanks, engines, and fuselage has to be carried into orbit, resulting in low payload mass fractions. The McDonnell Douglas DC-X was a prototype for an SSTO called the Delta Clipper, and demonstrated a vertical rocket landing two decades before SpaceX did. The program was acquired by NASA, which cancelled it in favor of the X-33, a prototype for the VentureStar which used a lifting body design. That too was cancelled due to technical issues with making lightweight composite propellant tanks in unusual shapes.

Nowadays. SpaceX's Falcon 9 is said to have a launch cost of $2,720 per kilogram, while payloads on the Space Shuttle costed $54,500 per kilogram, thus reducing costs by a factor of 20. SpaceX took a different approach, using a partially reusable two stage design instead of an SSTO, with commonality for propellants and engines on both stages to reduce design and manufacturing costs. Multiple engines on the first stage also allowed it to throttle down for a vertical landing. In the 2000s, Kistler Aerospace also attempted to develop a two stage reusable rocket with the K-1, but used parachutes on the first stage and went bankrupt before they could launch anything. SpaceX's Starship, currently undergoing prototype testing, is planned to reduce costs even further. Some people are confident that this finally will create the "space boom" - a rapid expansion of activities into space, even saying that other space companies and agencies are decades behind, while others are still skeptical about how effective it will be. Only time will tell.

It was considered to be a "catch-22" or "chicken-and-egg" scenario that a reusable launcher required a highly demanded flight rate to amortize its development costs, while high flight rates required a reusable launcher. Delta Clipper was initially designed for the Strategic Defense Initiative to launch and service many space weapons in orbit. Other RLV proposals of the 1990s were expected to fulfill demand for large communications satellite constellations, which did not come to fruition at the time. Today, with increasing demand for broadband internet, SpaceX's Starlink satellite constellation is considered by some to be a solution to the "chicken-and-egg" dilemma that has limited the development of RLVs in the past.

 

[Navigator]

@Pipcard Have you encountered the postulate that every project that Musk has ever proposed is taken from a SF novel?

 

[Pipcard]

@Pipcard Have you encountered the postulate that every project that Musk has ever proposed is taken from a SF novel?

I’m not a fan of Musk myself, but I give credit to SpaceX as a whole as they have so far demonstrated a highly successful launch vehicle - almost 300 launches of the Falcon 9 with a mission success rate of 99.3%.

 

[lionhead]

2001: A Space Odyssey was co-written by a technologically aware scientist who had been an integral part of the development of space and the practice of science engagement since the 1930s. The projected developments were entirely in line with the consensus of the time. Nobody was going to the planet Jupiter, they were going to the  moons of Jupiter. That is once again part of the policy after NASA's 50 year manned spaceflight hiatus in low Earth orbit, due to the lack of ambition of the early 1970s.

Jupiter, moons of Jupiter. Same thing. There is nothing there.

 

[kholieken]

In alternatehistory.com you had timeline like "In Shoulder of Giants" with FTL amd human spreading out in space.

 

[Kalga]

Most of the nitpicks concerning realism of technological progress (space or otherwise) is often at the wrong factors. Truth is, there is an inverse relationship between the amount (numbers, duration, and intensity) of armed conflicts and technological progress. Wars improve how people fight wars, and whatever civil benefits that come out of them tend to be coincidental, if even that. Destroying large amounts of resources and lives kinda put a damper on everything (this should be obvious but somehow isn't).

Thus most of the unrealistic aspects of most timelines is the lack of extra peace (in comparison to OTL) to justify the available slack for greater investments in tech & the sciences.

 

[Workable Goblin]

Because why realistically go to the trouble to get to Jupiter? What is there? Probably nothing. Who is going to put their money and/or lives on the line to get there and find out? Nobody. Realistically

People have, in fact, put “their money” on the line to go find out what is at Jupiter (and Jupiter’s moons), quite a few billions once you add up all of the spacecraft that have primarily been aimed there. Enough for a human mission? No. But if human missions were sufficiently cheap to do, or the world were much richer relative to the cost, someone would probably do it.

And in any case “nothing” is certainly wrong. The Galilean moons are all, except perhaps for Callisto, rather interesting from a scientific perspective, as is Jupiter itself. There are also a lot of volatiles and a great deal of energy available there, which while not practically useful right now could very well have value in the future, somewhat like bauxite vis-a-vis people in the 17th century. There is also some possibility of life, with proposals for how life could exist on both Jupiter and some of its moons, although this could fold back into the “scientific perspective” mentioned above. There is plenty to motivate people to spend a relatively modest amount on traveling to and investigating the planet and its moons, which is why they do so.

 

[Polish Eagle]

People have, in fact, put “their money” on the line to go find out what is at Jupiter (and Jupiter’s moons), quite a few billions once you add up all of the spacecraft that have primarily been aimed there. Enough for a human mission? No. But if human missions were sufficiently cheap to do, or the world were much richer relative to the cost, someone would probably do it.

And in any case “nothing” is certainly wrong. The Galilean moons are all, except perhaps for Callisto, rather interesting from a scientific perspective, as is Jupiter itself. There are also a lot of volatiles and a great deal of energy available there, which while not practically useful right now could very well have value in the future, somewhat like bauxite vis-a-vis people in the 17th century. There is also some possibility of life, with proposals for how life could exist on both Jupiter and some of its moons, although this could fold back into the “scientific perspective” mentioned above. There is plenty to motivate people to spend a relatively modest amount on traveling to and investigating the planet and its moons, which is why they do so.

Not to mention the plasma physics and magnetodynamics that were of interest to the physicists who pushed so much for Jupiter studies in the 20th century, before the true nature of the Galilean moons was known at all.

As to the question of the OP, in general, people write and read about what interests them, and a space buff writing alternate history would, by his nature, tend to be a bit of an armchair general looking at how, if he had been in charge, things would be different (and therefore better!). The intersection between "people inclined to write a space-screw TL" and "people who study enough about space to do it well" is smaller than the intersection between astrophilic people and knowledgeable people. Space exploration gets mildly buffed or outright wanked in TLs written by space buffs for the same reason, then, that a Byzantophile would give Basil II a functioning dynasty instead of the mess his successors actually made of the empire. Stephen Baxter is something of an exception, though one can note that a general bleak tone runs through a lot of his work, and Voyage was written close to when he seemed to go through a mid-life crisis (culminating in Titan)--frankly, the cancellation of Pioneer 10 in the book doesn't make a lot of sense in-universe, since it was cancelled during TTL Apollo 13, after TRW had already received the contrast to build the spacecraft. He wrote another work, Moon Six, which features a dimension-jumping astronaut landing on an earth that doesn't even have unmanned satellites (the hinted-at reason is that science fiction doesn't exist in that world, IIRC).

One could easily postulate scenarios bleaker than Kolyma's Shadow--no moon missions at all, Project Apollo winds down under the Nixon administration when the US decides unmanned spy satellites are better, human spaceflight never recovers, robotic spaceflight also winds down in the 1990s.

Spaceflight could have been made more afforable--e of pi and myself, I think, did so plausibly in Right Side Up. The issue after that, though, is that unlike most alternate history, space alternate history is also at the border between genres, between alternate history and Hard SF. Someone writing an alternate history of the colonization of the Americas or Australia could look to centuries of hindsight to see what works and what doesn't work. Someone trying to make a business case for lunar colonization in the 1980s, on the other hand, is dealing with about as many unknowns as one making the case today would be. Which is why For All Mankind, for example, resorts to the old He-3 mining idea, even if even OTL space advocates don't talk about it as much as they used to. There might actually be something worth commenting about from a meta-genre perspective--any long-duration Space TL will transmute into Hard SF, just as an AH story that begins in antiquity or the middle ages will eventually become indistinguishable (once the butterflies build up) from Low Fantasy.

 

[FellowTraveller5]

One example missed here is the 1991 TV movie/failed series pilot "Plymouth". Short version: the town of Plymouth, OR is wiped out by an industrial accident. The evacuated inhabitants want to stay together as a town, and the company that irradiated their town has a failing lunar helium-3 facility. This is not presented as alternate history, and no dates are ever mentioned. However, there is a decidedly contemporary look to the clothing, and one Charles "Pete" Conrad appears as "himself", a resident of the lunar colony. My best guess is that ITTL fusion research actually got the Manhattan Project funding levels needed for fast results. Also, either Shuttle design was not half-assed like in OTL, or a refined Mk2 model was greenlighted.

 

[Workable Goblin]

One could easily postulate scenarios bleaker than Kolyma's Shadow--no moon missions at all, Project Apollo winds down under the Nixon administration when the US decides unmanned spy satellites are better, human spaceflight never recovers, robotic spaceflight also winds down in the 1990s.

One I've contemplated in this vein is if Columbia catastrophically fails on STS-1 through failure of the body flap, and then Challenger (most likely) fails on STS-2 due to an SRB failure or RCC puncture on the leading edge. This would surely kill the Space Shuttle program, and given that it's been a decade since the last American was in space I think there is a reasonable chance that the U.S. just...gives up on HSF. Especially since the Soviets are likely to still collapse and then a lot of the keeping up with the Joneses argument that I think is underrated in why the Shuttle went ahead just goes away. Then there's no U.S. money to keep the Russian HSF program afloat, and maybe the Chinese don't even bother going ahead with Shenzhou since no one else is doing it. So human spaceflight ends, a bit like the Moon program.

It might revive in the modern day somewhat with private space tourism-oriented developments, but like OTL (aside from Dragon, of course, which was NASA funded) these would probably just be suborbital hops. So it would probably still feel, to space advocates, like people just gave up on the high frontier and there is nothing to look ahead to, or at least that the battle is all around doing something in space versus something like going back to the Moon, much less Mars. People who talk about that kind of thing are probably viewed as vaguely crazy even in space-oriented circles because of how far you need to go to even get to the point of being able to do it.

 

[NHBL]

Regarding OTL, I think that it started as VERY optomistic--we reached the MOON in 1969. Even Star Trek put "the first manned moon shot" somewhere in the '70's, per Lieutenant Uhura--and a Star Fleet Officer is certain to have had history of space flight at the academy.
The entire space program was forced up under glass.
One possibility would be a slower moon program--perhaps a MASSIVE change results in some form of lessening of tensions between the USA and USSR, and somehow, the two superpowers work together, if haltingly, on space travel.
The result is the moon in the late 1970's, but with a ship to a space station, then another completely unstreamlined space only ship, built in orbit. The result is a solid crewed presence, allowing for a somewhat seamless transition to both a lunar colony and deep space exploration.

Then there is Reach for the Skies, which is my effort, which is categorized as ASB because it involves a meteorite landing in New Hampshire in 1876, blowing a hole a couple of miles in diameter in the White Mountains, but which I am trying to keep non ASB besides that.

The space program starts in 1876 (sic) and the timeline is up to 1879--obviously on one has reached the skies yet.

 

[Polish Eagle]

One I've contemplated in this vein is if Columbia catastrophically fails on STS-1 through failure of the body flap, and then Challenger (most likely) fails on STS-2 due to an SRB failure or RCC puncture on the leading edge. This would surely kill the Space Shuttle program, and given that it's been a decade since the last American was in space I think there is a reasonable chance that the U.S. just...gives up on HSF. Especially since the Soviets are likely to still collapse and then a lot of the keeping up with the Joneses argument that I think is underrated in why the Shuttle went ahead just goes away. Then there's no U.S. money to keep the Russian HSF program afloat, and maybe the Chinese don't even bother going ahead with Shenzhou since no one else is doing it. So human spaceflight ends, a bit like the Moon program.

It might revive in the modern day somewhat with private space tourism-oriented developments, but like OTL (aside from Dragon, of course, which was NASA funded) these would probably just be suborbital hops. So it would probably still feel, to space advocates, like people just gave up on the high frontier and there is nothing to look ahead to, or at least that the battle is all around doing something in space versus something like going back to the Moon, much less Mars. People who talk about that kind of thing are probably viewed as vaguely crazy even in space-oriented circles because of how far you need to go to even get to the point of being able to do it.

We can get even bleaker--your scenario at least has the memory of Apollo to show it could be done.

Here's one I have in mind:

Al Shepard beats Gagarin to space (but not to orbit--though the broad mass of the US population can't tell the difference). There is no Kennedy moonshot goal, Apollo remains the LEO-focused program it was supposed to be initially, with some MOL-scale space stations as annexes to it. This chugs along until 1973, when the oil crisis and stagflation combine to render the program less popular with the public--and with the overall not-that-impressive (at least, to the public) scientific results from microgravity research and military disinterest, the program is quietly wound down, with a reusable lifting body spacecraft proposed as successor but also wound down (perhaps entirely killed under Carter). The Soviets, for similar reasons, ultimately wind things down as well--coming second, they were never able to squeeze as much propaganda value out of it as they got IOTL, and the Politburo is overall less interested (maybe they even squeeze some propaganda out of winding it down--'the warmongering capitalists continue to seek ways to weaponize space, long after experience has shown the lack of utility in that; while their citizens starve and die of drugs, they pander to their warmongering industrialists; we are more enlightened. Now, get in the truck, we're going to Afghanistan...'). There is talk of revival under Reagan, in the context of SDI, but that also dies when the Cold War ends and we get the thrice-damned Peace Dividend. On the unmanned front, we probably see Voyager, but maybe no Viking (by extension, no Mars revival in the 1990s?). Mars is written off as "as dead as the Moon." Hubble might still go up, launched on a Titan III rather than Shuttle. Not sure about Galileo, Ulysses, and Cassini ITTL--maybe the complicated politics of working with the Europeans on those ends up killing them?

Space advocacy functionally doesn't exist ITTL, except maybe the Planetary Society. In your scenario, the occasional space advocate can still point to Apollo as an example of, "it can be done, it has been done, and the results speak for themselves," comparing Apollos 15-17 to the later unmanned probes. ITTL, there isn't even that example, and space advocacy is entirely the domain of a relatively smaller population of planetary scientists and astronomers. Pretty much the only people who talk seriously about space colonies are the LaRouche cult, and even they say it comes after controlled fusion power plants.

 

[Talwar]

I've been slowly tinkering on a timeline that has approximately historical-ish tech, but the participants are quite different because I've jammed a few unlikely-but-non-ASB points of departure into the preceding 150 years of history. Maybe it'll see light of day sometime.

 

[Pipcard]

One possibility would be a slower moon program--perhaps a MASSIVE change results in some form of lessening of tensions between the USA and USSR, and somehow, the two superpowers work together, if haltingly, on space travel.
The result is the moon in the late 1970's, but with a ship to a space station, then another completely unstreamlined space only ship, built in orbit. The result is a solid crewed presence, allowing for a somewhat seamless transition to both a lunar colony and deep space exploration.

I was also thinking of the use of multiple smaller launch vehicles and refueling depots to support a Moon mission (which would also favor reusability with high flight rates) instead of a huge, expensive expendable rocket like the Saturn V (as impressive as it was). Mission architectures and infrastructures that would be less prone to cancellation.

 

[dangaffa]

We can get even bleaker--your scenario at least has the memory of Apollo to show it could be done.

Here's one I have in mind:

Al Shepard beats Gagarin to space (but not to orbit--though the broad mass of the US population can't tell the difference). There is no Kennedy moonshot goal, Apollo remains the LEO-focused program it was supposed to be initially, with some MOL-scale space stations as annexes to it. This chugs along until 1973, when the oil crisis and stagflation combine to render the program less popular with the public--and with the overall not-that-impressive (at least, to the public) scientific results from microgravity research and military disinterest, the program is quietly wound down, with a reusable lifting body spacecraft proposed as successor but also wound down (perhaps entirely killed under Carter). The Soviets, for similar reasons, ultimately wind things down as well--coming second, they were never able to squeeze as much propaganda value out of it as they got IOTL, and the Politburo is overall less interested (maybe they even squeeze some propaganda out of winding it down--'the warmongering capitalists continue to seek ways to weaponize space, long after experience has shown the lack of utility in that; while their citizens starve and die of drugs, they pander to their warmongering industrialists; we are more enlightened. Now, get in the truck, we're going to Afghanistan...'). There is talk of revival under Reagan, in the context of SDI, but that also dies when the Cold War ends and we get the thrice-damned Peace Dividend. On the unmanned front, we probably see Voyager, but maybe no Viking (by extension, no Mars revival in the 1990s?). Mars is written off as "as dead as the Moon." Hubble might still go up, launched on a Titan III rather than Shuttle. Not sure about Galileo, Ulysses, and Cassini ITTL--maybe the complicated politics of working with the Europeans on those ends up killing them?

Space advocacy functionally doesn't exist ITTL, except maybe the Planetary Society. In your scenario, the occasional space advocate can still point to Apollo as an example of, "it can be done, it has been done, and the results speak for themselves," comparing Apollos 15-17 to the later unmanned probes. ITTL, there isn't even that example, and space advocacy is entirely the domain of a relatively smaller population of planetary scientists and astronomers. Pretty much the only people who talk seriously about space colonies are the LaRouche cult, and even they say it comes after controlled fusion power plants.

Damn, I had an idea that's even bleaker, but that's more due to a string of unlikely disasters more than anything:

Leonov, on Voskhod 2, passes out due to him going too under pressure when de-pressurizing his suit to re-enter the capsule, and is unable to be taken back to Earth. The first in-space death is observed. In Gemini 8, due to the high rate of rotation, the Agena target vehicle explodes, killing Armstrong and Scott, in the first American deaths in space. The Apollo 1 fires happen as IOTL, as does Soyuz 1. Apollo 8 has a valve malfunction on its AJ-10 SM engine, leading to an improper burn just after S-IVB jettison, leading to the capsule drifting off into space, and the 3 astronauts, after viewing the lunar surface from an unplanned flyby, dying. Apollo 9 is the final flight of the Apollo project proper, in an Apollo 7-esc test of a modified CSM, however due to a rupture in the Hydrogen Fuel Cells, that leads to an early abort, and near catastrophe, along with a cancellation of the Apollo program. The Soviets, seeing a chance to leap ahead in the space race, attempt a 5th flight of the N1 moon rocket, this time crewed, however due to oscillations in flight, and the well-known issues with thrust control on the main stage, the rocket broke up, and the capsule's abort motors failed to fully fire, leading to Yuri Gagarin and Georgy Grechko dying on ascent. To make use of old Saturn hardware, Skylab is launched earlier than IOTL, however sustains even more damage on ascent. After Skylab-2's launch (via a very stripped-down Apollo CSM), the astronauts would stay on orbit for 21 days, however the hull of Skylab proper breached due to damage sustained on ascent plus an MMOD impact in just the wrong place, leading to both the crew and the station to perish. Soyuz 10 and 11 also fail in their own ways, similar to IOTL, and both the USSR and US avoid having any crewed spaceflight programs, getting by on satellites and the occasional sample returns and interplanetary probes. Eventually, in the late 2010s, private companies will be developed to launch space tourists above the incredibly dangerous karman line, renewing interest in space exploration, however this is primarily for thrill seekers and stunts, not particularly for scientific endeavors. A person likely wouldn't set foot on the moon until *maybe* the 2030s, if that. The Saturn Vs built for Apollo would be used for the aforementioned Skylab, as well as Voyager 1 and 2, sent on a grand tour of the solar system, Voyager 3 and 4, sent to Mars, and Artemis 1 and 2, lunar sample return missions using a modified LM for retrieval of lunar regolith to study. The rest would be scrapped, save for one, sitting in Huntsville, Alabama, as a reminder of the unfettered ambition of the 60s, and the hard wall of reality it ended up running into.