How would the world look like today if the US would have continued using the Saturn 5 instead of developing the Space...

How would the world look like today if the US would have continued using the Saturn 5 instead of developing the Space Shuttle? Would we have been to Mars already?

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The Saturn V was no more capable or less of a pork program than the Shuttle
The only difference is that it carried a little more payload, solely due to the lack of a 70 ton orbiter

Fuck off the Saturn V lifted five times the payload of the Shuttle, could lift larger loads, and could be launched unmanned. And it had a launch escape system.

And what do we have to show for it? Nothing

The apollo program was a bigger pork project than the shuttle

>Saturn V was no more capable
Setting aside the moon landings, they put a space station in orbit with Saturn V in 1973. It took one launch, and cost about $10 billion.

They put a space station in orbit with the shuttle starting in 1998. It took 36 launches (plus some with Proton), and cost $150 billion.

Skylab fell out of orbit and was lost because of the shift to the shuttle, and the shuttle's lengthy development delays. In some ways it was superior to the ISS despite having less volume, because it was one big, open space. They can't do this stuff in the ISS:
youtube.com/watch?v=S_p7LiyOUx0

>or less of a pork program
The shuttle's ostensible purpose was to reduce launch costs, and it ran for decades after it became obvious that it had made launch more expensive. The Saturn V's ostensible purpose was to put a man on the moon, and it did within a few years.

The Apollo Program was a prestige program. The shuttle was pork.

Look up the "wet workshop" concept. It could have increased the size of a space station componentby flooding the interior with propellant and using it as a stage. After purging the atmosphere astronauts would enter and install equipment stored in a seperate dry storage compartment. Skylab used a few ww features like the flow through floors but it was a "dry workshop".

You'd really be better off asking Veeky Forums.

We raced to the moon because of the national zeitgeist and competition during the 50's and 60's. Once we beat the Ruskies there and sclerotic Brezhnevism set in for them over the 70's, they gave up.

No competitor, no push for Mars. With either shuttles or rockets.

>pork

Every bit of everything ever done for the space program isn't pork. The tech we got from this stuff is worth more than gold.

>if the US would have continued using the Saturn 5
That would mean every president from Carter on would have had to justify the (very small) NASA budget every time they wanted to launch something.
The shuttle is the only reason we're as far along as we are.

Spaceplanes are cool. Fuck you

>The Saturn V's ostensible purpose was to put a man on the moon, and it did within a few years.
Sure, but that purpose was pork
They really only succeeded because they were handed everything ready to go from the military, NASA showed how they would perform if they were allowed to start from scratch with the Space Shuttle
As far as I understand NASA had to be forced into actually doing practical stuff while they were on the moon too, like bringing samples back.

20 billion dollars is not "very small"

Like this

And like this

What an immense waste of space & resources lol

But also like this

What the fucking fuck did you just say to my face motherfucker. I'll have you know that the O'neill colony configuration is one of the best for providing large living spaces with equal levels of gravity

Is that Australia after the emus overrun it in 2023?

assuming things like resources are free, and stuff like air leaks don't happen huh
Also the only way to grow crops is on giant open fields

Development and operation for the Space Shuttle cost 150 billion for 37 launches. With these 37 launches you were able to put around 800 tons of stuff into space, none of that to the moon, since the Space Shuttle was not capable to reach the Moon.

A Saturn 5 launch to the moon costs 1.5 billion, a launch to LEO cost 500 million. It also was able to put 6 times the load to LEO, and 50 tons on the moon (which is still even more than the Space Shuttle was able to put into LEO). So if you had used the 150 billion that went into the Space shuttle to do, lets say 50 moon missions, and 100 LEO missions, you would have put 18 times the load the Space Shuttle put into LEO, plus 50 Moon missions, which translate into around 1.500 tons of load to moon, which would be enough to build one big or several small moon bases. 100 missions into LEO would have been enough to put a space station much bigger than the ISS, +
Reagan's SDI into space.

So yeah, we would have a moon base, a much bigger space station, and a strategic defense against intercontinental rockets.

t. brainlet

>none of that to the moon
It coulda gone to the moon, thats just another 6 km/s delta-v or so
So if they wanted to launch a moon mission piecemeal with the shuttle they COULD have done that.

Without an atmosphere or giant runway to land on the space shuttle would never be able to land on the moon. So we would have resorted to using a lunar lander anyway, which the space shuttle would have a hard time carrying. The space shuttle might have been able to take us to the moon, but landing on the surface would never happen without extensive modifications to the design, to the point where it wouldnt even be the same spacecraft. Saturn V was superior in every way except reusability, but it was still significantly cheaper despite that fact.

this

Saturn was pork but still much much better than the Shuttle

>20 billion dollars is not "very small"
See what I mean?

>So yeah, we would have a moon base, a much bigger space station, and a strategic defense against intercontinental rockets.
You're missing the point. Your dream list would have been a political anchor for any president, and likely to have been abandoned as undesirable political weight.
Instead, the public was told it was a "reusable" space truck, don't worry about the cost.

No, it was mainly abandoned because Saturn 5/Apollo programm was Kennedy's legacy, and Nixon couldn't handle that. He wanted to end it as soon as possible. There was no big "end the Saturn 5" demonstration like there were with the Vietnam war. People didnt give a lot of fucks about it. It was Nixon who killed it because he hated Kennedy.

This is the ideal space station. You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.

>>The Saturn V's ostensible purpose was to put a man on the moon, and it did within a few years.
>Sure, but that purpose was pork
You don't understand what "pork" means, do you? Pork is short for "pork barrel spending", in reference to the home economics of the early US, where people were generally in a desperately impoverished situation when they ran out of salt pork. So it refers to welfare through employment: giving people jobs so you have an excuse to pay them money so they can feed their families ("so they don't see the bottoms of their pork barrels").

The moon race wasn't a jobs program. The purpose was to demonstrate American technological supremacy, to demoralize communists who had trumpeted the early Soviet lead as proof that communism was a better system. There was still a real danger of a communist revolution in the USA.

Imagine how easy terrorism would be on this thing.

How scalable was the production for the saturn 5? Could nasa actually have started mass producing those for private satilite launches?

The US built over 300 Atlas ICBMs.

They could have mass produced the space rocket just fine.

It makes no sense to have so much open space when you can build multiple stores and pack much more people while reinforcing the structure at the same time.

>Sure, but that purpose was pork
Garbage. It was to catch up with Soviet Union.

>They really only succeeded because they were handed everything ready to go from the military,
Garbage, they used von Braun, the US military had huge problems until then.

>NASA showed how they would perform if they were allowed to start from scratch with the Space Shuttle
Garbage. The Shuttle was a astronaut killing disaster.

>As far as I understand NASA had to be forced into actually doing practical stuff while they were on the moon too, like bringing samples back.
garbage. Nixon cut it short.

Let's just say you would not admit anyone aboard such a space station.

>she's dressed up like the girl in the Thriller video

you mixed up the fucking timelines, australia didn't get wrecked in the gundam wing universe

>assuming things like resources are free

If we have the tech to live in space, we could mine that asteroid made up of $10,000,000,000,000,000,000 worth of iron.

The space program is balloons

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Echo

>and a strategic defense against intercontinental rockets
If you want a defense against intercontinental rockets, you basically just need a few satellites with a little bit of fuel to manoeuvre it right into the ICBM.
The reason why such a defence system doesn't (officially) exist is pure political, look up the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, they were already shitting their pants about the possibility of someone being the first to successfully defend against ICBMs on a larger scale, which would make him invulnerable for a short amount of time (till the other one is successful at building up defence), which would mean that there would be a strong urge for this side to make the first nuclear strike.

Someone being able to build a defence and being invulnerable is treating and scary as fuck, while the usual "Who is having the biggest dick" arms races are just part of the game.

>discussing ancient rocket technology

It's 2017 - The future is Musk:

>Inb4 some madman builds a satellite defense network and uses it to stop everyone's nukes.

Psychology
humans don't like being trapped in cages like rats