>>12155719mostly i thought it sucked as a work of alternate history.
1. nixon did not give a shit about spaceflight and would not have supported increasing nasa budgets just because the soviets landed on the moon first. and he would have been totally opposed to any militarization of space, just like every president before him had been. ron moore makes the same mistake tom paine and other guys in nasa made - assuming that nixon just innately hated the soviets and therefore he'd spend any money he could to screw them over. nasa tried, repeatedly, to play up the cold war competition angle after nixon came into office and it just put the guy off. they missed that he was the first president to visit the soviet union and had idolized woodrow wilson from childhood. in the white house tapes you can hear him drunkenly crying on the phone about how all he wanted was world peace. at the absolute best, nixon might have wanted a joint moonbase with the soviets, an ASTP on steroids.
2. ted kennedy actively hated manned spaceflight and was very much of the we-can't-do-anything-in-space-until-all-problems-ever-on-earth-are-fixed school
3. the soviets thought valentina tereshkova's flight was a disaster and would never have put a woman on the moon unless they thought the americans were about to do it first
if you're gonna do a neverending-space-race timeline then it needs to address the real reason why the space race ended - the outer space treaty alleviating the defense establishment's worry that the soviets were going to claim the lunar surface. but even if the outer space treaty hadn't been signed there would have been a great deal of pressure to sign something like it to save money. most media and intellectuals would have cheered any treaty slowing down the space race.
