Quote:
Originally Posted by Phantasm
This timeline is treading a fine line where the forum's RealPolitics rules are concerned, I think. Let's not focus too hard on the politics.
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Well the recent politics is, but I don't think much of it after Kennedy actually matters much to the setting. The collapse of the Soviet Union may be nice, but not really necessary. Not even for there to be some improvements in the Russian economy - the PRC hasn't "collapsed" after all, but has evolved. And the relegation of the Middle East to mostly a non-problem is an automatic consequence of anything that shifts global energy away from oil, so even if none of those "better" outcomes happen it probably doesn't matter much, its assorted brutal dictatorships and failed states are of no more interest than the ones in eastern Africa these days.
I think the key political hurdle is the one that has to be solved for the 1970s US. I remember the Carter administration actually pushed pretty hard for nuclear energy to deal with the "moral equivalent of war" from OPEC, and it went basically nowhere, despite being both considerably cheaper than orbital solar could ever hope to be, and using proven technology. I don't see a Kennedy administration pulling off allocating huge amounts of funding to something more expensive that might not work. It is after all something there hasn't been a successful prototype of even now, and which the launch costs for the solar panels alone, never mind what you'd need for the rest of the process would still exceed the costs of going full nuclear even with our cheaper panels and more expensive fission plants, so if it does work here it pretty much requires something that would still be technologically revolutionary to be developed in the late 1970s.