We could be on Mars by now #shorts #history

If JFK hadn't been assassinated, it's possible that Apollo would never have landed on the moon, but that we would also have a human presence on Mars by now. On September 18th of 1963, at a speech at the United Nations, Kennedy called to cancel Apollo in favor of a joint mission with the Soviet Union. He basically cited that it was insane for these two countries to be competing and spending this much money to effectively duplicate technology, that it made a lot more sense to do something together. Finally, in a field where the United States and the Soviet Union have a special capacity, in the field of space, there is room for new cooperation. I include among these possibilities a joint expedition to the moon. Then, of course, two months later, he was assassinated in Dallas. And that kind of forced LBJ to continue funding and push Apollo to the moon to fulfill the fallen president's goal. So, let's play a little game of what if. What if Kennedy had not been assassinated and this plan to cancel Apollo in favor of a joint mission with the Soviet Union had actually gone forward? Well, it's possible that that mission would have looked incredibly different. Apollo was basically a crash program. It was the easiest way to go to the moon with the technology that we had available and the time frame he prescribed. But without any of those constraints, a mission, especially one shared between countries, might have looked a lot more like some of the early space exploration proposals in the 1950s. things like Warner Brown's idea of a 70 plus person mission to Mars. All things being equal, American experts in the 1950s and60s wanted to start a big space exploration program with a space station, which made a lot more sense. Start with a station as a launching point for deep space missions to the moon and eventually to Mars. You could use the moon as a staging point. You could build a base on the moon and that could also serve as a way station on the way to Mars. Either way, it would allow the country to establish a firm foothold in space, something it was never able to do for a really long time because the Apollo program changed the way we think about space flight for a really long time. Or it's possible that nothing would have changed at all and Apollo would have gone to the moon exactly like we know it did. Just a really interesting tidbit from history that I think gets buried way too often when we talk about Apollo and also starts a really fun thought experiment.