Astor
Rich guy ends up controlling space travel. I guess some things are pan-universal.
A Night No One Remembers
At 11:37 at night, on the deck of the Titanic, a lookout looked out at just the right moment. An alarm was raised, and the great boat turned, missing an iceberg by a few feet. Only long-forgotten records note who was standing watch, and no one considers such a fact to be worth noting, any more than someone might care who peeled the potatoes in the galley or who mopped the deck. It was a night no one remembers.Some of the ripple effects almost anyone could predict; some other ship would need to sink before lifeboat requirements were changed, the various international agreements on rescues at sea came later, and so on. But there were other, less obvious, changes. Among about 1600 other people, John Jacob Astor IV did not die that night.
In 1920, Astor read an article in the New York Times mocking Robert Goddard. Astor was not amused, and spent some time in correspondence with Goddard, and in 1921, had begun to back his experiments. With the funding, and Astor's people seeking out qualified assistants and supporters, Goddard was able to advance far faster than on Baseline. His first liquid fuelled flights launched in 1923. They progressed rapidly, with Astor footing the bill in return for Goddard's promise no one else would be sold the patents or allowed to develop them. When Goddard noted one evening that a major stumbling block were the thousands of tedious calculations, Astor saw another opportunity. He began hiring engineers and mathematicians to find a way to build a calculating engine with the flexibility needed to handle equations and formulae not known at the time of the design. This effort eventually involved Vannevar Bush, John Von Neumann, and Walter Bothe, who, by 1934, had completed the "Astor-matic" (They had no say in the naming), the first electromechanical stored-program computer.
Goddard's rockets, meanwhile, were reaching the upper atmosphere successfully, with automatic cameras providing views of the world beyond anything seen before. As war loomed, it was inevitable the military would come calling, and a crash program, enhanced by the newly-built computers, produced the first truly long-range missiles. From a launch base in England, it was estimated, they could easily reach Berlin, though this fact was not widely advertised. When the Blitz began in London, the US gave the go-ahead to return fire. The German's own rocket program was going nowhere, in large part because Von Braun had been recruited in 1935. Hitler was killed in 1942, and the Reich was done with by 1943. Japan did not surrender, but with the aid of the second generation of computers, the atomic bomb was ready, and sent by rocket to Tokyo, in 1944. Something relatively close to Baseline's post-war political order took shape.
By this point, Astor was old, and ill, but his heirs, seeing the profit in his pro-technology vision, carried on. The Astor Rocket Company placed the first satellite in permanent orbit in 1949, and the first moon landing took place on Octobr 4, 1957.
It is currently 1975. The Luna Astoria, a permanent colony focused on mining and refining in low gravity, has been operating for 13 years. Russian and Japanese bases exist at other locations, despite the Astor Corporation's efforts to crush them via patent laws. With the technology gap rapidly closing, there is great pressure for breakthroughs like those of 30s, but risk-aversion, cost-cutting, and other rot has set in. The next prize, a Mars landing, awaits, and it is doubtful Astor will be there first.
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