Monte Davis wrote:

If no prospect of nuclear warheads, how long for *scientific*
motivations and budgets to push us from something like Aerobee to
orbit, with Vanguard or the like? Or would a first commercial commsat
or first miltary spysat have done the trick?


There are so many variables in that question that I don't know if it can
even be answered in any real form.
Without a nuclear weapon (or some sort of other highly destructive
payload such as Anthrax or Smallpox) a strategic SSM doesn't make a lot
of sense unless you can give it some form of terminal guidance to hit a
specific target with great accuracy.
What made things fluky was that both the German's and ourselves came up
with one part of a terrifying weapons system technology that when put
together worked extremely well as a combined system- the nuclear
warheaded SSM.
What really would have seriously stymied space exploration isn't a world
without V-2s, it's a world without the atomic bomb. If it hadn't been
possible to build, then the drive to build long-range rockets might
never of happened.
I went digging around for when the WAC Corporal program got started,
and what gets even it rolling is reports that the Germans are playing
around with long-range artillery rockets, although I doubt anyone
involved in the WAC Corporal program knows about the Manhattan Project,
so the design is very modest in size.
In a atomic bomb free world the bomber, not SSM, may be king, due to the
need for dropping its bombload with accuracy, requiring some guidance
input from the bombardier.

In a way, it's a question about Big Science and the associated Big
Bleeding-Edge Engineering, which historians agree was very much a
legacy of WWII. After radar, jets, the V-2 and the A-bomb, scientists
who previously had thought $50K was big money had access to millions,
so we would stay ahead with wonder weapons (or at any rate not be
surprised by somebody else's wonder weapons). But to what extent would
the US or USSR have seen a high-explosive-only uber-V-2, antipodeal
bomber etc. as a wonder weapon worth pursuing?

I remember a "won't it be great?" IGY poster in my classroom in 1956,
and in hindsight I know that planning for it had been going on since
1952-1953. Would a satellite (rather then just a slew of up-and-down
instrument packages to the exosphere) have been part of the mix if the
scientists hadn't had the benefit of pedal-to-the-metal engineering
towards the R-7, Redstone, Atlas etc?


That's a good question indeed...you might end up with something like the
Antipodal Bomber being developed, and that slowly evolving into
something like the Space Shuttle in the way the X-15 was to lead to
Dyna-Soar.
One incentive for hypersonic superbombers even with conventional
payloads is that the impact of the bomb at those velocities makes it
highly destructive from the viewpoint of kinetic energy alone. The "Rods
From God" concept may have shown up decades earlier.

Pat