[fastball]

It would not exist in its current form, but a space industry would almost certainly still exist without the Cold War. Space is too useful to just ignore, regardless of whether or not it was another venue for a geopolitical boxing match.

[m4rtink]

Yeah, that's something I have been wondering - how would things look like if the main driving force behind spaceflight was entrepreneurs of the Goddards generation, not military mainly trying to get good ICMBs and spy sat launchers ?

A lot of the current status quo of single use state of the art super-expensive hyper-optimized launchers can be IMHO traced back to ICBMs and spy sat launcher where accomplishing the given military mission was the most important goal, whatever the cost (both monetary and in general sustainability).

I wonder if it all was instead financed by private and commercial money from the start, we might have perhaps ended up with cruder (partially ?) reusable rockets much sooner, not to mention with a more robust in-space infrastructure (propellant depots, etc.) that simply does not make sense if you just want to lob nukes one way or launch a couple expensive spy sats per year & don't care about anything else.

[imtringued]

I looked into agriculture in North African countries. You can do crazy things with greenhouses and aquaponics but compared to simple fertile soil it is very expensive. So the problem shifted into creating fertile soil and once I read up on afforestation it feels absolutely trivial but the scale of the problem is so big that only governments can attempt it.

USA gives those countries foreign aid in dollars which are then spent on weapons and food imports when afforestation programs are actually what is really needed there. It's not rocket science. You install sand barriers to prevent erosion and you plant trees to increase the water capacity of the soil and 50 years later you have a nice forest which you can convert to farmland.

[SiempreViernes]

You can look at optical astronomy for how the "market" would look like if it was only science driven: all innovation happening on government funded projects, with very few companies worldwide having some manufacturing capability.

In any case, calling Goodard a entrepreneur seems pretty strange: he was a professor interested in rocketry firstly as a means of recording the state of the atmosphere at very high altitudes. To the extent the market gave him any attention it was as a source of cheap entertainment by making people laugh at him.

[m4rtink]

I should have worded it better - not Goddard himself but the early pioneers of rocketry in general in the US, Britain, Germany and Russia, if they could have developed the technology without military influence.

Still you might be right that it might have never got the funding it needed like that and stayed a pure niche for ever.