Maybe, but the Nerva XE would have been capable of such repeated launches for so cheap, it would have been making daily launches for decades putting all polluting heavy industry off world. Making asteroid mining and helium3 mining common enough that we’d have multiple mega space stations to launch from. There’d be no need to have terrestrial bases on shit hole planets like mars where launch dates are subject to its orbit. They’d just be stationary in optimal positioned for certain routes.
I suppose in this scenario there is no rush to escape the brown hordes, making Mars unnecessary as a short term solution.
If there’d have been no brown hoard invasion to escape, I think progress would have been so fast we would have just looked at mars as a waste of time. People really do underestimate how strong the long term vision for the future was in the German ruling class. There would have been no derailing tech progress into microchips and screens to pump hedonism and filth into the masses.
We went from the first man to fly, to inventing the nuke and dropping it from a long range bomber in 50 years. Then went 1/100th as far in the next 70 when progress should have not only continued faster, but exponentially.
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