As Project Apollo wound down, federal science investment fell by half from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s.  But what if it didn’t? The alternate history premise of For All Mankind on Apple TV+ imagines an extended Space Race where the USSR reaches the moon first. This embarrassing defeat spurs continued US investment in space and technology. The show depicts an accelerated timeline of achievements: a permanent lunar base by 1973, Mars landing in 1995, and widespread use of cell phones and electric cars in the 1980s. By 1988, lunar helium-3 mining has sparked a fusion revolution, slowing global warming — a stark contrast to our reality’s growing climate concerns.

As I write in my 2023 book The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised: 

But imagine if generating a fusion reaction had been one of the most impressive feats of the late twentieth century, as [Arthur C.] Clarke predicted. Maybe that would’ve happened had the technology been as big a federal research priority as Project Apollo was in the 1960s with years of massive government investment. Fusion might already be a big part of America’s power portfolio. But nuclear fusion wasn’t the new Apollo. Nothing was. That’s why it’s still a trope of political campaign ads to highlight the moon landing of a half century ago as the prime example of American greatness. As Arthur Turrell, a plasma physicist whose book The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet documents the effort to achieve nuclear fusion, told me soon after the [2022] breakthrough, “How fast technological progress goes depends on how much we, as a society, want it. Societal will and investment can speed up technology — just look at the development and deployment of vaccines during the [coronavirus pandemic].

Although there was no massive fusion effort — energy officials in Washington did muse about the technology’s 21st Century potential, however — there was interest in greatly expanding nuclear fission. Project Independence was an initiative announced by President Richard M. Nixon in 1973 to address the energy crisis. Sparked by oil shortages due to the Arab oil embargo, Nixon said the United States must achieve energy self-sufficiency. He compared that goal to the Manhattan Project and space program in scale and importance. The project called for increased use of domestic energy sources like coal and nuclear power, energy conservation measures, and relaxed environmental regulations. A key part of the plan was expanding nuclear power generation by accelerating the construction of new nuclear power plants, increasing funding for nuclear R&D, and promoting public acceptance of nuclear power. 

Now, I often see online claims on social media that Project Independence was Nixon promising to build 1,000 nuclear power plants by the year 2000. That’s not quite right. Nixon never said that, specifically, as best as I can determine. Nixon didn’t say it in his related speeches, nor is there any mention in the New York Times coverage of Project Independence. (Also, there is nothing  about 1,000 nuclear plants in the Project Independence Wikipedia article, for what that’s worth.)

Rather, it was the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) as early as 1967 predicting a thousand nuclear plants by the year 2000. So I guess people making this claim about Project Independence are extrapolating from what the AEC had been saying over the years. Alas, Project Independence was abandoned for a variety of reasons, including its unrealistic timeline, Nixon’s resignation, the shaky 1970s economy, and rising nuclear construction costs and delays. The upside here is if another president wants to set an ambitious energy goal, critics can’t deride it as a warmed-over Nixonian plan.

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