The Timeline of a Space Lover

It is known that in our own timeline (OTL) that the Soviets would become the first country to launch a satellite into low-earth orbit on the 4th of October 1957, beating the Americans to their own commitment of launching a satellite as part of the International Geophysical Year, creating a whole scare in the United States, a red scare, that the Soviet Union, the evil communists, were catching up to the free and capitalist West + the United States. 
But, what if something else had happened? The main point of divergence (POD) (there are many other PODs in this timeline) for this timeline is that the United States agrees to the U.S. Army's proposal of launching the Explorer satellite with a PGM-11 Redstone rocket instead of the U.S. Navy's Vanguard satellite on a Vanguard rocket, as such the USA launches the Explorer 1 satellite on the 2nd of October 1957, while the Soviet R-7 Semyorka rocket would suffer a rapid unscheduled disassembly due to the accidental ignition of the second stage while still on the launch pad, as shown in the picture, despite attempts by the Soviets to hide this failure, the Americans would reveal it and essentially embarrass the Soviets by calling it Flopnik and Kaputnik (something that in OTL was used as a nickname for America's own failed Vanguard launch). 
This causes the Soviet Union to go on a space race attitude, establishing their own space agency Roscosmos, consolidating their space program, which prompts President Eisenhower to do the same soon after. They also begin creating very sensationalized propaganda of the soviet/socialist dream ushering in the space age and conquering space, freeing it (and Earth) from the corruption of the capitalist economic system and ideology, among many other things, basically, this is a weird timeline where the Soviets try to one-up the Americans and not vice-versa and it leads to the timeline below. 
The Timeline of a Space Lover is a hard science fiction timeline, which utilizes scientific accuracy and logic alongside more fictional ideas that may be employed in this timeline due to its nature as being more inclided towards space exploration than in our own timeline. 
==Timeline==
===The 1950s===
*1952: The International Geophysical Year (IGY) would be announced and be set for July 1st 1957 until December 31st, 1958, it representing an international scientific project and would encompass 11 Earth sciences (aurora, airglow, cosmic rays, geomagnetism, gravity, ionospheric physics, precision mapping, meterology, oceanography, seismology and solar activity) and the period of 1957-1958 would also see solar cycle 19, it being the 19th one since 1755, meaning that the timing for it was particularly suited for studying some of these phenomena. 
 
Dwight D. Eisenhower is elected President of the United States. Soviets would begin launching their own R-1 rocket, their own version of the V-2 rocket reverse-engineering it with the help of Nazi scientists they kidnapped, something the USA also did after World War II. The Eisenhower-Nixon ticket would make great use of political slogans, such as I Like Ike and his popularity as a World War II veteran who was responsible for the success of D-Day and also for his north african Operation Torch. 
The United Kingdom successfully tests its first nuclear weapon, Hurricane, on the western coast of Australia, becoming the 3rd country after the United States and the Soviet Union to perform such a feat. 
Wernher Von Braun, a Nazi scientist taken by the Americans as part of Operation Paperclip, publishes a series of articles known as "Man Will Conquer Space Soon!", which not only includes ideas for satellites and men in low-earth orbit, but also crewed missions to Mars and orbital space stations meant for long-term human habitation in space, using something known as the Ferry Rocket, it being a super-heavy rocket that has on its first stage 78 engines and would be by far the largest rocket, it looking oddly similar to the V-2 rocket, but way bigger. 
*1953: Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin would die and after some internal power struggles would be succeeded by Nikita Khrushchev, who promised a more moderate approach, even secretly denouncing Stalin and announcing de-stalinization. Dwight D. Eisenhower is inaugurated as President of the United States. The Soviets and the Americans begin drawing their eyes towards 
launching the first satellite and the missile arms race, despite not yet publicly saying it, but they're building the R-7 (Soviet 
Space Program) and the SM-65 Atlas (U.S. Air Force) intercontinental ballistic missiles. 
Princess and the Duchess of Edinburgh Elizabeth officially becomes Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and all of Britain's dominions (the British Empire). She would be the first female monarch since Queen Victoria who died in 1901 and her reign would begin a great change, through something known as decolonization, even if not directly influenced by her as the monarch's powers were mostly ceremonial. 
*1954: The Americans successfully launch the Viking 11 rocket, a sounding rocket that would be sub-orbital, with the capability of reaching 82 km, near the 100 km Karman line set by the International Aeronautics Federation (FAI) and the Americans would initiate Project Orbiter, a joint U.S. Army and Navy project meant to use a Redstone rocket to send a satellite into orbit. The Soviets also launch their R-5 rocket, an intermediate range ballistic missile, it being a successful test of a sounding rocket as well. 
The United States of America tests, at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, the most powerful hydrogen bomb so far, that being Castle Bravo, which would have a yield of 15 megatons, around x2 more than what was expected due to some not understood properties of lithium deuteride, a component of the fusion-stage of the bomb and because of this, large amounts of radiation would be emitted across the atoll, affecting the lives of many indigenous people there. In the same year, the weaker Castle Romeo test is also conducted. 
*1955: President Eisenhower accepts the joint U.S. Army-Navy proposal of launching on a PGM-11 Redstone rocket as part of the International Geophysical Year (IGY), rejecting the our own timeline accepted proposal by the Navy to launch the Vanguard satellite on a Vanguard rocket, this meant that the USA could launch a satellite quicker than in our own timeline and even succeed, as the PGM-11 Redstone turned out to be a better design than the Vanguard. Also in this year, Eisenhower's press secretary, James C. Hagerty, would announce that the USA would launch small circling Earth satellites from July 1957 to December 1958 as part of America's contribution to the International Geophysical Year (IGY), the Soviets would also soon announce in the same year that they would be participating in the IGY from 1957-1958. 
*1956: Dwight D. Eisenhower, from the Republican Party, would easily win re-election in a landslide against Democratic party candidate Adlai Stevenson. Japan launches its first ever sounding rocket, Kappa-1, but it doesn't yet have space flight capabilities and China begins testing missiles, to be used later for space exploration. The American Jupiter-C would make its first maiden flight and it would be an uncrewed sub-orbital flight meant to test re-entry nosecones and the Soviets would continue launching R-1 and R-5 rockets into space. 
*1957: The International Geophysical Year (IGY) from 1957-1958 has commenced, it being a worldwide program of geophysical research meant to study the Earth and its planetary environment, it sort of brought back scientific interchange between the West and the East that was halted because of the beginning of the Cold War in 1949 (because of the Berlin Airlift) and had 67 countries participating as part of its scientific projects, including the United States (USA) and the Soviet Union (USSR), the world's main superpowers.
In this year, the United States would successfully launch on the 2nd of October, 1957, the satellite Explorer 1, launching on a PGM-11 Redstone rocket from LC-26A at the Cape Canaveral Missile Center, it being the first artificial satellite ever successfully put into orbit, this would be a very important mission, as the Explorer 1 would discover the Van Allen radiation belt and other important scientific discoveries considered monumental as part of the IGY. 
On the 4th of October 1957, 2 days after the infamous American launch of the Explorer 1, they would attempt with their R-7 Semyorka rocket to launch the Sputnik 1 satellite, which results in the satellite race being a tie. Sputnik 2 is launched later on 3rd of November 1957. 
*1958: 
The Soviet Union would launch from a R-7 Semyorka rocket its first satellite on the 15th of May, 1958, it being known as Sputnik 3 and was the original proposal of Sergei Korolev, carrying a large array of instruments for international geophysical research. By this point, the United States had launched the Vanguard TV-3 satellite in December 1957, the Explorer 2 satellite in January 1958, the Vanguard 1 satellite in March 1958 and the Explorer 3 satellite also in March of 1958, showing just how far the Soviets were behind in terms of satellites.
This would prompt Nikita Khrushchev to declare the creation of the Soviet Space Agency, also known as Roscosmos as a response to the slew of American satellite launches on June 7th 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower would also respond to it by creating the National Aeronautics and Space Agency soon after on July 23rd, 1958, but it wouldn't be as hyped/funded as NASA was in our timeline and plus it was established a couple months later. The Soviets knew they had to get an achievement that surpassed the launching of the first satellite and they came up with the first man in space and they sought to do it as fast as possible and as such, pumped up funding for Roscosmos, which was led by Sergei Korolev. 
Eisenhower and Khrushchev would also sign National Defense Education Acts in their own respective countries in order to create a large pool of scientists, engineers etc., with stuff like new math becoming a trend of the 1960s as students were forced to learn as if they were about to become rocket scientists or were meant to work at NASA or Roscosmos. 
*1959:
America would continue with its launching of satellites under NASA at Cape Canaveral, specifically Vanguard and Explorer satellites. Wernher Von Braun and his engineering team would begin work on the Mercury Redstone rocket, in order to get the first man into space, although because of NASA's limited funding this may not happen soon. What's even better was that it turned out that in 1959, after a surveillance mission into the USSR with a Lockheed U-2, which managed to return unharmed revealed news that the USA had more SM-65 Atlas ICBMs than the Soviets had R-7 Semyorka ICBMs. 
But, the Soviets would with their R-7 Semyorka rocket, launch Luna 1, which would be the first spacecraft to make a flyby of the Moon and enter heliocentric orbit (even though its goal was to impact the Moon), Luna 2 would be the first to hit the surface of the Moon and Luna 3 would be the first to return with pictures of the Moon and its far-side all of this would happen in 1959 and the United States would not even know. 
The United States knew that it had just been surpassed in the Space Race, while yes it launched more satellites and had better technology, somehow their arch-nemesis the Soviet Union had just one-upped them. That was unacceptable, according to President Eisenhower and would order massive funding to be pumped into NASA and would promise that within at least a year, the United States would be the first country to send a human into space (above 100 km). 
===The 1960s===
*1960:
John F. Kennedy from the Democratic party narrowly wins the election of 1960 against Richard Nixon, from the Republican Party, Dwight D. Eisenhower's vice-president. 
The Americans would launch the first test flight of the Mercury Redstone and also of the modified Atlas rocket, these rockets are to be used for sub-orbital and orbital flight capabilities, their tests would go remarkably well. The Soviet test, as part of Sputnik 4, of the Vostok capsule would also go well, the Soviets also taking the American challenge to heart and attempting to send their own man into space. The race was on to send the first man into space. Also during this time, the Soviets would announce the Vostok program and the Americans would announce the Mercury program. 
Also during this year, the Americans would recover the Discoverer 13 satellite from orbit, a recovery the first of its kind and 1960 and with the Discoverer 14, part of Project Corona, would take the first photographs with the intent of spying on the Soviet Union. The Soviets send the first dogs into space and also orbit, Belka and Strelka as part of Sputnik 5 and return them to Earth. 
Also in this year, the Soviets finally manage to with a surface-to-air missile shoot down the American reconnaissance plane, the Lockheed U-2 and would take pilot Francis Gary Powers hostage until a deal was successfully made to liberate him. This plane was used to surveil Soviet space and military activities, which worsened relations between the two powers and further sparked the flame that became the space race. 
In the later parts of the year around November 1960, the Americans would successfully launch Alan Shepard on a Mercury Redstone rocket, carrying him on a sub-orbital trajectory and to a maximum altitude of 120 km before his space capsule would re-enter and splash down near Cape Canaveral. To NASA and the Americans, this was the best they had as the Atlas, the crew-rated rocket capable of orbit was not ready yet. 
*1961:
John F. Kennedy is sworn in office on January 20, 1961. 
In February of 1961, the Soviets successfully launch the first man into orbit on an R-7 Semyorka, that being Yuri Gagarin, this achievement would be a blow to the Americans who thought that they'd be the ones to have the first man orbiting the Earth. His Vostok capsule would successfully re-enter and land in Kazakhstan, near the Baikonur Cosmodrome, where the R-7 would be launched from. The Americans would soon repeat this achievement by launching John Glenn into orbit using a SM-65 Atlas rocket
John F. Kennedy would give his 1961 State of the Union speech and would stress the goal of making sure America is the first country to land a man on the Moon and return him safely to the Earth by the end of the decade, after news of this Soviet space achievement, essentially moving the goal post once again. NASA would come up with ways to get to the Moon, those being direct ascent, earth-orbit rendezvous and lunar-orbit rendezvous and they proposed a series of rockets, the Saturn family, to do the job and as part of the Apollo program and would also establish the Gemini program, launching astronauts and the Gemini capsule on a Titan II rocket and an Agena Target Vehicle and the Apollo program, choosing the Saturn V rocket carrying the Command & Service Module and the Lunar Excursion Module and will utilize earth-orbit rendezvous and lunar-orbit rendezvous and not direct-ascent, which would've required the use of the Saturn VIII (a rocket with 8 F-1 engines on its first stage, instead of 5).
The Soviets in response publicly announce the creation of the Voskhod program, a program that is pretty similar to Gemini in that it will test longer-duration astronaut stays in space and at further distances from the Earth and also docking and rendezvous capabilities of Soviet spacecraft, they will launch the Voskhod on a modified R-7 rocket that is known as Soyuz. They would launch the last 5 missions of the Vostok program from 1961-1962, the second mission carrying Gherman Titov who would stay in space for 26 days before returning and then begin the first uncrewed test flight of the Voskhod, beating the Americans as they were stil flying astronauts as part of the Mercury Program as part of suborbital or orbital flights. 
In 1960 we would see the first TV satellites to be put into orbit, these being the American Telstar satellites, through the Telstar, we would the first telephone calls, telegraph images and TV pictures relayed through the means of space for the first time in human history, its other companion, Telstar 2 would be launched 3 years later, but both are still in orbit today. 
*1962:The Soviet Union continues the Vostok program all the way until Vostok 6, this last mission carrying the first woman into space and orbit , Valentina Tereshkova, a Soviet cosmonaut. 
The Voskhod program, which began with uncrewed test missions in 1961, would have its first 2 astronaut crewed mission of the Voskhod spacecraft, launched on a modified R-7 rocket known as Soyuz. Voskhod 1 would be an unmanned test flight in late 1961 and Voskhod 2 would carry dogs Veterok and Ugolyok on a 22-day flight in space, successfully returning them to the Earth. Voskhod 3 would in the same year launch cosmonauts Vladimir Komarov, Boris Yegorov and Konstantin Feoktistov. 
The United States begin its first crewed flight of the Gemini program, successfully demonstrating the first rendezvous of two spacecraft, that being the Gemini 1 and Gemini 2 capsules, each with 2 astronauts. 
The Soviets follow this up with Voskhod 4, where Alexei Leonov and Pavel Belyayev, the crew of the Voskhod spacecraft, complete the first spacewalk, 3 years earlier than in our own timeline, showing just how much the Space Race had intensified. At this point, NASA funding would receive 10.4B$/year and Roscosmos would receive 8.9B$/year, with their funding being neck and neck. 
 
The Soviet Luna program (also known as Lunik in Western media) would once again do lunar flybys as part of Luna 4 and 5 and impactor missions as part of Luna 6 and 7 in the year 1962. The Soviets were hoping to eventually land an unmanned lander and return actual lunar rock samples back to home and also create a lunar rover as part of the extension to Lunik, known as Lunokhod.
The Soviets beat the Americans in May of 1962 on a planetary flyby of Venus as part of the Venera 1 mission, with the Americans only doing their flyby with the Mariner 1 mission in December of that year, although the former failed during the trip to Venus.
The Cuban Missile Crisis still happens in 1962 and a Soviet nuclear submarine almost launch a nuclear-tipped torpedo at an enemy ship, but luckily and soon after John F. Kennedy agrees to withdraw their nuclear missiles from Turkey and Nikita Khrushchev agrees to withdraw their missiles from Cuba, ending this crisis, in this timeline however Nikita Khrushchev isn't toppled in favor of Brezhnev thanks to stronger support by politicians like Alexei Kosygin and also the fact that he has guided the Soviet Union through these space race victories and the creation of Roscosmos. 
*1963: 
Soviet rocket engineers/scientists like Sergei Korolev and politicians like Alexei Kosygin urge Khrushchev to go ahead through market socialist economic reforms that are meant to prevent an era of stagnation by prioritizing small business privatization like in the old New Economic Policy (NEP) of Vladimir Lenin and to also prioritize consumer goods over heavy industry and to also begin the OGAS program. At the same time, America would begin its ARPANET program under the Defense Advanced Research Projects (DARPA). Both of these were academic and military research programs meant to use the power of computing for aerospace and military purposes, however it is said that Soviets may have been planning to use OGAS in the long-term for economic planning, although this is not confirmed. 
The Americans replicate the Soviet achievement as part of Gemini 4 when astronaut Ed White would step out of his Gemini spacecraft and perform a spacewalk, or in official terms, extravehicular activity (EVA). 
During this year, there would be 2 other Voskhod missions, reaching up to Voskhod 6 and 3 other Gemini messions reaching up to Gemini 7, all of these missions saw extensive periods of and Gemini 6 would see the first docking of two spacecraft, that being the Agena Target Vehicle, launched from a SM-65 Atlas and a Gemini spacecraft, launched from a Titan II, while Voskhod 5, the last of the Voskhod missions in 1963 would see the autonomous docking of two Voskhod spacecraft.
In other shocking news, the Soviets manage to soft land the first object on the Moon in late 1963 as part of Lunik 9, this would only be a lander however it would take the first pictures of the surface of the Moon and it would last for a few da before its batteries would run out, but this was enough to force the Americans to put its space program into overdrive, as its funding would reach an at the time record of 25B$/year, or around 4% of the federal budget and there would also be the construction of new launch sites LC-39A and LC-39B and of the Saturn V rocket, something the Soviets weren't aware of as the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) hid it from view. 
In this year, President John F. Kennedy would also get assassinated and that made his vision of landing on the Moon before the end of the decade even more appealing and needed as it would essentially serve as accomplishing what he so desired and that would be further be prioritized by the incoming administration of Lyndon B. Johnson, he having positioned as the space guy and a fundamental piece in creating NASA in the first place and as such he couldn't just ditch it and as such continued it. 
In this year, the Partial Test Ban Treaty (PTBT) would be signed between the United States and the Soviet Union and also a whole slew of other countries, banning all nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere, the oceans and in space, limiting them to just underground tests, this also put to a halt projects like Orion, which were about nuclear-pulse propulsion in space using a whole slew of nuclear fusion/fission bombs to propel a spacecraft forward to its destination, whether i'd be the Moon or Mars. 
*1964:
The National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA), thanks to a massive amount of funding, begins to do 3 Gemini missions per year, by the end of 1964, we would have reached Gemini 11 and due to the increased familiarity of NASA with the Gemini spacecraft, decides to use a larger Gemini spacecraft, which will be known as the Advanced Gemini spacecraft for an eventual crewed lunar mission and a lunar lander that is designed to carry just carry 1 astronaut, while another would stay inside the Gemini spacecraft, this is to land on the Moon well before the end of the decade, said NASA.
Roscosmos is slower overall, only being able to do 2 Voskhod missions per year, getting to only Voskhod 8. The Soviets also take up President Kennedy's Moon challenge, but are overall late as they only now 3 years after the Americans b,egin work on their own super-heavy rocket, that being the N1 and their modified Soyuz spacecraft with an LK lunar lander. The Proton-K (also known as the UR-500), made by Vladimir Chelomey, a (in this timeline) friend of Sergei Korolev, is also being rolled out and has recently been used to launch Lunik missions 10 (the first spacecraft, unmanned, to orbit the Moon) and Lunik 11 which was another soft landing on the surface. 
The Americans in July of 1964 and August of 1964 launch the first geosynchronous and the first geostationary satellites, these being known as Syncom 2 and 3. They also begin the first flights of a new reconnaissance aircraft, the SR-71 Blackbird, it being able to fly 10 km higher than the U-2 and also had a top speed of Mach 3.3, which was faster than interceptor aircraft and surface-to-air missiles at the time, meaning that American air reconnaissance over the Soviets could continue shortly. 
 
The Advanced Gemini Program would begin, it being a test flight of the Saturn V,to low-earth orbit, with the Soviets being surprised at how quickly the Americans manage to build and launch the rockets plus all of these components. The Advanced Gemini spacecraft and the Lunar Excursion Module would be successfully demonstrated, with there being docking and rendezvous but also there being extravehicular activity in cases of emergency. The Gemini spacecraft capsule would also successfully re-enter. The Saturn V would also feature a nose cone with a Q-ball equipped with a solid rocket motor as an abort system in case things went wrong during launch, which was a far safer abort method than the one they had with ejection seats. 
Because of this timeline, by 1964, computers would be more advanced thanks to efforts of ARPANET and OGAS starting way earlier, which would mean that for example rocket guidance systems would be much more sophisticated in both the United States and the Soviet Union, this will be important later on. The Soviets launch Venera 2 in April of 1964, but it fails, instead the Americans successfully send Mariner 2 in the same month to a flyby around Mars (the first of its kind) and later Mariner 3 in June of 1964 once again in a flyby around Venus, offering new information regarding those two planets. 
In this year, the People's Republic of China successfully tests its first atomic bomb, becoming the 5th country to test a nuclear weapon, after the United States (1945)- Trinity Test, Soviet Union (1949) - RDS-1, United Kingdom (1952) - Hurricane, France (1960) - Blue Gerbil and now China tested its Project 596 nuke. The country with the most nukes in 1964 was the United States, with 30,000 of them, followed up by the USSR with 7,000 of them. 
*1965:
The Americans would launch a record 4 Gemini missions this year, reaching Gemini 14, Gemini 12 and 13 docked to each other, while Gemini 11 and 14 saw dockings with the Agena Target Vehicle. Both missions were hundreds of km above Earth and in orbit and there was also extravehicular activity, and there would also be an expansion of Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center to increase the size of the Vehicle Assembly Building and also build LC-39C and LC-39D. The Soviets also replicate this by expanding Baikonur Cosmodrome to have more space for their upcoming N1 rocket and other future space endeavours. In this year, NASA reaches peak funding of around 6% of the federal budget due to the even more intense space race with the Soviets and the building of the two launch complexes, this means that Johnson's Great Society programs are not in the same scope and in this timeline Johnson seeks a quick end to the Vietnam War.
The SR-71 Blackbird would also begin reconnaissance operations in the Soviet Union, Vietnam and other pro-Soviet countries during this time and would be highly successful and as such more and more of these aircraft continue to be built, however the Lockheed U-2 is still kept and Project CORONA with the Discoverer satellites (spy satellite program) is still ongoing. Americans use these vital assets to improve their efforts in the Vietnam War and thus not divert that much military expenditure into fighting it.
[This year would also see the second Apollo mission, which would be just like the first, testing out the systems of this advanced gemini spacecraft and also of this new lunar lander. While this is unknown to the Soviets, besides the Advanced Gemini and the Lunar Excursion Module, which are meant for short-duration lunar orbit and lunar surface operations alongside mid-duration low-earth orbits, are also building the Command & Service Module and the Extended Lunar Module, the former carrying 3 astronauts (instead of 2) and the latter carrying 2 astronauts (instead of 1) and will land on the lunar surface, these are to offer extended lunar missions and even low-earth orbit missions as part of proposals by engineers like Wernher Von Braun of the Apollo Applications Program (AAP). 
*1966:
The final missions of the Gemini program would occur, these being Gemini 15 and Gemini 16 and it would involve a docking of the two Gemini spacecraft in low-earth orbit and would see a world record (so far) stay in space for the Gemini program of around 8 days and even of extravehicular activity of 7 hours and 20 minutes. Apollo 3 would see the first testing of the Command & Service Module in low-earth orbit and Apollo 4 would perform with the Advanced Gemini spacecraft the first crewed flyby around the Moon before safely returning to Earth, both of these missions were launched using the Saturn V and the Apollo 4 lunar flyby would create the famous Earthrise photo, taken by pilot Donn Eisele and by commander Gus Grissom. 
It was clear to the Soviet Union that the Americans have seized the lead when it came to the space race, as the images of the Earthrise would make its way to the Soviet Union as well. While missions Luna 13 and Luna 14 successfully landed on the Moon and were able to transmit pictures, they knew that their Lunik missions they called "Luna" were not going to get them the lead in the space race, said Roscosmos. They may have to jump quite a few corners to get their N1, which was set to be complete by early next year, with astronauts, to landing on the surface Moon before the Americans would. 
A Boeing B-52 Stratofortress collides with a KC-135 Stratotanker and three hydrogen bombs with yields each of 70 kilotons fall, two near the Spanish town of Palmeares and one in the sea, this yet again ignites fears of nuclear annihilation at least for a short while, this being 4 years after the infamous Cuban Missile Crisis, in which the Americans, led by John F. Kennedy and the Soviets led by Nikita Khrushchev manage to settle things through and nuclear war was averted by one heroic Soviet known as Vasily Arkhipov. 
A Soviet Proton-K rocket would manage to launch a modified Soyuz spacecraft, known as Zond and have it make an orbit around the Moon and successfully return carrying animals aboard, it carrying two tortoises, fruit eggs and plants and this was the best response the Soviets could muster in that year, although it wouldn't be as publicized. 
The Americans by now would've finished their massive expansion of Cape Canaveral and the KSC, adding LC-39C and LC-39D and also expanding the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB), it now being able to hold around 8 Saturn V rockets (x2 more than in real life, it being made with the option of being expanded like this). The Soviets also roll up a mock up of their N1 rocket onto the launch pad, which the Americans do initially interpret it as the Soviets having finished their rocket, although they were close to doing so. Their Baikonur Cosmodrome has also finished its expansion, meaning its VAB can carry 6 N1 rockets and there an additional 2 launch pads at the cosmodrome. 
Another point of divergence (POD) that would happen in this year specifically is that Sergei Korolev, thanks to the better state of the Soviet economy and of the space program, would manage to survive his gastrointenstinal surgery and it is just a mundane surgery that is just not reported at all, but for the sake of this timeline we're going to mention it. 
*1967:
In this year, the Americans would launch Apollo 5 with astronauts Pete Conrad (commander) and James Lovell (pilot) performing a dress rehearsal landing on the Moon using the Advanced Gemini spacecraft and the Lunar Excursion module (Conrad would enter the excursion module, while Gordon would stay in the Gemini), getting within 15 km of the lunar surface with the lander before ascending back to the Gemini spacecraft. Apollo 6, with astronauts Thomas Stafford (commander) and Neil Armstrong (pilot) would also perform a testing of docking and rendezvous of the Command and Service Module and the Extended Lunar Module (this being in low-earth orbit) for future Apollo missions and finally Apollo 7 at the end of the year would see the first man to walk on the surface of the Moon, that being astronaut Michael Collins, who was the commander, while pilot David Scott would stay in lunar orbit . The mission ould only for 2-3 days before returning to Earth and Collins only had 1-2 hours of EVA on the lunar surface, showing just how short-term the whole Gemini-LEM system was when it came to lunar exploration, which was why the CSM and the ELM were being built and tested for the future. Apollo 5 happened in March of 1967, Apollo 6 in August of 1967 and Apollo 7 would happen in November of 1967 and would all be launched on Saturn V launches, which showed just how far NASA had gone. Michael Collins, after stepping out of the LEM, would utter the words: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."
 
In the Soviet Union, in October of 1967, the Soviets attempted to test their own shortcut, after finishing the N1 rocket, which utilized OGAS-made guidance systems, but the fact that it had 30 NK-15 engines and a very complicated system of kerolox propellant meant that this first test, with crew inside would fail and a 6 kiloton explosion would destroy the launch pad and the crew while they managed to abort to safety using the launch escape system, had their capsule severely damaged and sustained some hefty injuries themselves, these being cosmonauts Alexei Leonov (commander, would have landed on the Moon) and Andriyan Nikolayev (pilot, who would stay in lunar orbit) and had to be quickly sent to the hospital after landing around 10-15 km away from Baikonur with their capsule and the Soviets just missed their opportunity, the modified Soyuz would carry the two astronauts and the lander was not directly docked to the Soyuz, meaning that Leonov would have to make a spacewalk to get in the LK and back to the Soyuz, unlike in the Advanced Gemini-LEM of the Americans, where there was a small tunnel between the two craft. Despite the Soviet attempt to keep this under wraps, it did eventually hit the newspapers after some time.
 
The Soviets on the same day as the first ever landing of a human on the Moon, that being the 20th of November, 1967 would successfully land, by using a Proton-K rocket, the Luna 15 lander, which would specifically carry the Lunokhod 1 rov er, around 200 km away from the Tranquility Sea landing site of Michael Collins and of the Americans, this would represent the first rover to ever land on the surface of the Moon. 
After convincing done by NASA administrator Thomas Paine and chief rocket engineer Wernher Von Braun, through the Apollo Applications Program (AAP), LBJ would decide to continue further Apollo lunar missions, not just the additional Gemini-based ones until Apollo 12 set in 1969, but also a series of additional missions until Apollo 20, despite the fact that NASA funding was reduced from its 1966 peak of around 5% of the federal budget down to just 3%. 
Nikita Khrushchev would also be removed from the leadership after being far behind in the arms race with the United States of America, having an economy that was below that of the USA (which had 1T$ of GDP), while they only had 600B$ in GDP, losing the space race to the Moon and having the failure of the N1 rocket, among many other reasons. In his place would surprisingly come Evsei Liberman as who had a history as a Kharkiv economist but would enter the Soviet political sphere after his reforms would be put into place under Nikita Khrushchev, being chosen because he was the architect of the Soviet economic reforms in the 1960s, with Alexei Kosygin becoming Premier and Nikolai Podgorny becoming Presidium Chairman, creating a new troika (triumvirate). He was the first and only Soviet leader to ever be officially toppled through a vote of no confidence in the Supreme Soviet, this happened on December 18th, 1967 and he would die less than 4 years later. 
Israel, like in our own timeline manages to very easily win the Six-Day War which lasted from 5-10 June of 1967, defeating the Arab powers of Egypt, Jordan and Syria and annexing the Golan Heights, Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip and the West Bank, with Israel now becoming larger than it has ever been, it also beginning to encourage settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip for the first time ever, with this problem not being solved for quite some time.
Greece suffers a military coup on April 21st 1967, and a dictatorship is established led by Georgios Papadopoulos, but it only lasts for 7 years. 
*1968:
Landings on the Moon would continue with missions Apollo 8 and 9 in the year 1968, Apollo 8 happening on February 9th, 1968 and Apollo 9 happening on May 16th, 1968, with Apollo 8 having astronauts Frank Borman (commander) landing on the Moon and Tom Stafford (pilot) remaining in lunar orbit and Apollo 9 having astronauts Ed White, him also being the first American astronaut to conduct a spacewalk, being the mission commander, landing on the surface of the Moon and Bill Anders (pilot) remaining in orbit around the Moon. Apollo 10 would also happen in this year on November 27th, 1968, it sending out astronauts John Young (commander), Eugene Cernan (CSM pilot) and David Scott (ELM pilot), (despite the fact that the ELM wasn't for this mission, it still was labelled as such to give all 3 people inside of the CSM) to a circumlunar trajectory, with the CSM, which was an extended version of the AGS and successfully returning to Earth.
 
In this timeline, Lyndon B. Johnson chooses to run as President for another term as the Vietnam War is going not as horribly as in our own timeline thanks to better use of welfare, space and military funds, also utilizing international troops, not just American ones to fight in the Vietnam War. He is also much more popular because he is the space guy, he helped create NASA and under his administration did we see Michael Collins land on the Moon in 1967 and he also talked to the astronaut through a phone call while he was on the surface of the Moon and got to go himself to see the launch of the Apollo 7 rocket and also the recovery of the Gemini capsule in the Pacific Ocean. He manages to narrowly defeat Richard Nixon in the electoral college vote and is elected for a second term, where he would serve until 1972 (this also means that he doesn't pick up smoking again, only dying 8 years later in 1981) 
Alexander Dubcek is allowed to remain in power in Czechoslovakia, pursuing his economic reforms, although they take a step back in the sense that democracy is not granted in Czechoslovakia with the fear that it may spill over into other member states and threaten the Soviet bloc, instead, the Prague Spring is just a sort of more amplified version of Hungary's Goulash Communism. This also prevents Soviet Army deserter Vitktor Ilykin from attempting to kill Soviet leader who in this timeline is Evsei Liberman. 
2001: A Space Odyssey, a movie about human evolution, space exploration, computing & artificial intelligence and alien life and is also considered a symbol of humanity beginning to look to the planets and the stars, is released by Director Stanley Kubrick. While initially in our own timeline it had mixed reviews and it was not recognized for its greatness, in this timeline it would be as it would be an even greater source of optimistic, but also pessimistic take on the future of mankind as it enters the space age, it winning 4 Oscars and it would even become part of the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress.
 
*1969:
By this point, in the year 1969, the American ARPANET would be at the same level of computational power and advancement as it was in the early 1980s thanks to the earlier creation of the program, the Soviet OGAS would also have the capability of a mid-1970s computer, being slightly behind the ARPANET of the United States. The ARPANET would be headed by the Defense Advanced Research Project (DARPA). 
Apollo 11 would successfully land astronauts Neil Armstrong (commander) and Buzz Aldrin (ELM pilot) on the surface of the Moon, specifically at the landing site known as the Descartes Highlands on May 20th, 1969, with astronaut Fred Haise serving as the CSM pilot, stayin in lunar orbit, this being the first of the lunar extended mission series, utilizing the new Apollo hardware of the Command & Service Module (CSM) and the Extended Lunar Module (ELM), besides just offering additional crew space, it also introduced the lunar rover and expanded the scope of scientific equipment that could be brought over to the Moon and it also allowed for more extravehicular activity (EVA), with Apollo 11 having a record 18 hours of EVAs (up from the previous Apollo 9, which only had 9 hours of EVA) and the mission taking 10 days instead of 5 days. 
On August 11th, 1969, the Soviet Union would have a successful testing of its N1 rocket, after spending quite some time repairing the damaged Baikonur Cosmodrome, with the Soviets finally managing to land a cosmonaut of their own, that being Pavel Belyayev as part of the Soyuz 1 mission (him being the Soyuz 1a backup) and his first words on the Moon are: "I take this step for my country, my people and for the Marxist-Leninist way olife knowing that today is but a small step, in a journey that will one day, take us to the stars." A Soyuz rocket would have also launched the Lunokhod 2, as part of Lunik 16, at the same landing site as the Soyuz 1 mission, landing at Clavius crater. 
Lyndon B. Johnson, who in our own timeline had begun secret negotiations (which in OTL were delayed and interfered by Nixon for his own political gain, most likely in violation of Logan Act) in order to begin the American withdrawal of troops. In order to prevent history from judging him as a chicken who withdrew from Vietnam right when America was about to have a winning edge, he would intensify the war's operations from 1967-1968 in order to make this pacifist act seems less unmanly and just the last resort that had to be taken anyway. By 1970, the United States would withdraw from Vietnam, 3 years earlier than in our own timeline and instead a demilitarized zone (set at the 17th parallel) was established between North and South Vietnam, essentially resulting in nothing, no one won, no one lost, it was simply a second Korea and that was the best outcome anyway. 
The Americans would also finally land their own rover, that being Surveyor, part of the Surveyor 1, it being launched on a Titan III-C, which was launched from Cape Canaveral at LC-40 and on the same day on November 7th, 1969, astronauts Alan Shepard (commander) and Pete Conrad (pilot) would land using the Extended Lunar Module on the surface of the Moon and would besides using their own lunar rover also do scientific studies with the Surveyor rover and also set up other scientific equipment on the Moon, landing at Ocean of Storms. 
The Soviets successfully land Venera 5 on the surface of the Venus in May of 1969, becoming the first craft sent from Earth to successfully land on another planet in the Solar System and the American Mariner 7 makes its closest flyby of the planet Mars. In other events, the government of Canada confirms bilingualism, making French equal to English in the national government, Lyndon B. Johnson also visits the first communist state ever since the start of the Cold War as Liberman also seeks to create a thaw in or a detente in relations between the two countries and serious border clashes occur between the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union as the relations between the PRC and the USSR continue to get worse ever since the Sino-Soviet Split as the Soviet and Chinese visions differ through the fact that Liberman is an authoritarian market socialist while Mao is a totalitarian state socialist, who believes that Liberman is further example that the USSR has become revisionist. Albania, under Enver Hoxha despite the fact that the USSR didn't intervene in the Prague Spring, still decides to leave the Warsaw Pact like in our own timeline and pursue relations with Maoist China. 
In this year, the Woodstock Festival would be held in White Lake, New York, featuring the top rock musicians of the 1960s, attracting more than 400,000 attendees and it would become a symbol of the counterculture movement of the decade and it would have people like Jimi Hendrix and around 34 other rock artists perform at this festival/concert. 
===The 1970s===
*1970:
The United States and the Soviet Union sign and ratify the SALT treaty, which saw Evsei Liberman and Lyndon B. Johnson agree to limit the number of anti-ballistic missile systems in order to reduce pressures when it comes to the arms race and building up nuclear detterence, this also came through a reduction in the number of nuclear warheads: The Soviets reduced theirs from 10,000 to 6,000 while the Americans reduced theirs from 27,000 down to 9,000, putting a limit of 10,000 warheads and also set in place transparency rules when it came to nuclear weapon activities and it would also limit the number of SLBMs and ICBMs the USA and the USSR possessed. 
President Lyndon B. Johnson would sign into law a bill that would create the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and set regulations to the emission of sulfur dioxide, which was a known causer of acid rain, through the Clean Air Act and would urge other countries to implement such regulations on the emission of this harmful substance. He would also sign a bill that would create a national passenger-rail company known as Amtrak, that would have control of all passenger rail services in the United States, meanwhile a national freight-rail company, known as Conrail, expanding it from the Northeast would be made, this is in order to greatly improve railway travel in the United States, according to LBJ.
The Apollo program, with the Command & Service Module and Extended Lunar Module would continue with Apollo 13 happening on January 31st, 1970 with Stuart Roosa as the commander, James Irwin as the ELM pilot and Alan Bean as the CSM pilot (him staying in lunar orbit) and would land at Fra Mauro crater. Stuart Roosa would also place seisometers on the surface of the Moon and would manage to detect the S-IVB upper stage (with 1 J-2 engine) crashing into the Moon. The Apollo 14 mission would happen on June 7th, 1970 and would have commander Eugene Cernan and ELM pilot Edgar Mitchell land on the Moon and Ronald Evans, the CSM pilot would stay in lunar orbit. This mission would see a landing at Tycho crater. Apollo 13 and 14 would have 30 hours and 34 hours of EVAs, keep in mind the configuration of the CSM and ELM allowed for a maximum of 100 hours of EVAs while the previous configuration of the AGS and LEM only allowed for 20 hours of EVAs. In both of these the Surveyor rover would also be present and be used for scientific purposes. 
The Soviet Union would land cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman on the surface of the Moon (who also was the first woman in space) on an LK lunar lander on September 24th, 1970 at the same time as the Lunokhod 3 mission, which would be used to expand the mission's scientific scope. The N1 rocket would launch like usual a Soyuz LOK spacecraft and a LK lunar lander, with the Soyuz pilot being this time Gherman Titov, him staying in lunar orbit, which shows that the USSR had the money for a moon landing, even if these weren't extended missions and were more like the advanced Gemini-style Apollo missions.
Also in this year, Lyndon B. Johnson of the United States and Evsei Liberman of the Soviet Union alongside 54 other countries agree to sign and ratify the Nuclear Non-Profileration Treaty which has the goal of preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons and nuclear weapon technology in the world. Further news when it came to improved West-East relations, the country of West Germany, led by Willy Brandt, signs the Ostpolitik with East Germany and the Soviet Union and saw a normalization in relations between the two countries. Despite these news, the Soviets and the Americans deep down still have tough relations as the Soviets want to one up the Americans once more in the space race and while there are some breakthroughs made in stopping nuclear proliferation, when it comes to the conventional arms race, things are still not looking good. 
Sergei Korolev, chief rocket engineer of the Soviet Union (his real name is hidden as just almost dies from another surgery in 1970, but luckily survives once more, but it is clear that his 6 year period of hard labor and harsh conditions in Stalinist gulags and also the tense and long work he has to make to keep Roscosmos afloat and at an even level with NASA and this is while he was only 63 years old. 
This year would also see the first Chinese satellite be launched into low-earth orbit (Dong Fang Hong 1) and also the first Japanese satellite (Ohsumi) be launched into low-earth orbit, showing that other countries are beginning to pick up on the things done by the United States and the Soviets in around the last 20 years. 
The Americans also manage to launch Apollo 15 in this year in around November of 1970, with NASA and Wernher Von Braun commiting to launching 3 Apollo missions to the surface of the Moon per year, and these being Type J missions (utilizing the ELM and CSM) and not Type H missions (utilizing the LEM and AGS), as per NASA's classification. Apollo 15, with Alfred Worden serving as the commander, Vance Brand serving as the ELM pilot and Deke Slayton serving as the CSM pilot and it would land at Hadley-Appenine. 
In the Soviet Union, Roscosmos approves a proposal by rocket engineer, Vladimir Chelomey, who is a hesistant friend of Sergei Korolev in this timeline, to build the Energia rocket, which can carry payloads up to 100 tons in low-earth orbit. It was powered by 4 strap-on boosters each with 4 chambers each with a total of 16 RD-170 kerolox engine nozzles and its core stage was powered by 4 RD-0120 hydrolox engines. It was believed, according to Chelomey that this could much more easily get Soviets to the surface of the Moon alongside other payloads to the Moon as it could carry more stuff than the N1, despite the fact that it had 3 million less lbs of thrust than the N1 and it was proposed by Chelomey to carry with it a reusable space plane that could be used for a variety of things. 
NASA would also begin to ponder about what it should do after the Apollo missions, as such administrator Thomas Paine and chief rocket engineer Wernher Von Braun, among others, would propose the Apollo Applications Program (AAP) and while the main reasoning behind it was promoted to the public as expanding upon the work of the Apollo program and to bring in scientific and economic progress, in reality, the reasoning for it was to keep the 500,000 employees at NASA that poured their heart and soul into this and believe that completely switching their hardware would mean a lot of them would lose their jobs. The proposals outlined in this AAP would include a space station in low-earth orbit, a lunar base, a reusable space shuttle and a nuclear-powered space tug and a next-generation CSM/ELM meant for interplanetary expeditions, among other things, using Apollo-era hardware and improving upon it. 
As of 1970, there have been 8 Apollo missions that have landed on the surface of the Moon and these are their landing sites and also the hours of EVA in each mission (Type G represents the first crewed lunar landing, Type H represents systematic lunar exploration missions and Type J represents extensive scientific investigation on the Moon and in lunar orbit): 
**Apollo 7 (Type G): Sea of Tranquility, 1 hour and 34 minutes of EVA
**Apollo 8 (Type H): Sea of Procellarum, 4 hours and 11 minutes of EVA
**Apollo 9 (Type H): Mons Bradley, 9 hours and 6 minutes of EVA
** Apollo 11 (Type J): Descartes Highlands, 18 hours and 14 minutes of EVA
** Apollo 12 (Type J): Ocean of Storms, 24 hours and 4 minutes of EVA
** Apollo 13 (Type J): Fra Mauro, 30 hours and 47 minutes of EVA
** Apollo 14 (Type J): Tycho, 34 hours and 32 minutes of EVA
** Apollo 15 (Type J): Hadley-Appenine, 36 hours and 21 minutes of EVA
*1971:
Apollo 16, 17 and 18 missions successfully land on the surface of the Moon on March 7th, 1971, July 9th, 1971 and December 1st, 1971. Apollo 16 would have as its commander Thomas Mattingly, as its ELM Pilot Joe Engle and its CSM pilot it would have Owen Garriot. 2 of them would land on the Moon and 1 of them (the CSM pilot) would stay in lunar orbit (just like any other Apollo mission) and it would land at Mare Nectaris. Apollo 17 would have as its commander Harrison Schmitt, as its ESM pilot Gerald Carr and as its CSM pilot and it would land at Taurus-Littrow, a lunar valley and finally Apollo 18 would have as its commander James Irwin, as its ELM pilot Jack Lousma and as its CSM pilot it would have Don Lind and it would land at Censorinus, a lunar crater. 
The Soviet Union attempts to launch another N1 rocket only to wound up failing during first stage separation at 65 km in altitude, forcing the activation of the Launch Escape System. The crew of the mission would die, these being commander George Dobrovolsky and pilot Viktor Patsayev, as due to the shockwave and explosion, their capsule and LES would be damaged, resulting in the parachute not deploying and them hitting the ground hard at around 150 m/s and it landed closer to Baikonur Cosmodrome instead of around 40 km away, causing the death of both of them, this being considered a repeat of Komarov's death in 1967 also due to a Soyuz capsule hard landing as part of Soyuz E-1, the actual first Soyuz mission and was meant to be a low-earth orbit of the Soyuz spacecraft for a Lunar mission. 
President Lyndon B. Johnson officially decides to stop converting dollars to a fixed value of gold, as such permanently ditching the Gold Standard and breaking the Bretton Woods, concluding his goals from a previous bill he signed in 1968 which eliminated the gold cover for Federal Reserve notes. This gives the government greater room for fiscal spending during times of crisis and overall just leads to the better execution of Keynesian economics and economic recovery, say defenders of this measure. 
The American Mariner 9 mission would make the first successful orbit of the planet Mars in May of 1971, becoming the first spacecraft to ever do so. The Americans also begin construction of a slightly larger Saturn V that can carry the Lunar Surface Access Module (LSAM), which is almost x2 bigger than the ELM and can allow for 200 hours instead of 100 hours of EVA, can carry 3 astronauts instead of 2 and it also includes the Block III Command and Service Module which can carry 4 astronauts to the Moon and begin eying towards launching the Skylab space station by as early as 1972 or as late as 1974, seeing the Soviet failure to launch Salyut. The Skylab B station isn't even proposed as the Apollo-Soyuz cooperation does not exist by now and neither is the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project proposed. 
Wernher Von Braun and NASA officially go ahead with the construction of the proposed Space Transportation System (STS), also known as the Space Shuttle, which would contain the first stage of a Saturn IC with its 5 F-1 engines powered by kerolox, which has the capability of landing itself at a landing pad, set at Cape Canaveral, a second stage (external) powered by hydrolox and is also the fuel source for the Space Shuttle and its 3 RS-25 engines (it also having 2 OMS hypergolic engines with its own internal fuel system), the external tank is reused using parachutes and two helicopters that will catch it and the space shuttle will land like a glider, creating a fully reusable rocket. They hoped for a rocket that could better perform crewed missions in low-earth orbit, lunar orbit and on the surface of the Moon, with the reusable spaceplane offering just that opportunity in routinizing spaceflight and reducing the cost of launching a kg of payload into space, says the scientists and engineers. For a lunar mission it will require the launching of a Saturn V alongside it to low-earth orbit in order to refuel it, due to its reusable nature, to act sort of like a space fuel tanker. 
The day of March 21st is officially declared by the United Nations as Earth Day, like in our own timeline. A terrorist incident done by a far-left organization, known as the Weather Underground is done in the men's room at the Capitol building of the United States. The movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, directed by Mel Stuart. Despite it not having a good showing, possibly because of Roald Dahl's heavy criticism of the movie's de-alignment from his book (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), it would eventually become part of the National Film Registry for being culturally, historically or aesthetically significant. 
*1972:For the 1972 presidential election in the United States, the Democratic Party's presidential nominee would be current VP Hubert H. Humphrey and the vice-presidential nominee would be Maine Senator Edmund Muskie, while the Republican Party's presidential nominee would be former-VP candidate and U.N. ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. and the vice-president would be the governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller. The election would be narrowly won by Cabot Lodge in an upset, with 306 vs 232 electoral votes, despite the fact that the economy was doing good, the administration was decently popular and the Vietnam War was over, which led to this surprise post-election. The main issues in this election were the space race, the equal rights amendment, abortion, civil rights and America's foreign policy going forward, among others. Also, Hubert H. Humphrey was considered a social liberal, a continuation of the LBJ administration while Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. was considered a Rockefeller republican, which had conservative economics and liberal social views.
In this year, the United States would launch an additional 3 Apollo missions, Apollo 19, 20 and 21. Apollo 19 would have as its commander Robert Grippen, as its ELM pilot Ronald Evans and as its CSM pilot would be William Pogue. It would have its landing site at Hyginus (a lunar caldera). Apollo 20 would have as its commander Frank Borman, as its ELM pilot it would have Gus Grissom , as its CSM pilot it would have Charles Bassett and it would land at Marius Hills meanwhile Apollo 21 would have as its commander Elliot See (jr.), as its ELM pilot it would have Clifton Williams and as its CSM pilot Gordon Cooper and it would land at Mare Frigoris. During this mission, the Command and Service Module's scientific equipment would manage to pick up the presence of water ice at the north and south poles of the Moon, when it was in a polar orbit to facilitate the landing it did, showing just how far Type J missions have gone. 
*1973:
Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. is officially inaugurated as the next President of the United States, him being part of the Republican Party (also known as the Grand Old Party - GOP) and the Rockefeller Republican faction, which is a fiscally conservative and socially liberal political group. He is known for being pro-space exploration, a political moderate and is also neutral on things like the equal rights amendment, but is in favor of progressive measures like abortions or even gay rights (privately), the War on Drugs also does not happen in this timeline. 
NASA officially begins construction of the Space Transportation System (STS). It also rejects the creation of a bigger Saturn V (known as the Saturn VI, due to its 6 F-1 engines on its first stage) and instead opts to put the Lunar Surface Access Module
(LSAM) inside the Space Shuttle (the spaceplane) in its payload bay that can carry 30 tons. The Shuttle is also slightly bigger than proposed in order to accomodate a single STS mission, no longer requiring the Saturn V refueling tanker. The Lunar Surface Access Module (LSAM) will be used to offer even greater scientific, extra-vehicular and geological capabilities for human crewed missions to the Moon and will also offer a wider range of landing, set to use a near-rectillinear halo orbit that allows crew to land anywhere on the Moon and to also keep communications with Mission Control 24/7 and may also pave way for a permanent lunar presence. 
The World Trade Center is officially opened, it utilizing an innovative design known as the open floor plan, a concept made having a perimeter made out of tubular steel trusses with each column being 3 floors tall and the steel beams would reduce in thickness and a core made out of an innovative micro-reinforced ultra-high-perfomance concrete, which could withstand 14500 PSI of pressure and it also includes a micro-steel mesh and it is extremely resistant to chemicals, water and temperature (this is for this alternate timeline) - only beginning to weaken at 1275 degrees celsius. The core and the perimeter would be connected by steel trusses and steel seats and both buildings would also have a hat truss, which not only added further connections but created the foundation for an antenna. The buildings would also feature 20000 visco-elastic dampeners that are meant to absorb the "punch" of very strong winds - like those of a category 5 hurricane (+average winds) and a slurry wall (bathtub foundation), a concrete foundation going down 7 floors (including the Underground Mall, the PATH station and a car parking lot) and tieback cables. The fireproofing for the buildings (specifically the steel) would also be more than enough (75mm thick made instead of mineral wool) and the stairwells would be 160 cm wide instead of 110 cm and would feature trackling lights and photoreflectant tiles to ensure better evacuations. There would also be early suppression fast response (ESFR) sprinklers. This made the buildings however x4 more expensive, costing 1.8B$ instead of 400M$, adjusting for inflation this would cost 17.1B$ in 2023, 50 years after they were built. The towers would have a height of 417 meters (North Tower) and 415 meters (South Tower) respectively, but the North Tower's spire addition in 1979 would increase it to 530 meters.
NASA officially launches into orbit the Skylab space station on a modified Saturn V (known as the Saturn INT-21) which replaces the fourth stage with the payload fairing for Skylab, this mission is successful, with the station also sending its first crew, these being astronauts Bruce McCandless, Brewster Shaw and Gus Grissom and will test a slew of scientific experiments like micro-gravity, astrophysics, living in space etc. A few days later, the Soviets would launch the Salyut 2 space station, which would just re-enter the atmosphere 2 weeks after. 
On the day of Yom Kippur, an important Israeli religious day on the 6th of October 1973, several Arab countries, Egypt and Syria with expeditionary forces from countries ranging from Saudi Arabia and Jordan to even North Korea and Cuba. American support of Israel would result in the OPEC countries, most of them Arab ones, declaring an embargo on oil, resulting in a dramatic increase in oil prices from 1$ to 10$/barrel, also resulting in increased gas prices. Despite Israel's victory which saw them get Gaza, Sinai Peninsula, West Bank and the Golan Heights, this would still cause an economic crisis that ended the streak of high economic growth under the LBJ administration and into the first year of the HCL administration. Henry Cabot Lodge would begin implementing fuel efficiency standards, electrification of railway services (Amtrak and Conrail) and would begin using the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) heavily scaling up nuclear energy production to begin diversification and would even be known for founding the strategic petroleum reserve, meant to keep enough oil in case of other such crises in the future. 
Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union, construction of their own Energia rocket is also beginning to unfold for the same reasons as the Space Transportation System in America. The USSR, after the failed Salyut 2 space station, would launch Salyut 3 on November 17th, 1973 and send as part of Zvezda 14 (the alternate name for Soyuz, as this name is used for lunar missions) cosmonauts Boris Volynov and Vitaly Zholobov would go to the station and it, the station would re-enter around 6 months later. 
Cosmonauts Pavel Popovich and Yuri Artyukhin would land on the Moon as part of the Soyuz 3 mission, launching from an N1 rocket carrying the LK lunar lander and the Soyuz 7K-LOK command ship, with Pavel Popovich landing on the Moon while Yuri Artyukhin would stay in lunar orbit. 
Apollo 22, in March of 1973, would see testing of the Lunar Surface Access Module (LSAM) in low-earth orbit, a type D-prime mission, it being launched on a Saturn V rocket. It would carry the current Block II Command & Service Module (CSM) and also the Lunar Surface Access Module (LSAM), testing docking, rendezvous and even extravehicular ability + other things in order to become familiar with the LSAM. It would have as commander Karol Bobko, LSAM pilot Franklin Musgrave and CSM pilot Robert Overmyer. Apollo 23, in August of 1973, would be the first mission to use a near-rectillinear halo orbit to land on the Moon and it would land at Peary, having as commander Edgar Mitchell, as ELM pilot Jim McDivitt and as its CSM pilot Roger Chaffee, it sadly did not manage to return water ice back to Earth. This mission would have the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) as a secondary payload and it would be put in a polar orbit, meant to detect water on the surface of the Moon. The Soviets had already landed the first woman on the Moon, Valentina Tereshova in 1970, but now as part of Apollo 24, which happened in December of 1973, the Americans would send commander Walter Cunnigham, ELM pilot Marie Tharp (who was an infamous ocean geologist, would be trained for this mission) and CSM pilot Phillip Chapman. Tharp would be the first American woman to space and on the surface of the Moon and it (Apollo 24) would also be known for successfully returning samples of water ice after landing at Clavius (a lunar crater), at the lunar south pole. 
Inflation in the United States would rise to a record 10%, while the economy would begin to slow down significantly. John Connally, the chairman of the Federal Reserve in this timeline would begin raising interest rates in order to tackle inflation and the administration of Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. would reject measures like price controls and instead would implement fiscally conservative measures and cancels the expensive Great Society, instead implementing the earned income tax credit (EITC), implementing welfare reform around . Alongside all of these he would go ahead with powering the White House with solar panels and begin a program to scale up solar power across the USA (alongside nuclear) and other renewable/clean energy sources and beginning a national energy efficiency campaign all in order to mitigate the worst of this crisis. 
The United States would successfully send the Pioneer 10 probe, as part of a mission to explore the outer solar system and the heliosphere at around 110 AU away from the Sun, it was launched by an Atlas-Centaur rocket in the previous year and in this year it would finally reach the planet Jupiter, taking stunning pictures of it. It would also carry a "message" to extraterrestrials that may find this, including things like the hydrogen atom, a human male and female. Pioneer 11 would also be launched to explore the outer solar system and specifically the planet Saturn, it also being launched on a and carrying the same message as the Pioneer 10 probe. Today, both of these probes are beyond the heliopause and in interstellar space. 
In other events, the United States government would still topple the Chilean democratically-elected socialist/marxist Salvador Allende in favor of Chilean military general Augusto Pinochet on September 11th, 1973, just like in our own timeline, showing that relations between the Soviet Union and the United States, while good in some areas, is still terrible. After a referendum in 1973 meant to determine the status of Northern Ireland (98% voted remain with the UK), the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) would still do a series of car bombings which would result in 200 casualties (injuries + fatalities). The Sears Tower is also built in this year, 1 month after the World Trade Center (more specifically the North and South Towers, also known as the Twin Towers or WTC 1 and 2) and becomes the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere and the world standing at 442 meters, it being in the city of Chicago. Finally, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. would meet with Mao Zedong of China and Zhou Enlai, beginning a detente with the country of China and beginning an opening up of its economy and labor force. 
*1974:
The FIFA World Cup of 1974 happens in West Germany, it also being the winner of the mentioned football world cup and this is also the first world cup to feature the infamous World Cup Trophy that will be in use ever since this year, making this more important than other such world cups. 
Also in 1974, the United States would begin the first testing of the Space Shuttle, that being Space Shuttle Enterprise as part of the Space Transportation System, launching it from a Boeing 747 carrier aircraft. There is a plan to use 10 Space Shuttles: Atlantis, Columbia, Enterprise, Kon-Tiki, Victoria, Discovery, Celestia, Endeavour, Beagle and Pioneer. While NASA was seemingly being cut, it only getting 1.5% of federal funding (so around 4.4B$/year) as of the 1974 budget as part of the fiscally conservative Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. administration's policies. The fully reusable first stage, external tank and shuttle of the STS were also backed by the Department of Defense, especially the United States Air Force, which allowed it to continue to go through. The frequency of Apollo missions also dies down, with this year only seeing 1 Apollo mission, Apollo 25, with commander William Lenoir, ELM pilot Anna Fisher and CSM Pilot Russel Schweickart (with the CSM pilot staying in orbit) and they would land at Avogadro crater in the lunar north pole. The frequency of the Apollo missions has been reduced to 1 per year at most as per NASA funding. The USAF successfully convinces NASA to build a variation of the Space Shuttle meant specifically for Earth orbit classified intelligence & reconnaissance satellite missions, known as Space Shuttle Vanguard or just USAF/military Shuttle, that would be launched only from Vanderberg (California) or Cape Canaveral (Florida) Air Force Bases and as such has truly cemented USAF funding for the STS program. The differences between the military shuttle and other shuttles is that it is meant only for Earth orbit, that it has two reusable SRBs instead of the S-IC first stage and that it has a foam-made external tank that was expendable, instead of the aluminium-made external tank used on the NASA shuttle, the spaceplane would still be reusable in both shuttle versions though. The 1970s would see a sort of dying down of the space race at least temporarily due to the not-so-good economic situation of the USA and the USSR, although they're both working on big things. 
The Soviet Union's economy would also begin to stagnate like the American one (although i'd be a short one just like the US one was and not a collapse-causing stagnation), meaning that Roscosmos also doesn't receive as much funding. An N1 rocket, this time with 30 NK-33 engines + OGAS computer guidance which guarantee far higher success would launch a Luna-like lander and a Lunokhod-like rover as part of Zond 6, not to the Moon, but instead it would be the first mission to see a landing on a near-earth asteroid and the first automatic sample return from it, this mission beginning on 29 May 1974. The Lunokhod rover would also offer great insights into the asteroid and around 5 kg of samples were returned from the asteroid. The first test flight of the Buran shuttle happens using an Antonov An-225 Mriya carrier aircraft, while the Energia rocket gets closer to completion, this shocks the United States. What's even worse is that Korolev and Chelomey have secretly agreed to use Soyuz, N1, Proton-K and Energia rockets for something grand: A crewed landing on the surface of Mars by the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, 
The United States launches the Mariner 10 spacecraft and it successfully does a fly-by of Mercury, the first spacecraft to ever do so. NASA also begins working with the space agencies of Europe (ESA) and Japan (JAXA) and even launches an European astronaut to the Skylab space station on a Command and Service Module, doing a slew of science experiments on there and has been helping ESA and JAXA conduct rocket launches and ESA/JAXA have been partnering with NASA as well, this also comes from the reduced funding of NASA, from a peak of 6% (15B$/year) in 1965 down to just 1.5% today (5B$/year). 
Nuclear power in the United States makes up 30% of energy production by this year instead of 20% and it is set to make up 60% by 1985 based on current policy-decisions done by the U.S. government and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). Nuclear is also becoming much more popular, with it set to make up 50% of the world's energy grid by 1985 and 80% by 2000, with Japan, Russia and France being other major users of nuclear besides the USA. Computer technology, especially through things like Arpanet, is in the level of the mid-to-late 1980s which is used by science academies, aerospace, military, stock markets and other important sectors/assets, having a computing power of around 1.5M operations/second and the first computers for commercial applications (personal computers) are being made by private startups, but these only have late 1960s to early 1970s level computing due to their lack of funding and technological capability, only having around 50,000 operations/second. 
The United States would follow this Soviet achievement with their own mission, Surveyor 8, finally continuing these missions and it would see the American automatic landing and sample return from the same asteroid the Soviets landed on, 1974 TK7 (discovered 36 years earlier than in OTL), around 5 kg of samples were also returned from this asteroid. It was launched using a cargo-version of a Saturn V, but this would happen on November 5th, 1974, making the Soviets the definitive firsts to do such an act, which re-sparks the Space Race. Wernher Von Braun in this timeline is not fired and is still the chief rocket engineer at NASA. Thomas Paine is still the administrator as of now, just to know. 
Finally, space-wise, the Soviets would launch the Salyut 4 civilian space station and it would last 3 years before re-entering in 1977. It would be visited by Zvezda 17 and Zvezda 18 crews, specifically Zvezda 17 cosmonauts would be Aleksei Gubarev and Georgi Grechko and Zvezda 18 cosmonauts would be Pyotr Klimuk and Vitaly Sevastyanov. Skylab would also see astronaut missions Skylab 5 and 6, Skylab 5 carrying astronauts Neil Armstrong, William Thorton and Henry Hartsfield. Skylab 6 would carry astronauts Ulf Merbold (from West Germany), Daniel Brandenstein and Donald Williams. 
North Vietnam, led by Le Duan, would invade South Vietnam, taking over forested areas among the former Ho Chi Minh trail. Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. decides to intervene and manages to push out North Vietnam out of the South, but falls short of actually invading North Vietnam in order to not ruffle any feathers with the Soviet Union, the ceasefire is ended and instead a full-on peace treaty is signed between the two sides, ending the war permanently. Turkey, who is a NATO member, invades Cyprus and occupies 37% of the island, dividing it into Cyprus and North Cyprus. This causes Greece to withdraw from NATO's command structure. Cabot Lodge had no choice but to play the middle man and as such a ceasefire was put into place and the USA would follow a policy of maintaining good relations with Greece and Turkey. Greece would in the same year come back to the command structure, albeit reluctantly. 
*1975:
The U.S. government, specifically NASA, the Department of Energy and the Atomic Energy Commission are looking into nuclear fusion using deuterium and helium-3. President Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. has approved bills which increase nuclear fusion funding from the government to a record 1.75B$/year, or 0.7% of the federal budget, some say that this is a waste of money. NASA is looking for it because of potential space mining on the Moon (thanks to Apollo mission orbital observations using the CSM and LRO) and also for cleaner and better forms of propulsion, while the DoE and the AEC are looking for clean and non-radioactive sources of nuclear power, this also coming in the midst of the energy crisis caused by OPEC countries blocking oil exports to the USA. President Lodge and Prime Minister Wilson of the United Kingdom have also signed a partnership regarding space exploration, just like they did with West Germany 1 year prior. 
Speaking of inflation, it remains high, hovering at 11-12%, despite attempts by the Federal Reserve to mitigate it, raising interest rates to around 9% as of 1975. This has caused an economic decline that coupled with this high level of inflation has been dubbed stagflation and has been a thorn in his administration, lowering his approval ratings down to just 40%. He has continued with his policies of fuel efficiency standards, strategic petroleum reserves, spending cuts and fiscal responsibility through creating workfare, making the Great Society less costly and more effective and also implementing EITC and food stamps to replace a chunk of the welfare system and also increasing the Social Security retirement age to 67 and removing the SST cap, among other things, which have led to a surplus of 180B$, up from a deficit of 50B$ during the LBJ administration. 
The Soviet Venera 9 would successfully land on the surface of the Venus, staying around 2 minutes, (with the following mission, Venera 10, staying 14 minutes) and would also include pictures and other scientific observations of Venus, it happening on June 12th, 1975. With the followig mission in even deploying the first aerosat balloons in the atmosphere of Venus on September 16th, 1975. The Soviets would also send Zvezda 19 and Zvezda 20 to the Salyut space station, with the 19th mission having a stay of 22 days and the 20th mission having a 18 day stay.
Meanwhile the Americans would land Viking 1 on the surface of Mars and take pictures and do scientific work, while Viking 2 would be used for orbital reconnaissance of Mars. Meanwhile, Skylab 7 which happened on the 22nd of May 1975, carrying 3 astronauts who would stay in the station for 123 days, Skylab 8 would see astronaut Helen Sharman (from the UK) and American astronauts David Walker and James van Hoften part of a 156 day stay, the longest so far in the station and it happened on the 1st of November of 1976. 
The United States would send Apollo 26 to a flyby around the Moon using the Lunar Surface Access Module carrying 4 astronauts. This mission, besides successfully testing the LSAM in its full configuration of 4 astronauts as it was meant to be, would also offer a better Earthrise photo compared to the Apollo 8 mission. This mission will be essential in paving way for longer-duration lunar landing missions using the LSAM and in the future the Space Shuttle. 
*1976:
The Equal Rights Amendment officially becomes the 24th amendment to the constitution of the United States of America, which would guarantee legal rights for all American citizens regardless of sex and end distinctions between men and women in matters of divorce, property, employment etc. This came after the state of Illinois became the 39th state in the country to officially approve the ERA, 3 years before the deadline. This becomes an important political issue and represents a significant stepping stone when it comes to the rights of women in America, this would be celebrated by rockefeller republicans (including Lodge) and also liberal democrats. 
The 1976 elections are also wild, as the Equal Rights Amendment, stagflation, the future of space travel, the energy crisis and even things like America's foreign policy were important issues. In the Republican primaries, incumbent president Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. would just narrowly manage to beat Ronald Reagan, a member of the party's right-wing conservative faction, 53% to 47% and winning only 40 delegates more than Reagan, which showed the party's ever-growing division. Meanwhile the Democratic Party would rally behind a 44-yr old Ted Kennedy, who was seen as a bright visionary and hopeful candidate in these desperate times, easily winning out with 57% of the vote against Jerry Brown, Henry Jackson, George Wallace and Jimmy Carter among others and also because Kennedy would be portrayed in a better light compared to today. George Wallace, discontent with the fact that both party candidates were liberals would run a third party Dixiecrat campaign. The presidential elections would result in the victory of Democrat Ted Kennedy with 310 electoral votes, the incumbent president would get 194 electoral votes while George Wallace and the Dixiecrat Party would get 34 electoral votes. Ted Kennedy's VP would be Birch Bayh, Henry Cabot Lodge's VP would be the current Nelson Rockefeller and George Wallace's VP would be Lester Maddox. He would be the first president to be a biological young brother of a previous president in American history. 
The first shuttle mission (STS-1) is done, where the Space Shuttle Enterprise (the spaceplane), equipped with the first stage based on kerolox (RP-1/LOX) powered by 5 F-1 engines and with the second stage (also known as the external tank), powered by 3 RS-25 engines (strapped onto the spaceplane, not the tank, but the second stage fuel tank based on hydrolox - LH2/LOX is the fuel source) and the space shuttle would have its own OMS engines based on hypergolic propellant. The mission, uncrewed this time and not with astronauts, would send the shuttle into low-earth orbit and then have it land at a shuttle runway built near Cape Canaveral. The first stage (the RP-1/LOX stage) would also actually land itself at a Cape Canaveral landing pad using the RCS thrusters and 3 parachutes so that it wouldn't expend as much rocket fuel (only expending around 150,000 lbs of fuel instead of 500,000 lbs) and the second stage which deployed its 3 parachutes and would have used RCS thrusters to slow it down and then a helicopter would grab it and send it back to KSC. 
The computer company, Apple, is founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, these people also being part of a growing movement seeking to privatize Arpanet and give this advanced government technology to the private sector where it could allow for all sorts of things. In the same year they create the Apple I computer, the company's first such computer. The American Bicentennial celebration also commences on the 4th of July of 1976, or 200 years after the declaration of independence of America from the British Empire. 
 
The Soviet Union would send Zvezda 20 and 21 to the Salyut space station and would even land cosmonaut Yuri Glazkov to the surface of the Moon with the LK lunar lander, launched on an N1 rocket. They would also send the Venera 11 mission to the surface and orbit of the planet Venus. Meanwhile, a devastating death would happen, Sergei Korolev, chief rocket engineer of Roscosmos and the Soviet Union would die in 1976, at the age of 73. While he said he wanted to appoint Vasily Mikhin as his successor, he would serve for a short period before Vladimir Chelomey, the creator of the Proton-K and Energia rockets would become the next Roscosmos top dog, which may mean a completely new direction from that of Korolev. 
 
In the United States, Skylab 9 and Skylab 10 would happen in the year 1976, these being missions to the Skylab space station, although these may soon be replaced by Space Shuttle missions, which may offer limitless potential due to its fully reusable properties, offering low-earth orbit (to Skylab), moon orbit and moon surface missions for astronauts. Meanwhile, Apollo 27 would see the return of humans to the Moon with the LSAM launched on a Saturn V, it only containing a 2-astronaut LSAM configuration. Astronauts Jack Lousma (commander) and Steven Nagel (pilot) for the first time since Apollo 25 in 1974. 
*1977:
Ted Kennedy is officially sworn in as the 38th president of the United States and promises to fix the inflation crisis, to bring about great progress and to begin a new era of economic growth and American prosperity, tapping into the narrative of the cut-short wonder that his older brother John F. Kennedy would have brought when he was president, but was assassinated. In his first month of office, he appoints Paul Volcker, governor of the New York Federal Reserve as chairman of the Federal Reserve (across the entire USA) in order to deal with the crisis of inflation.
The deadliest accident in aviation history occurs as a Pan-American Airlines Boeing 747 collides into a KLM plane at Tenerife airport, killing 583 people, this would become known as the Tenerife disaster. South Vietnam's Nguyen Van Thieu decides to invade Cambodia, led by Pol Pot after a short-lasted cold war between the two, immediately toppling him alongside anti-Pol Pot resistance forces and the support of countries like Thailand and North Vietnam, soon enough, the Khmer Republic would be re-established with instead a president, Saukam Khoy, choosing not to bring back the unpopular dictatorship, although there would still be guerrila resistance for quite some time. 
In this year, there are around 5 Shuttle missions, STS-2 on February 7th of 1977, STS-3 and STS-4 on August 20th, 1977, the first also being part of Skylab 11 and would send a new pair of astronauts, Richard Truly, Norman Thagard and Ellison Onizuka (the first Asian-American astronaut) to the Skylab space station. This would also see the testing of the fully-finished Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU), first on the ground and then as part of a tethered spacewalk. STS-3 and STS-4 would be an unmanned mission and would launch the Voyager 1 and 2 probes, with the first set to make flybys of Jupiter and Saturn and the second set to make flybys of Uranus and Neptune before using them as gravity assists to go far out, beyond the solar system. The Voyager probes are also special not just that they're meant to study and offer great footage of the gas giants, but are also meant to be a message to the cosmos, just like the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes. STS-2 would be a Shuttle Enterprise mission and it would land at Edwards Air Force, STS-3 would be a Shuttle Columbia mission, STS-4 would be another Columbia mission. 
 
STS-5 would launch astronauts Judith Resnik, James van Hoften (the first two who would land on the Moon using the LSAM), James Buchli and Steven Hawley (who would stay in the Space Shuttle) in lunar orbit as part of Apollo 28, landing on the Moon for the second time using the LSAM and also landing at Faustini crater. STS-6 would send another lunar reconnaissance orbiter made to be bigger and also a modified design of the Apollo Command & Service Module (CSM) and would also send cubesats to Moon orbit and low-earth orbit. STS-5 would be a Shuttle Enterprise mission and STS-6 would be a Shuttle Discovery mission. This year would also see two missions of the Space Shuttle Vanguard, owned by the USAF, one launched from Vanderberg Air Force Base and another from Cape Canaveral Air Force Base, but would both land at the Vanderberg runway, the first one carrying a military spy satellite and the other the first global positioning system (GPS) satellite, the Block I version. Launch costs have fallen significantly thanks to this Space Shuttle, instead of costing 10,000-15,000$/kg every launch, it costs just 1,000$/kg, a 90% reduction, while for the military shuttle (Vanguard) it is 2,500$/kg, due to its configuration not being fully reusable (only partial) and also the more expensive nature of miliary missions. t
The Soviet Union would for the first time launch the Buran spaceplane on the 5th of September 1977, mounting it on the Energia rocket and would send it to low-earth orbit, carrying two cosmonauts Igor Volk and Anatoly Levchenko as part of Zvezda 22 mission to the Salyut 6 space station, which was launched on a Proton-K rocket after the previous had re-entered just a few months prior, sadly making an Energia-boosting impossible. The Soviets would also successfully demonstrate the landing of their spaceplane, the Buran, autonomously. 
Paul Volcker, the new chairman of the Federal Reserve, would begin raising interest rates to a record 15%, resulting in a reduction in inflation from 12% at the beginning of the year to just 5% by the end of it, although the economy would be at a slow down due to high interest rates, although the economic outlook would begin to improve as the inflation would begin to decline and thus the interest rates. 
In this year, Ted Kennedy would manage to get a landmark universal healthcare bill, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which would implement for the first time actual healthcare in the USA, implementing mandatory private health insurance with a public government option, allowing 15% of the U.S. population, which previously did not have insurance, would now have access to it, fixing a fundamental problem within the healthcare system. He would also implement an amendment to the Clean air act that would expand the cap and trade system to other harmful substances like carbon dioxide (CO2), nitrogen dioxide (NO2) among other substances which are emitted and will also have more regulatory power given to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), with narrow victories in Congress. 
*1978:
A civil war erupts in Afghanistan as local resistance in the form of the National Resistance Front (NRF), also known as the Mujahideen, rise up against the Soviet-backed communist government of Afghanistan, the Mujahideen being a group of islamist fighters willing to end Soviet, atheist control over their own country. Evsei Liberman, unlike Leonid Brezhnev of our own timeline, chooses not to invade the country, which leaves the Afghani civil war raging on for decades afterwards to the present day as there is no Soviet and American backing of any side, thus neither can break the stalemate. 
There would be an additional 6 STS missions in 1978, the first one, STS-7, on February 12th, 1978 which had astronauts Bruce McCandless, Sally Ride, Ronald McNair and Robert Stewart would have Bruce McCandless conduct the first untethered spacewalk, going as far as 100 meters from the Space Shuttle Pioneer, using the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU). STS-8 through 10 would also be low-earth orbit missions, while STS-11 would be a Type "I" mission meant for Shuttle lunar reconnaissance and extended orbital stays before returning to Earth, it also seeing the first spacewalk in lunar orbit by astronaut Robert Springer on the 8th of September 1978. STS-12 would see the first launch of Space Shuttle Victoria and it would be as part of a satellite repair mission on the 27th of September of 1978 and would carry astronauts Roberta Bondar (from Canada), Norman Thagard, Ronald Grabe and Loren Shriver to low-earth orbit. 
 
The Soviet Union launches as part of Zvezda 23 cosmonauts Aleksei Gubarev and Vladimir Remek (from Czechoslovakia) as part of the first mission of the Interkosmos program of the Soviet Union, this program includes the USSR + the Warsaw pact countries but also other Soviet-aligned nations such as Mongolia, Vietnam, Cuba, Afghanistan, Syria and India. Zvezda 24 which would also happen this year, it carrying cosmonauts Pyotr Klimuk and Miroslaw Hermaszewksi (from Poland), the second mission of Interkosmos and all launched to the Salyut 6 space station on an Energia-Buran rocket. This also forces the United States to respond with its own multinational program known as Cosmos, which would include Canada, Japan, ESA-member states (West Germany, France, Spain, Italy, United Kingdom and Switzerland) but also South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, this opening a new frontier space travel as it offered small countries the chance to explore space themselves, even if through the means of the Soviet and American space giants.
*1979:
The Soviet Ministry of Communication changes the name of OGAS to Sovnet, giving it the same naming style as America's Arpanet. This also comes after some computing power improvements to the system. Evsei Liberman also willingly signs into law the creation of the Soviet version of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the one that America has and the agency it, America, uses for its powerful internet system, which is used by government science foundations, the military etc. it being an interconnected link all under the government, while the people have a less advanced version of it from private companies, same thing in the Soviet Union, although their personal computers (from private companies) are worse due to the scarce number of them. 
In this year, a group of businessman and scientists, mostly in the technology sector, such as Microsoft CEO Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, CERN scientist Tim Berners-Lee (and also the inventor of URL and HTTP, a decade or so earlier than in OTL), Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, Adobe CEO John Warnock, among others, have sent a letter to both United States President Ted Kennedy and Soviet President Evsei Liberman seeking the creation of a World Wide Web (WWW) that knows no borders and goes beyond their self-imposed Iron Curtain and also the privatization of Arpanet, giving it to the hands of private individuals and companies which they say will allow for a revolution in communication, technology, science and will even see a great political upheaval which shall be the new bearer of the next millenium, a better world for us all. However, their proposals (for now) are ignored. This letter officially saw the addition into the vernacular of the populace of "internet rights activist."
There would be a record 14 shuttle (STS) missions this year, going from STS-12 to STS-26, 5 of them being Space Shuttle Victoria missions, 2 of them being Space Shuttle Kon-Tiki missions, 2 of them being Space Shuttle Enterprise missions, 2 of them being Space Shuttle Columbia missions, 1 of them being a Space Shuttle Discovery mission and another being a Space Shuttle Atlantis mission, the last two being the first of its kind and they would happen from a span of February-November 1979, including STS-18, which would see Shuttle Kon-Tiki refuel the Skylab space station, preventing its deorbiting and allowing for future missions on it. STS missions 14, 15, 20, 21 and 23 would all be missions to the Moon, with STS missions 20 and 21 actually landing astronauts on the surface as part of Apollo 29 and Apollo 30 both at Shackleton crater. STS mission 23 would carry the Viper rover to the Moon, it having the goal of collecting samples of helium-3 and water-ice from the lunar south pole. The other missions would be to the Skylab space station, reaching Skylab 22 to it. 
The military (U.S. Air Force) would also have another slew of missions as part of STS-22B, STS-31C and STS-24D, the first two sending spy satellites to low-earth orbit and the other sending another GPS satellite and this would be done using the Space Shuttle Vanguard. STS-31C would be launched from Vanderberg, while the rest would be launched from Cape Canaveral. 
Ted Kennedy successfully negotiates with the Shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi to create a constitutional monarchy with a dominant-party system in politics, in the country while in return he would get more U.S. money for building up his country economically, for the secret police, for maintaining secularism and for the military and other things. The Iran Revolution would wound up being in fact just a small protest done by radical islamists and would paint them in an even worse picture as they commited violence to get their way. Aytollah Khomeini would be locked up for life instead of killed, as to prevent his martyrdom and riling up of other Iranian islamists, this preserves the Pahlavi Dynasty and also allows for more stability in the Middle East and in the world as the whole drama of the crisis does not happen. The Soviet Union, under Evsei Liberman, denounces this meddling and in response begins arming Iraq for a potential invasion of Iran. 
A nuclear meltdown is successfully averted at the Three Mile Island, as such in this timeline the anti-nuclear movement never gains popularity and nuclear is still viewed relatively positively. While yes the fact that Arpanet is more advanced in this timeline than in our own allowed for this, it still meant that the plant and other need service extensions and as such it was undertaken. In this timeline, as of 1979, nuclear makes up around 40% of energy production in the USA and clean energy sources overall have reached around 55%, surpassing fossil fuels for the first time. The previous years and this would begin to see significant reductions in the emissions of greenhouse gasses, like carbon dioxide, although there is a growing problem when it comes to CFCs and the ozone layer as environmental activists continue to raise the alarm about them. Ted Kennedy is working on an international agreement to phase out emissions of these CFCs, but it isn't coming to fruition yet.
1979 would be a year of high economic growth, the U.S. economy growing by 5%, as the previous two saw slow increases after the end of the stagflation period and also . Prices across the board are beginning to decline as inflation is down to usual levels of 2-3% instead of high levels like 10% or 12%. The Iranian Revolution not happening also means that there isn't a second oil price shock. Japan would also become a country as its private companies are beginning to catch up to American ones, as they have companies like Toyota, LG, Sony etc. which is raising alarms. It became the 3rd country to hit the mark of 1T$, as the USA has 3T$ and the USSR has 2T$, it surpassing the countries of West Germany, the UK and France, who are all at 700-800B$. Some are beginning to say that the century beginning in 2001 will be known as the Japanese century. 
Roscosmos would have 3 Buran missions in 1979, one of them, Buran 3, would land cosmonauts Vladimir Kovalyonok and Alexei Leonov, and it would be the first landing of a spaceplane on the surface of another celestial body, also being intertwined with Soyuz 5. Meanwhile, Buran 2 and Buran 4 would be missions to the now Salyut 7 space station as part of Zvezda 25 and Zvezda 26 and Interkosmos 3 and 4. In this year, there would also be a Zvezda 27 mission but launched on a Soyuz rocket on the Soyuz crew capsule, it only carrying Romanian cosmonaut Dumitru Prunariu to Salyut 7 and . An Energia rocket would also launch a deep space mission, collecting an asteroid sample from near-earth asteroid 99942 Apophis and would later send this Vega probe as part of Vega 1 (Zond 7) on an impact course to asteroid 1855 Korolyov, named after the deceased Soviet rocket engineer Sergei Korolev, who died in 1976. The Buran would carry not only the probe but also an upper stage for the probe meant to get it to the mentioned asteroids. The Soviet Union would also begin to construct a lunar base module, known as Soyuz Base to later send it using an Energia rocket and it would be at the South Pole and would be meant for 3-crewed stays and it is set to be finished soon. 
Ted Kennedy would sign into law an infrastructure bill and in the same year would decriminalize lgbtq+ rights all across the United States as a victory for gay people across the entire USA, while not amounting to full-on marriage, it was still a sign going forward. He would also begin funding NASA more as the economic crisis of the 1970s would wane and would even see welfare expansions and poverty reductions through increasing EITC, implementing the child tax credit (CTC), while he would still keep the workfare implemented by his predecessor, he would also sign into law a bill which would make minimum wage rises yearly. 
===The 1980s===
*1980:
In the 1980 presidential election, Ted Kennedy would seek a second term alongside his vice-president Birch Bayh, with his approval ratings being a decent 55-60% as the economy and the stock market are doing pretty well, he has had decent achievements like universal healthcare and environmental policy, although the internet is becoming a huge issue and this is something both parties have been trying to ignore. Famous conservative Republican Ronald Reagan would refuse to run due to the charisma and popularity of Kennedy, instead, the Republicans would manage to nominate Gerald Ford. Ted Kennedy would have an easy victory of 363 electoral votes to 175 electoral votes against Gerald Ford, winning a second term. 
The Republican Party's hard-right, conservative faction has taken the mantle of the party after this election, it being led by Ronald Reagan, believing that the moderate, centre-right approach of Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. and now of Gerald Ford have proven to be too weak in the face of the Democratic Party's current politics of liberal social stances and progressive economic stances, as seen by the fact that they lost the presidency twice and that the Democrats have a significant majority in Congress even as of right now. They have already become the dominant faction within the Republican congressional caucus and have big plans in the future. 
In China, the reformist Deng Xiaoping takes power, him promising to reform the economy of China away from centralized planning instead towards a market socialist system, with capitalist special economic zones and to also offer some political reforms, such as a 10 year term limit for every leader and the creation of "consultative democracy". This results in a thaw of relations between China and the Soviet Union and also between China and the United States, making China essentially a non-aligned power, playing both sides. 
Meanwhile in space, there would be in 1980, around 12 STS missions, so from STS-27 to STS-38. The STS-27 mission would see repairs and modernization (+some modifications) of Skylab alongside the addition of the Columbus module from ESA and this mission would have one Swiss astronaut alongside two American astronauts. STS-28 would deliver the Skylab B module, these two missions being done on January 11th and February 9th respectively. The space station would be renamed to Freedom and it is set to be completed over the course of 10 years, with the capacity of carrying and it is also multi-national, it being a collaborative project between NASA, ESA, CSA and JAXA (American, European, Canadian and Japanese space agencies).
Meanwhile, STS-29 on February 24th, 1980 would see the delivery of the Canadarm to the Freedom space station before it would go to the Moon and land 4 astronauts on the surface near Shackleton crater at the lunar south pole, where they would also study the findings of the Viper rover and do a whole slew of scientific experiments on the Moon, them having EVAs of around 100 hours, as NASA would also have managed to invent a suit that electrically repulses lunar dust and also better vacuum cleaners, meaning it isn't as huge of a problem. STS-30, on March 19th, 1980 would see 4 astronauts make a flyby of the Moon using the Block III Command & Service Module, recently created, it being deployed on a Space Shuttle that was sent to a low-earth orbit flight and then it would do the trans-lunar injection before landing and returning, so that the CSM could perform this. STS-30 would also be the first to deliver the news also using intel from the LRO-1 and LRO-2, that there were 1.5 million tons of helium-3 on the Moon, way more than the estimated 125.000, water ice is also said to be much more abundant than previously thought, having 600 million tons of it instead of the previously estimated 10 million tons. The LROs would also detect high quantities of rare-earth metals like iron, silicon, aluminum, titanium and others, but also of radioactive elements like uranium, plutonium and thorium. However, there are only traces of elements like carbon and nitrogen. 
The Soviet Union meanwhile would launch with the Energia rocket the Polyus, a two-stage rocket that also contains the Soyuz lunar base as part of Soyuz 9 and it would successfully land on the lunar south pole and the American public would be shocked at this and wondered how the Soviets were able to keep this under wraps for so long, this happened on the 9th of May, 1980 and it would land at Shackleton crater. The Energia-Buran would also launch as part of Zvezda 28, 29, 30 and 31 crewed missions to the Salyut 7 space station during the year 1980. Also in this year, Evsei Liberman would controversially order Soviet troops to position themselves along the border with Afghanistan, further escalating things in the country that has had a civil war raging on for 2 years so far.
An assassination attempt on singer and musician John Lennon would fail in December 1980, unlike in our own timeline, as the bullet would barely miss John Lennon's head due to a firing that would happen a few seconds or miliseconds earlier, with his assassin, Mark Chapman, immediately sent to prison for attempted murder.
*1981:
Ted Kennedy would officially be sworn in on the 20th of January, 1981 for a second term as the President of the United States and so would his vice-president Birch Bayh, former Indiana senator.
Flight 342 of Aerolineas Argentinas (the state-owned airline of Argentina), a Boeing 707 would during a long flight from Buenos Aires to New York City crash into the North Tower (WTC 1) of the World Trade Center, at the 105-108th floors, although luckily, this crash was when the plane had low levels of fuel, only around 13500 liters or 15% of its original fuel and the plane was only flying at a low speed trying to land at JFK Airport, so it travelled 250 km/h only. As such the building would be relatively undamaged and i'd be mostly like the 1945 ESB crash, it only killing the 96 passengers (plus the two pilots) on board the plane but also 37 people inside the North Tower (with another 50 being injured). Although luckily the towers design allowed for a lot of people to evacuate (as the stairwells weren't damaged and some elevators did still work) and the firefighters were able to get up there in time and extinguish the flames, being helped by the sprinkler system and the thick fireproofing.
Evsei Liberman, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), basically the head of state, would officially die on the 11th of November 1981 at the age of 84, being succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko, a 70-yr old Soviet politician who was not in a very healthy state, due to his very heavy smoking that began at a young age. While Chernenko favored the market socialist policies implemented by Evsei Liberman, he was more interventionist overall and did not favor detente as much. Also in this year, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, would die on the 27th of July 1981, being succeeded by his son, the 21-year old Reza Pahlavi. 
In this year, on the 2nd of December 1981, Iraq would launch a surprise invasion of Iran on the orders of Konstantin Chernenko and Saddam Hussein, this would initially shock American president Ted Kennedy and the new Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi. While the Soviet-backed Iraqi army would manage to take Khuzestan and border settlements between Iran and Iraq, by 1982, the frontlines would stabilize as American aid would begin to pour in into Iran and the Iranian Armed Forces would begin to show its superiority over the Iraqi one.
New modules of the Space Station Freedom have been sent as part of STS-39 and STS-40, these being the Unity module and the DestinyLab module. STS-41 would demonstrate the successful repair of an American low-earth orbit satellite by 3 American astronauts. The final Saturn V mission would happen and it would send a module to the station also in 1981, that being the Harmony module. It seems that progress on this space station is going faster than expected, although that's because these modules were in the works for around 5 years since the mid-1970s or late-1970s. In April of 1981, the Americans would launch their own lunar base and soon after send astronauts there on the Space Shuttle Discovery as part of STS-41, it being known as Jamestown, as part of Apollo 33, which is America's lunar exploration program, while Jamestown would be the lunar habitation program. 
There would be additional Shuttle missions (around 12) in the year 1981, reaching up to STS-50. STS-44 and STS-46 would see moon landings as part of Apollo 34 and Apollo 35, which would see habitation of the Jamestown base each for 75 days, with Titan IIIE rockets providing the necessary cargo for long-term lunar surface stays, this mission would be part of Jamestown 2 and Jamestown 3 of the Jamestown program. Apollo 35 (Jamestown 3) would be the last Jamestown mission to be also called an Apollo mission as their two purposes would diverge from here on out. Space Shuttle Pioneer would also launch for the first time in this year as part of STS-49. 
The Department of Energy and NASA would give funding to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to construct the National Ignition Facility (NIF), it being the most powerful magnetic confinement device ever built and would utilize 2H-3He fusion with helium-3 made from recovered lunar samples from Jamestown and Viper missions, skipping the 2H-2H fusion phase, which generated radioactive neutrons, this reaction also has the advantage that there is little to no radioactive waste from it and that we have the Moon as an abundant source of helium-3, unlike with tritium. 
Ronald Reagan, on the 30th of March 1981, would be assassinated by John Hinckley Jr. , him doing this not for any personal hate or spite for Reagan, but because he thought such an act would impress actress Jodie Foster, although this would leave quite a vacuum within the Republican Party, as neither the moderates or the conservatives of the party could wield any viable leader like Reagan was. 
 
*1982:
The Soviet Union would launch using the Buran-Energia the modules of their own Space Station Mir, the first being the core module in February of 1982 and then the Kvant-1 module in April of 1982, then the Kvant-2 in May of 1982 and then finally in 1982 the Spektr module and then also the Docking module in December of 1982. The Mir was the Soviet response to the Space Station Freedom. The Buran would be a way to send crew to the Mir space station, with cargo being sent by a Progress supply vessel (it being a modified Soyuz spacecraft). Surprisingly, the Soviets built a station in less than a year, although it was smaller and it seemed to have been more rushed and it could only hold 6 instead of 10 cosmonauts. In this year there would be 4 crewed rotations at Soyuz base on the lunar surface each with 90 day-stays, with the base hosting around 3 cosmonauts. The Buran would act like a ferry. 
 
The United States meanwhile would see the addition of Kibo (Japanese Experiment Module) to the Space Station Freedom, it being JAXA's contribution to it, while the Integrated Truss Structure (ITS) would be launched, carrying the four solar arrays and as part of STS-51, STS-52, STS-53 and STS-54 all within January-May of 1982, meanwhile STS-59 would launch the iROSA roll-out solar panels (4 of them). These panels are special in that they have a higher efficiency and also point to the direction of the sun, like sunflowers, this being a new technology overall. Now, the Space Station Freedom would be finished and its major modules would be Skylab A, Skylab B, Columbus, Unity, Harmony, Canadarm, DestinyLab, Kibo, Integrated Truss Structure (ITS) and the iROSA solar arrays and now it was the role of the Space Shuttles to ferry astronauts to and from this station, specifically, 10 of them and to enable a whole slew of scientific experiments in space and long-duration stays. 
The first mission to the SSF would be STS-61, with 10 astronauts sent to it and they would have a stay of around 300 days in Earth orbit, offering great scientific insights into the world of micro-gravity and other space stuff. Supply spacecraft would also exist in the form of the American Cygnus, launched on the Titan IIIE rocket, powered by LR-87 engines. There would be 15 STS missions all the way to STS-65, with STS-63 being the other SSF mission of this year, while the other would be other missions simply to low-earth orbit and lunar orbit and also 4 of them were Jamestown crew rotations. All 10 NASA Shuttles were used for the first time ever and keep in mind they're fully reusable.
Iran begins to take back the territories it lost from Iraq in the early phase of the war, pushing the Iraqis back to the border with its own military might and American assistance and would also begin pushing into Iraq itself, also backing Kurdish resistance against Saddam Hussein in the north, worsening Iraq's chances of victory, although an influx of Soviet aid into Iraq would keep the frontlines stable, with Iran only occupying some border settlements. 
The European Economic Community, consisting of 9 members (France, Netherlands, Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium, Greece, Italy, United Kingdom and Ireland) would decide as part of the Treaty of Luxembourg in 1982 to create the European Union, the Single Market (with a currency, the Euro), the Schengen Zone (no borders between all members) and the creation of a constitution which outlined a democratic semi-presidential government structure + human rights and accountability and the EU had become its own power on the world stage, even if it was mostly a confederation of a couple nations, it would be more powerful than our own EU in real life, it would come 10 years earlier and it would come out of growing desires to rival the United States and the Soviet Union. 
Richard Branson, the CEO of the Virgin Group, would create a new branch of the company, Virgin Galactic, seeking the goal of creating cheap and accessible space tourism and travel industry, to Earth and beyond. The Virgin Group would take off as a conglomerate, operating in many different economic sectors, being most successful in air travel. He would begin by building up Spaceport America, where his spaceplane, SpaceShipTwo and mothership, WhiteKnightTwo would operate. It would be stationed in New Mexico, near the White Sands Missile Range. It would have the capability of sending people into space to the Karman line of 100 km and have them experience zero gravity for a few minutes during the fall back to Earth. The spaceplane and the mothership would be fully reusable and initially the tickets would be 250,000$/person, although with the expected goal of 400 launches/year, those are set to decline to just 600$/person and lower, says Branson. This is the first private space company (that isn't the United Space Alliance of Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman) to ever be made. 
The Twin Towers complete their post-1981 renovation, it now featuring bullet-proof windows as part of the safety measures put in place by the NIST and the government in general. This being a slight increase to its durability and would make its glass just slightly better at withstanding the impact of a plane travelling hundreds of kilometers per hour. The NIST would mention in rest that the building would be adequate enough to withstand even a full-speed jumbo jet like a Boeing 747. They would be opened once again in early to mid 1982, 1 year after the crash. The floor 106-107 restaurants Windows of the World and Wild Blue would also be rebuilt in a modernized way.
*1983:
The Montreal Protocol is ratified on September 16th, 1983 by 198 countries, it having the goal of reducing chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) emissions, as they are a potent greenhouse gas and also the cause of an ever-growing ozone hole in Antarctica and also the ozone becoming weaker in general, due to its ozone-degrading properties. It is set to enter into force on the 1st of January, 1985. Ted Kennedy, the U.S. president, alongside other major world leaders would be vital figures, including British prime minister Thatcher, Soviet first secretary Konstantin Chernenko, among others, who spearheaded the mentioned efforts and it will lead to the ozone hole in Antarctica closing up by 2050-2060, as per estimates and will save the Earth around 0.4 degrees of warming. 
Geopolitically, 1983 would be a tense year, as not only have the Iranian Armed Forces made plenty of gains, nearing the city of Baghdad (possibly restoring the monarchy there) and Saddam Hussein loses popularity as he fails to fight the Kurdish resistance 
in the north (which has basically annexed most of their desired lands by this point) and the Iranians. The United States also invades the country of Grenada in order to unseat its Communist government and in November conducts the yearly Operation Able Archer, a military training exercise, these two things make the Soviet Union ramp up its activities in Eastern Europe, sending tanks to the Berlin Wall and what's worse a radar error is almost interpreted as a nuclear strike by the Soviets, although luckily Stanislav Petrov is able to notice eventually Ted Kennedy and Konstantin Chernenko are able to settle things out through a long phone call and other negotiations, although the year 1983 would be considered a close call. 
Astronaut stays on the Space Station Freedom (SSF) reach a record of 450 days, more than a year, testing out the effects of micro-gravity on the human body, how things act in micro-gravity and a whole slew of scientific experiments on board this football field-size station. The Space Station Mir (SSM) also reaches record astronaut stays of 375 days, there are always around 16 astronauts in low-earth orbit as part of Freedom (NASA, ESA, CSA and JAXA) and Mir (Roscosmos) missions. 
NASA has around 12 Shuttle missions this year all the way up to STS-77, Jamestown base has been expanded to include a maximum of 6 astronauts and to enable longer stays of 150 days on the surface of the Moon. The Soviets have done the same with their Zvezda 
base. NASA would utilize Titan III rockets to send cargo to the base, while Roscosmos would utilize the N1 rocket for this purpose. The Space Transportation System (STS) and the Energia-Buran would be the way crew would be sent to it. 
The United States and the Soviet Union would be aiming for the red planet after this, both wanting to land men on the red planet before the other, although the lessons on the SSF, SSM, Jamestown and Zvezda on microgravity, G-forces and solar radiation show that it can have terrible effects on the human body such as significant muscle atrophy, space motion sickness, cardiovascular modifications and many other things that just make humans not that suited to live in space. Solutions are being proposed such as artificial gravity rings, although these are expensive and have to be very large to offer Earth-like gravity, this also means that our stays cannot be too long as back on Earth, astronauts and cosmonauts would get. So yea, the race is on, but it is a tough one.
In 1983, Virgin Galactic would see 4 launches, each with 4 passengers with its SpaceShipTwo rocket, that can send people on a suborbital trajectory reaching a maximum altitude of 105 km. The first mission on April 2nd of 1983 would be special in that it would see the first private-built rocket in space, but also the first private astronauts: David Copperfield, Larry Flynt, Christie Hefner and Annie Leibovitz, keep in mind, the tickets would have costed 250,000$/person. There would be an additional 3 launches on August 12th, 1983 and finally on November 9th, 1983, with the third flight including Richard Branson himself.
*1984: Incumbent president Ted Kennedy would not be eligible for a third term, meaning that the Democratic Party would have to find a new presidential candidate. That candidate would soon be found in the form of Gary Hart, who would narrowly win the Democratic primary against candidates Walter Mondale and Jesse Jackson and he would choose as his vice-president Lloyd Bentsen. Meanwhile, the Republicans would have to pick someone other than Reagan, the primary was tense, although in the end moderate, centre-right George H.W. Bush would come out on top over the other candidates, like Pat Buchanan and John B. Anderson. He would choose as his vice-president congressman Jack Kemp. The election was pretty close, with George H.W. Bush winning 278 electoral votes and Gary Hart would win just 260 electoral votes. The popular vote was close, with Bush winning 50.7% of the popular vote and Hart would win 48.6% of the popular vote. The state of Texas being the closest with Bush winning it by just 4,200 votes and it would essentially decide the election. Good for H.W. Bush is that his party, the GOP, has a majority in both chambers of Congress.
After the Mujahideen almost take the city of Kandahar, Soviet First Secretary Konstantin Chernenko finally begins the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, despite the 500.000 Soviet troops sent that almost took out the Mujahideen basically all of a sudden, the United States and a coalition of other countries led by President George H.W. Bush would begin sending aid to the Mujahideen and other islamist fighters within Afghanistan, turning the war once again into an even bloodier stalemate, now with Soviet boots on the grounds of the graveyard of empires. This act clearly seemed like the decision of an dying, increasingly insane first secretary that was Konstantin Chernenko.
The Iran-Iraq war would also end in this year, with the treaty stating a unification of Jordan and Iraq into the Hashemite (Arab) Federation, led by King Hussein, cousin of the deceased last king of Iraq, this being a popular proposal among the Iraqis. Iran meanwhile would receive war reparations, the Kurds also receive independence and the country of Kurdistan is created, all of this being approved by the United Nations. The number of countries would remain the same as while Iraq and Jordan became one Arab Federation, the country of Kurdistan would be created. 
 
Virgin Galactic conducts 6 launches of their SpaceShipTwo rocket to an altitude of 105-115 km, sending private civilians to beyond the Karman line on a suborbital trajectory that allows them to experience zero gravity for a brief amount of time. NASA meanwhile has an additional 7 STS missions, 3 of them unmanned payloads to Earth and lunar orbit in the form of satellites and the 4 that are manned are crew rotations at Space Station Freedom and the Jamestown lunar base. The record stay so far by any astronaut in the SSF has been around 484 days (that being Sidney Gutierrez) and for Jamestown it has been 107 days (the astronaut being Roy Bridges), which has offered great insights to the effects of space travel on the human body and other Earthly things and also how we can use it to improve the lives of us back here on Earth. 
The Jamestown missions, which have been so far up to Jamestown 12, alongside Viper rover missions, which have been so far up to Viper 3, have only extracted 1% of the amount necessary for a continuous reaction at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), which utilizes magnetic confinement nuclear fusion between deuterium and helium-3 at 150 million degrees celsius. 
*1985: 
The Montreal Protocol would officially come into force on January 1st of 1985, with the goal of phasing out CFC emissions so as to patch up the hole in the ozone layer in Antarctica, the smaller one in Greenland and to in general bring the ozone back to safer levels in order to reduce skin cancer and also to reduce warming because CFC is a potent greenhouse gas. The switch is easily done as CFC emissions would fall by 95% by the year 2000, just 15 years after this came into force and in 2023, emissions would be zero, as they reached zero in 2010. 
Konstantin Chernenko would become the second First Secretary to be voted out of power by the Supreme Soviet, as his War in Afghanistan would prove to be unpopular even among most of his own parliamentarians and higher ups. He would be succeeded by Mikhail Gorbachev, beating out hardliner candidates like Grigory Romanov to the top job of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev would be chosen due to his youth, but also due to his anti-war stance and also due to his visionary and hopeful style of politics. 
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), through an announcement from NASA's administrator, James C. Fletcher to industry representatives from the United Space Alliance, which in this timeline not only includes Lockheed Martin and Rockwell International but also Boeing and Northrop Grumman, announces the creation of the Ares program, a program meant to land the first man and woman on the surface of Mars before the end of the decade in 1990, utilizing a modified Space Transportation System rocket, which includes a Mars Surface Access Module (MSAM), a modified LSAM and also an Inertial Upper Stage, taking its payload capacities to the limits and the STS rocket would also be strapped to Titan III-E UA120 solid rocket boosters (SRBs), allowing it to generate an extra 1.5M lbs of thrust, it also would come with new more powerful engines in the form of the F-1D and the RS-25C, allowing it to generate an extra 800,000 lbs of thrust at lift off and an additional 100,000 lbs of thrust when the second stage is activated, in total it has 11.5M lbs of thrust at lift off, meaning that it is only compatible with LC-39C and LC-39D for launches.
The first mission, Ares 1, would actually begin with a test of the Mars Surface Access Module (MSAM) in April of 1985, launching it on a regular STS rocket, carrying 2 astronauts, these being Mary Cleave and Charles Bolden on the MSAM, while the Shuttle would have two pilots and one mission specialist, the pilots being Richard Covey, Robert Gibson and the MS being Anna Fisher. It would be sent to low-earth orbit. Ares 2 would happen in the same year and it would carry Space Shuttle Discovery with 4 astronauts inside, these being Terry Hart, Steven Nagel, Christa McAullife (as part of the Teacher in Space program) and Linda Godwin, to a distance of 800,000 km, the furthest any human has ever been in order to test out the deep space conditions they to have to endure, before returning back to Earth.
Mikhail Gorbachev would begin a series of economic reforms, known as Perestroika. These reforms would begin a process of privatization of many Soviet state enterprises (except those in mining, natural resources, and some science) and the easing of foreign investment into the Soviet Union, with the goal of improving economic relations with the United States and other countries, like China, with the latter already having begun its own economic reforms. These are set to pave way for an economic boom within the Soviet Union, which worries politicians back in America, while yes the GDP is 6T$, more than x2 bigger than that of the USSR, there is still the chance that they catch up. The Soviet leader, Gorbachev would also announce withdrawal of troops and most combat operations that is Soviet from the region, but is still playing a role by supplying the communist government and while the United States heavily scales down its aid to the Mujahideen, the country of Pakistan becomes their main source of aid and this also includes aid to more extremist factions of the Mujahideen, leading to a gruesome and even longer civil war, despite Gorbachev's sort of peaceful gesture.
The country of Japan is also seeing its own rapid economic boom as it is beginning to pursue the Nihonet, which has begun to grow as a popular alternative to Arpanet and Sovnet and it has also begun fixing its demographic and real estate problems through immigration and other measures, right now, Japan has the second largest economy at 3T$, followed closely by the Soviet Union at 2.7T$ and by the European Union with 2.5T$ and it is also having the biggest economic growth of them all. It seems that computer technology is leading to division amongst the world's powers and is being used for their own malicious purposes, which is worrying the internet rights movement.
Roscosmos is also announcing its Mars program, meant to use three Energia rockets for low-earth refueling, the first of its kind in order to get its cosmonauts to Mars, with them having a deadline of 1990, just like the Americans for it, suggesting that they learned about this, seeing as this announcement also came after the Americans announced their own Ares program. Surprisingly, the first mission, Mars 1, in August of 1985, would see the successful refueling, the first of its kind, of two Energia rocket second stages, transferring fuel from one to the other and then the uncrewed Buran shuttle would make a flyby of the Moon and it would land on Earth using its OMS engines as it this time had performed almost the entire trans-earth injection burn, but ditched it anyway for the mission purposes. The Energia rocket's booster engines were also upgraded to the RD-180, it still being a four-chamber kerolox engine, while the central core had its engines upgraded to the RD-0122. 
The energy outlook of the world has changed significantly in the last decade, as nuclear has gone up from making 10% of the world's energy production up to 55%, while renewable sources of energy (solar, wind, hydro, geothermal etc.) have gone up from 10% to 20%, meaning that fossil fuels have went down from 80% of the world's energy production down to just 25%. This energy change has been spearheaded, especially with nuclear power, but also renewables, by the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, China, Germany and Japan. While this has been great news in that the world has been generating more energy and has been doing so more efficiently and that greenhouse gas emissions are beginning to decline significantly, fixing the ever-growing problem of global warming and climate change, there is still the problem of the fossil fuels jobs fallout, where people who used to work in oil, gas or coal had to be laid off as fossil fuels began to be less and less significant on the world stage. While measures have been taken to stop this, like in America, with George H.W. Bush, with bipartisan congressional support, creating the American Climate Corps. Other countries like the EU, the Soviets and Japan have also taken measures. Only time will tell if they will work though.
*1986:
In this timeline, the Concorde, the supersonic Mach 2 capable aircraft, is more popular due to the greater cultural impact of space exploration and just travel in general, despite the fact that Flight 342 accident was still fresh in people's heads, would prove to be more popular than in our own timeline, with there being around 500 planes created for not just Air France and British Airways, but also for Singapore Airlines, American Airlines, Pan-American Airways, United Airlines and also Lufthansa and even Virgin Airlines, yes the private airline company chaired by Branson. The Concorde is known for providing very fast supersonic travel, for example going from the UK to America in just 2h and 50 minutes and not the 6-8 hours it usually takes, which is why it has begun to take off. The Soviet Tupolev Tu-144 would also take off, it being just like the Concorde, but well Soviet. The Tupolev-144 would be operated by the Soviet Union (Aeroflot) and China (Air China).
NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft make the first ever flyby of Uranus, the 7th planet of the Solar System. NASA also launches using Space Shuttle Atlantis the Halley mission, which manages to have the first impact of a comet (the impactor) and also the first soft landing and sample return from a comet (the lander). The Soviet Vega 2 and Vega 3 probes would make a close 8,000 km flyby of the comet, while the European Giotto probe would make an even closer 600 km of the comet, both taking stunning pictures of it. The Japanese Sakigake would also make a flyby of it, even though it was just a simple interplanetary mission tech test, as it was 6 million km away from it, these would be known as the Halley Armada, with the American team having the best results. 
Virgin Galactic unveils its SpaceShipThree spacecraft, capable of orbital flights of 110 km in height, allowing for extended periods of zero gravity and offering a boost to the space industry. It is also expected to have a higher launch frequency than the previous spacecraft, promising 400 launches/year, while SpaceShipTwo only managed to have 40 launches/year in 1985. The spaceplane is keep in mind reusable. It will have its first human-crewed flights next year and it is set to greatly expand the scope of private space travel, as its ticket costs would be a record low of 1,500$/person and not the whopping levels of 25,000$/person and at first 250,000$/person.
NASA is beginning work on a nuclear-fusion based ion engine meant to be used in place of the OMS engines for a Mars mission, which would utilize deuterium-helium-3 fusion for thrust and xenon for electricity, with the Space Shuttle also carrying an array of solar panels to facilitate this crewed Mars deep space mission. These ion engines would offer greater levels of efficiency and can shorten the trip to Mars and back down to just 2 months. The Mars Surface Access Module (MSAM) would also use nuclear-fusion based NERVA engines. Speaking of nuclear fusion, helium-3 extraction on the Moon is going splendidly thanks to the addition of new horizontal tanks near Jamestown base, which are to be sent to the newly built National Ignition Facility (NIF) - which has tested successfully this type of fusion consistently as of late, but are also to be used for the new Shuttle engines, which are to be built on the Moon and sent back to Earth. Jamestown has also begun to expand from not just astronauts, but also scientists, engineers, contractors and even miners, having around 25-50 people. This is also happening with the Soviet Soyuz base, it having around 20-40 people and it is also in a race to perfect the art of nuclear fusion.
President George H.W. Bush (USA), Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping (China), President Jacques Delors (EU), First Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev (USSR) and Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone (Japan) meet in the city of Reykjavik in Iceland, attempting to get a settled result when it comes to the issue of internet rights, space exploration, further nuclear dearmament and other issues. While there are some breathroughs, especially with the unification and privatization even of their respective government internet services, Arpanet (used by the USA and EU), Sovnet (used by the Soviets + Warsaw Bloc), Sinonet (used by China) and Nihonet (used by Japan and South Korea) into one World Wide Web (WWW) as proposed by Tim-Berners Lee. This privatization is set to pave way for massive economic growth according to Berners Lee and that it would also allow for a faster rate of technological advancement and (in the announcements that only democratic countries could see/hear) offer an expansion of liberal democracy and its triumph over authoritarianism. The internet being under private hands means that companies like Microsoft, Apple, Oracle etc. have access to the hardware and technology of this thing. However, attempts at getting further nuclear dearmament and also tearing down the Berlin Wall would fail, although there would be a limited media liberalization in the USSR post-Reykjavik, which would mean that US-Soviet relations are at an all-time good, despite there being weak fronts.
Microsoft would release in 1986 this timeline's equivalent of Windows 95, it being known as Windows 86, which would include a start button, would have MS-DOS as an important anti-virus component, file shortcuts, it would also come with Internet Explorer 4, an optional desktop update feature, was 32-bit and overall represented a significant evolution from the previous Windows 3. Windows 86 would immediately become a very popular product and would result in Microsoft, chaired by Bill Gates and Paul Allen to explode stocks-wise. While Apple did release MacOS 8 in the same year, it was still Windows 86 that would be the big deal.
Roscosmos would see as part of Mars 5 and 6 in the year 1986 missions to deep space, out to 1 million km away from Earth in order to test astronauts condition while being in deep space. The Americans would also send astronauts as part of Ares 4 to the L2 Lagrange point, 2 million km from Earth, with them staying around 10 days in that area before returning to Earth. Ares 5 would also happen in this year and would be the test of the Mars Surface Access Module (MSAM), which would also land on the surface of the Mars, but would be an uncrewed test flight, only sending some cargo and rovers to the surface in preparation for the human Mars landing. However, both Roscosmos and NASA would notice that microgravity, space motion sickness and many other things would be heavy problems for astronauts on such deep space missions and may hinder interplanetary expeditions if a way to get there and back quicker isn't found or artificial gravity isn't mastered, which is meant to allow for 1g of gravity in order to solve the aforementioned problems. Another problem is dust on Mars and Martian storms, which could come out of nowhere. During the Moon landings and Jamestown missions, carbon nanotubes have been created which electrically repulse the lunar dust, thus significantly reducing its effects on the astronauts and other scientific and habitation equipment, on Mars this is still a whole other story as mentioned with the storms.
There have been 21 Space Shuttle missions in this year, reaching up to STS-125, sure some of them were uncrewed payload deliveries as the few ones that were crewed were to the Space Station Freedom, with STS-124 seeing the placing of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02), which is meant to study/detect dark matter, antimatter, quarks and other stuff. The Space Shuttles would also be mounted with their own Canadarm 2, with the same purpose as the one on the SSF. Roscosmos would also reach up to Zvezda 48, sending cosmonauts to the Mir space station. There would be extensive knowledge generated by NASA and Roscosmos, especially when it came to microgravity, food, water, biology, STEM etc. thanks to the efforts of astronauts and cosmonauts in the Freedom and Mir space stations in low-earth orbit. Jamestown base would reach a population of 50, while Zvezda base would reach a population of 35 and these bases would begin transforming into whole cities and not just outposts, as they included mining outposts and even corporate outposts (in the American base), although as said the very low gravity was problematic. 
The military's Space Shuttle, Vanguard's launch as part of 51-L had to be delayed from January to March of 1986 due to a flaw in the O-ring boosters, which would be fixed for subsquent launches. The external tank's material of foam would also be modified so as to prevent it damaging the heat shield. In this year, the military would send another pair of geosynchronous satellites in the form of the Global Positioning System (GPS), this time sending the 2nd version, which offered far greater accuracy. Vanguard would be a Shuttle variant that would be specifically designed for low, medium and high earth orbit and not for interplanetary missions like the other 10 shuttles. 
A meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Pripyat, Ukrainian SSR is just barely prevented thanks to more advanced computer technology. Although this forces the Soviet authorities to begin a modernization of the Chernobyl reactor and other such reactors in order to prevent future incidents like this from occuring. 
*1987:
SpaceShipThree has in the year 1987 around 85 flights each carrying 4 passengers. CEO Richard Branson has shifted the business strategy of Virgin Galactic to include not just space tourism but also Earth to Earth travel. 20 of the 85 flights were not to the usual suborbital flight path of SSTwo, but rather were flights from Spaceport America in New Mexico to destination around the world, with a trip to Australia from New Mexico for example taking not 20 hours, but only 1 hour. Virgin Galactic has also said that it has begun mass producing SpaceShipThree spaceplanes and WhiteKnight motherships in order to expand the future of space tourism and suborbital earth-to-earth travel.
Aneutronic magneto-inertial nuclear fusion, made using deuterium and helium-3 (extracted from the Moon, sent back to Earth using LSAMs) after successful energy generation through the National Ignition Facility, would begin to become more and more popular. General Eletric (GE) and Westinghouse, among others, would build a series of fusion plants, with 1987 seeing 5 of them being built. The Soviet Union would also unlock this technology as it too mined helium-3 from the Moon and would have 2 fusion plants built by Rosatom. The European Union would see Siemens and EDF build 2 fusion plants and Japan would see Toshiba build 1 fusion power plant. Nuclear fusion compared to Nuclear fission is far safer and far less radioactive, it said to be the cleanest and safest energy source there is. Near Jamestown base on the Moon there is now a Jet Propulsion Laboratory, with it being used to test the NERVA fusion engine in vacuum conditions. 
Mikhail Gorbachev begins the second part of his reforms, that being of Glasnost, which is meant to promote transparency and political freedom and continue upon the economic reforms of the Perestroika. A full liberalization of the press and political system begins, with elections of parliament set to occur in 1989, but they're still with just the CPSU (Communists) and political independents, but voting rights have improved. He proclaims himself as a liberal socialist during his Glasnost speech and after this, the ideology becomes more and more popular. This leads to Hu Yaobang winning over Chinese political conservatives and having his direction, similar to that of Gorbachev, be the one to happen and not that of chinese conservatives, meaning that Deng Xiaoping is more politically democratic. A visit to Romania in 1987 leads to the Brasov Revolution which is violently put down by the Ceausists, after the protesters seized the city and declared a new Romania (which had the same flag but with the coat of arms removed) and there are also growing calls to tear down the Berlin Wall. It seems the Iron Curtain that was offered by authoritarian socialists of the past is beginning to break. This also leads to a breakthrough in negoations, with the signing and ratification of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by a hundred or so of countries and a reduction in the total of nuclear warheads from 11.000 down to just 4.400, seeing warhead reductions not just from the USA and the USSR but also from other nuclear armed states. He also begins winding down military aid to communist Afghanistan.
In this year, NASA would send the Pathfinder rover to the surface of Mars, specifically at Vales Marineris, alongside a human-rated habitation module, like the lunar Jamestown, which would become the living quarters of the astronauts on Mars and could accomodate the necessary 2 astronauts that will land on Mars, but has supplies for 4 to 5 astronauts if it is needed. The mission, Ares 5, which would send supplies to Mars, would also include a communications antenna and also small-sats deployed in orbit around Mars with access to Valles Marineris to provide communication back to Earth. Although another problem is that it takes around 3 minutes for light to reach Mars and come back to Earth, which may make things harder, especially with broadcasting the landing. The base on Mars will be known as Frontier (base/outpost) after careful decision by NASA. The same administration has also said that the Space Station Freedom will be deorbited in 2001 in order to pave way for a new more modern space station. Roscosmos has also given the date of 2002 for the deorbiting of Mir Space Station. The United States would have Ares 6 and 7 occur in 1987, as well as Ares 8, which would be crewed missions to deep space using the Space Shuttle and would also be part of STS-130, STS-131 and STS-133. There would be 14 STS missions reaching up to STS-139 in this year and would be to Earth orbit, Moon orbit and deep space. Launch costs for the Shuttle have also fallen down to just 750$/kg. 
The Soviet space agency, Roscosmos has also landed a rover as part of Mars 6 on the surface of Mars, it being an upgraded version of its previous Mars 1 and 2 rovers and on the same mission it would also send a Mars orbiter. It also had 6 Buran missions this year, reaching up to Buran 84. Some of these missions, Mars 6 and 7, were part of Buran 82 and 84. In rest, the other missions were either to Earth orbit, Moon orbit or the Moon, except Buran 81, which repeated the American achievement and sent crew to the L2 LaGrange point. Mikhail Gorbachev, in a bid to keep up with the Americans has begun funding his space agency more and more in recent years in order to beat the Americans to Mars, as the race to Mars has begun and it is just as intense as the race to the Moon. 
The computer issue, known as Y2K, is in this timeline fixed earlier after the same amount of hard work and dedication put into fixing it, this means that computer systems don't go all messed up once 1/1/2000 begins and that the world economy doesn't have its largest depression and planes don't fall out of the sky and many things are prevented. But well, this is just a historical footnote in this timeline, as you're only awarded for fixing a problem and not awarded for preventing it in the first place. Yep, just like in our own timeline, Y2K never happens, but in this timeline its not even brought up in regular media like it was. 
Fossil fuel companies, like Chevron, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP and others who have been slowly dying after nuclear power has begun replacing oil & gas have begun shifting towards helium-3. These companies, Chevron and ExxonMobil, have received contracts from the U.S. government to use recently created Delta III Heavy rockets, powered by 6 RS-68 engines to begin mining on the surface of the Moon for helium-3 and other resources. The Outer Space Treaty as such has been heavily amended in order to allow for property ownership on the Moon by fossil fuel companies and other individuals/companies but t, with Jamestown and Soyuz having been recognized as American and Soviet territories, alongside all other territories they own in space. These companies are free to own territories in space while still complying with U.N. laws and human rights basically. Roscosmos has also built the Angara A5, meant for its own companies to extract resources on the Moon, these being Lukoil, Gazprom and others. 
The amended Outer Space Treaty and Moon Treaty, known as the Space Exploration Treaty of 1987, which has been ratified by all 114 countries that ratified the 1967 one, allows private property for individuals/corporations on the Moon and other celestial bodies, with the national territory of the property belonging to the nation they are a citizen of, or in the case of dual citizenship, the country of birth and they have to abide by the laws of said country. It also recognizes government military bases as part of those said countries. It also sets the Karman Line at 100 km across the entire world and it makes the distinction between airspace and space globally and it also allows military operations on celestial bodies, but only within the country that owns the body or part of it. Some criticize for the fact that it just expands Earth's geopolitics into space and that this benefits America and the Soviet Union more than any other country, among other things and some praise it for making space exploration easier, for offering a more effective space treaty and other things. Although, Jamestown base has been made a joint territory between the USA, Canada, the EU and Japan and Soyuz base has been made a joint territory between the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam and Czechoslovakia by the powers of the Soviet Union and the United States. Although, the mining and economic outposts that aren't part of Jamestown/Soyuz made by US/Soviet corporations and the US/Soviet governments still remain under US-only and Soviet-only control.
President George H.W. Bush, after a bipartisan bill in the senate, proposed by Democratic Senator Joe Biden, approves of a 100B$ infrastructure project meant to improve the Northeast Corridor and have it be capable of running, from the entire distance of Washington D.C. to Boston at 200 km/h, aka high speed rail, using the Acela, a passenger high speed train set to be made by Amtrak, the state-owned passenger rail company. The state of rail travel is better than in our own timeline as most railroads are electrified and modernized and is also more popular, meaning the demand for cars isn't the same (also the electric car boom happens way earlier in this timeline, with now 60% of cars being electric). It is said that this is just a first step in making sure that America is interconnected with high speed rails, that there are more projects like this to come.
The American economy is booming, having grown to 12T$, a growth of around 4T$ in just four years of the H.W. Bush administration. This came because of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the internationalization of computational and software technology, because of this the Bush administration is pretty popular and unemployment has fallen to a record low of 3% and inflation is down to a low of 1.5%-2%, last seen 30-40 years ago after the end of WW2. The Japanese economy has also begun to boom to a record 6T$, the European economy is at 5T$ and the Soviet economy is at 4.5T$, it just beginning to pick up steam after its capitalist Perestroika-Glasnost reforms. The Consumer Confidence Index in the United States for example has risen to a record 200 thanks to the space boom, the internet boom (the dot.com boom) and also just a general good economic outlook in all other sectors. This is also reflected in the stock market (the DOW Jones) as it soars to a record 4.000 SMI, back in 1984, it was just 2000 SMI, so x2 more now than back then.
In other events of the year, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) maintains the Fairness Doctrine, unlike in our own timeline. The most popular cable news sources in the United States would be CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System), CNN (Cable News Network), NBC (National Broadcasting Company), ABC (American Broadcasting Company), WSJ (Wall Street Journal) and WP (Washington Post). All being on the center-left, center or center-right as the fringe far-left and far-right were way too fringe. Rupert Murdoch in this timeline is not as relevant and is just a local Sydney progressive news guy. The Soviet Union celebrates the 70th anniversary of the October revolution, KFC opens its first restaurant in the People's Republic of China, Pizza Hut opens its first restaurant in the Soviet Union, a British InterCity train breaks the world record for diesel train speed and the fifth generation (32-bit) era of video games begin with things like the PS1, Atari Jaguar, Sega Saturn, Nintendo 64 and 3DO. The 16-bit would be a short lasting era, unlike other video game eras, which shows just how much the creation of the WWW changed how the internet would work. 
*1988:
In the 1988 presidential election, George H.W. Bush would easily be renominated as the presidential nominee for the Republican Party due to his high approval ratings (65-70%) and also because there wasn't any other viable candidate that ran. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party, which was worried about its future after losing in the 1986 midterms, would wound up choosing pacifist centre-left progressive Michael Dukakis in a surprise vote, beating out moderates like Al Gore and Dick Gephardt. George H.W. Bush, having managed to assemble a strong coalition of moderate Democrats, moderate Republicans and conservative Republicans, would win in a landslide against Dukakis, winning 458 electoral votes against Dukakis's 80 electoral votes and H.W. Bush would win 55.2% of the popular vote compared to Dukakis's 43.9% of the vote. This such landslide was last seen in the 1964 election, where LBJ won against Barry Goldwater. For vice-president, George H.W. Bush would continue to have Bob Dole, while Michael Dukakis picked Lloyd Bentsen, a more moderate politician, in order to steal votes from the GOP. 
The main issues would be the economy, with Bush promising to maintain fiscal responsibility while at the same promoting a social investment state and upward social mobility, the combination that, according to him, keeps the economy booming, while Dukakis promised to expand the welfare state and wanted to lower income inequality. Another important issue would be foreign policy, George H.W. Bush established himself as an experienced pragmatist that always did what's right, but Dukakis was viewed as a naive pacifist. His attempts at appearing tough, through riding a tank, would only makes things worse for his presidential campaign. Another issue would be LGBTQ+ rights, with Dukakis becoming the first presidential candidate to officially say that LGBTQ+ people should have the right to marry, while Bush would be neutral and hold the current, popular position and finally the issue of space travel would come, with Bush promising to continue the current policy of expanding the wings of humanity and to be ahead of the Soviet Union and cooperate with our allies, while Dukakis said at one point that what's the point of space if we can't solve our problems here on Earth, which generated a lot of uproar and tanked his campaign even further.
Osama Bin Laden meets with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Afghanistan and creates with him the radical islamist organization known as Al-Qaeda, after both would be disillusioned with the Mujahideen, saying that they fight against the infidelic Soviet oppression of Muslims while at the same saying nothing about American-backed oppression of Muslims, especially in Israel. He would be setting his sights on a jihad against the Soviets and the Americans in the 3rd millenium of the Gregorian calendar, planning things out in the mountains of Afghanistan alongside KSM and other Al-Qaeda recruits which were convinced by his message, some even coming from the west itself. The civil war in Afghanistan continues as the National Resistance Front (NRF), the Mujahideen, fail to make any gains against the communists in power and it seems that this civil war is becoming increasingly frozen. 
Arab countries and by extension OPEC, which were often known as petro-states due to their heavy reliance on oil and gas would begin to suffer immensely economically speaking, due to the world's shift towards renewable energy, nuclear fission and nuclear fusion energy. As such, countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar begin liberalizing, giving women more rights, allowing for slightly more political and economic freedoms and also beginning to follow a less radical version of islam (even though they would still fund Wahhabists, Salafists and other islamists in secret) in order to attract investors into the country and build up a new, more stable economy than their previous oil economy. Saudi Arabia would revoke the citizenship of Saudi-born terrorists like Osama Bin Laden (even if they still held close ties with him in secret) for geopolitical purposes. 
George H.W. Bush would announce the Space Exploration Initiative, which would focus on the future needs, goals and missions that will be done in the following decades when it comes to the topic of space travel and space exploration. Because of the SEI, construction of the Sea Dragon rocket would be approved, it representing a way and an expansion to Jamestown base on the Moon to make it the first artificial gravity base, which would allow for Earth-like gravity on the Moon because of a rotating ring, it being finally put on the Moon, but more importantly the Sea Dragon will allow for the commercialization and expansion of Earth's economy to the Moon due to its heavy payload capability. The Sea Dragon would be sent out to sea due to its very high thrust at lift off due to its massive first stage RP-1/LOX engine. It would be tugged by several ships out to its designated position in the water and then using a bottom stabilizer that gets just before launch.
The Soviet Union would also see the first major private companies emerge, like Sberbank, Alfa-Bank, Lukoil, Inter-RAO Magnit, Evraz, among others and there would also be western companies making shop there as its economy has become a capitalist one as well, companies like McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Apple, Auchan and many other companies would set up shop in the USSR as its economy begins to liberalize thanks to Gorbachev's reforms. The Soviets would also build skyscrapers in the center of Moscow due to the new demand brought in by this massive wave of economic growth, which is rivalling that of America and Japan.
The first crewed mission as part of a Mars flyby occurs, it being Ares 10, which would have astronauts Kenneth Cameron, Blaine Hammond, Sherwood Spring and Renate Brummer (German, part of cooperation with the EU and ESA). The pictures taken by astronauts of this mission further reinforce the views that the Earth is a spaceship and that we are its pilots and that we are all one - all of our petty divides are in the end insigificant. Before it would be Ares 9 and it would be a Moon flyby mission as a test before this mission. Roscosmos would be shocked by this achievement of the Americans, just like the American accomplishment of the first crewed lunar flyby and their only response would be a failed mission of sending animals to the asteroid belt and even beyond to Jupiter and back because of the fact that it failed to conduct booster separation, meaning the Shuttle had to be aborted and the Buran had to autonomously land back on the launch pad, although other rovers were sent to Mars by the Russians and by the Americans during this year to the surface of Mars, alongside orbiters.
In other news, NASA scientist James Hansen testifies in front of Congress and says that the world has averted what would have been one of its biggest challenges of the 21st century, that being man-made climate change due to the rapid roll out of nuclear fission, 
renewables and nuclear fusion and it has also solved the problem of the ozone layer and the ozone hole over Antarctica and Greenland. 
*1989:
George H.W. Bush is inaugurated as the president of the United States, being re-elected for a 2nd term after his landslide victory in the 1988 presidential election. 
In the year 1989, the Revolutions of 1989 would occur propped up by the growing movement liberal socialist initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev. It would start first in the country of Poland, resulting in the replacement of Wojtech Jaruzelski with Lech Walesa through peaceful means, the liberal socialist trade union leader of Solidarnosc (Solidarity) and the movement behind it, with the first multi-party elections in Poland giving him a clear win. Then it would come to Hungary, which also had its marxist-leninist one-party state abolished in favor of a multi-party one with liberal socialism at the helm. Most famously, the Berlin Wall would be toppled and the East and West would unite into one Germany, in Czechoslovakia, the Velvet Revolution would see the peaceful transition of power to a multi-party system. The only violent revolution would be that toppling the Romanian communist regime, which saw the deaths of around 1,000 people due to Ceausescu's desperate attempt of clinging on to power, which in this timeline would see liberal socialist Petre Roman put into power The Soviet Union would also see peaceful protests where Gorbachev would concede to the people and have the 1990 elections be multi-party, although politics in these countries would be pretty center-left. The Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union itself have turned into multi-party democracies through mostly peaceful means.
Although another revolution would happen in 1989, that being in the People's Republic of China. This would come after the death of liberal socialist reformer Hu Yaobang and while initially it was just a simple rememberance ceremony it soon turned into massive protests at Tiananmen Square in the face of the slow rate of economic and political reforms in the country of China. Despite the popularity and party dominance of moderate politicians and generals like Zhao Ziyang, Xi Zhongxun and Xu Qingxian, Deng Xiaoping would still order the tanks to be used as warning, although this would prompt Zhao Ziyang to conduct a self-coup within the CCP and topple Deng, which would succeed despite conservative, hardliner resistance due to liberal socialism's popularity in this timeline due to the Soviet economic success and also a recent visit by Mikhail Gorbachev. A multi-party system, dominated by the CCP and led by Zhao Ziyang would be created in the country of China, the first ever glimpse of democracy China would have in the 20th century.
 
Mikhail Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush, the leaders of the Soviet Union and the United States, announce the end of the Cold War, saying that while capitalism or socialism did not triumph necessarily, liberalism, human rights, democracy and the rule law as values have officially triumphed. Soviet-American collaboration also begins to increase as the relations between the former East and West blocs begin to grow closer and closer. Francis Fukuyama would release in 1992 The End of History and the Last Man, a political philosophy book which talks about the ascendance of liberal democracy after the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the revolutions of that same year through a Hegelian historical lens, it gaining massive amounts of fame, even if not fully understood. 
The Soviets replicate the American achievement in the previous year, by sending 4 cosmonauts using the Buran space shuttle on a crewed flyby of Mars. They also send Phobos 1 and Phobos 2 probes to the orbit of Mars, the first one actually making a flyby of Mars's moon Phobos and the other of Mars's moon Deimos before its areocentric orbit insertion. Space Station Freedom has around 15 people on board, Space Station Mir has around 10 people on board after modifications were made to the stations, Jamestown has a population of 125, while Zvezda has a population of 75. The Voyager 2 probe would become the first probe to make a flyby of the planet Neptune, the farthest planet from the Sun. In the later parts of the year, the Race to Mars begins, as part of Ares 11 for the Americans and as part of Mars 10 for the Soviet Union, both having their intended landing site in the Valles Marineris region of Mars. The Energia-Buran and the STS rockets launch essentially at the same time. 
These revolutions in Poland, Hungary, China, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania which would all succeed in creating multi-party democracies and would have a cascading effect. Soon after the revolutions, the East and West would reunite into one Germany, China would become a democracy and so would the Eastern Bloc. In the country of North Vietnam, the Doi Moi reforms began in 1986, although in 1989, with the growing waves of revolution across the East, North Vietnam would be taken over by a pro-Gorbachev democratic socialist who would institute a multi-party system. Just like in Germany, the country of South and North Vietnam would unite into one Vietnam, with the flag of the south, this Vietnam being a multi-party democracy.
In North Korea, due to the loss of essentially all foreign aid from their former givers, the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China and North Vietnam, among others have stopped giving it money. It is only receiving money from Cuba, but it too is in a very precarious situation due to it also losing its foreign aid givers. These countries are suffering a humanitarian and economic crisis, with 90-95% of their people now being below the poverty line. China and the Soviet Union have opened up their border with North Korea in order to allow for economic and political refugees to escape. Around 2 million people make this desperate march, despite North Korean military and police resistance, 1.8 million manage to get out. South Korea, China, Soviet Union, the United States, Japan and the European Union call upon North Korea's leader, Kim Il-sung to reform the regime so that it isn't as repressive, reduce its military size, stop its WMD program, open up the economy and allow for a smooth flow of humanitarian aid into the country. This has also been said to Cuba, which is suffering the same thing. North Korea, due to the insanity of Il-sung and his Juche ideology never bows down to the demands of these corrupt imperialists and as such this results in an U.N. approved invasion of the country. Within a year, Kim Il-sung is killed and his regime toppled, in its place North Korea is put under temporary U.N. coalition control until a smooth reunification with South Korea can be created, although continuous resistance from Juche militants continues, headqurtered in the godly Paektu mountains and spread from there in the form of guerilla warfare in the mountains of the Korean peninsula (mostly the North).
In Cuba however, things are much more smooth sailing, as Fidel Castro resigns and while he attempts to put his brother, Raul Castro, into power this is not accepted by the great powers of the world. Instead, the more Gorbachev-aligned 30 yr-old Miguel Diaz Canel is put into power and a multi-party democracy is established within the country. Yemen also reunifies in the later parts of 1989 into a liberal socialist country based from North Yemen. 1989 was sure one heck of a year. Also in this year, Brazil's military dictatorship ends and the first democratic elections occur since 1963, South Africa elects F.W. de Klerk, who eventually ends up abolishing the 
50-yr long Apartheid system of the country. 
===The 1990s===
*1990:
The race is on as both the Space Shuttle Discovery and the Space Shuttle Buran have inserted themselves into an orbit around the planet of Mars, ready to land at their designated landing sites at Valles Marineris, 115 km away from each other. The Space Shuttle Discovery would utilize its nuclear fusion ion engines to shorten its trip to Mars and so would the Buran, although the ones for the Buran are not as great as those of the Americans. The Mars Surface Access Module (MSAM), carrying astronauts Roy Bridges as the commander and MSAM pilot Mark Cumberson. While on the Shuttle, there would be the Shuttle pilot James Wetherbee and the Mission specialist William Shepherd. For the Soviets, they used a Mars Korabyl (MK) lander (modified LK lander) carrying cosmonauts Igor Volk (commander) and Valery Korzun (MK pilot) while on the Buran Shuttle would remain Shuttle pilot Yuri Malenchenko and mission specialist Sergei Avdeyev. American astronaut Roy Bridges would become the first man to walk on the surface of Mars, followed by the MSAM pilot Mark Cumberson. The Soviets would land Igor Volk and Valery Korzun 17 minutes later, 115 km away from the American Valles Marineris landing site. The Soviets would name their landing site Gagarin Ridge, while the Americans would name theirs Frontier Valley. The Americans would stay on the surface of Mars for about a week before returning to the Space Shuttle Discovery and then back to Earth just 2 months later, while the Soviets would only stay for about 2 days before returning to the Space Shuttle Buran and back to Earth 2-3 months after the event.
Soon after this event, both sides, the United States and the Soviet Union, would meet and officially end the Space Race as it had no reason to keep on going. Because of this, the United States of America, the Soviet Union, the European Union, Japan, Canada, Switzerland, Norway, the People's Republic of China, Vietnam and former Warsaw Pact countries all agree to form an international space alliance. The Shuttle Buran is sent on a mission to the Space Station Freedom, it sending the Nauka module, a science laboratory, to the station, including a docking port and even two cosmonauts to the station. The Shuttle Atlantis is sent on a mission to the Space Station Mir, it sending two astronauts to the station and an upgraded docking port replacing the old one in use for the Buran. Plans are drawn up on creating an International Space Station, that has modules from the USA, USSR, China, the EU, 
Canada, Japan and other countries part of this space alliance. Jamestown and Soyuz bases on the Moon and Frontier on Mars are also made joint territories of the mentioned International Space Alliance (ISA) countries. The USSR and the USA will also have joint missions to Frontier base on Mars. Although, moon resources are still mined by the individual nations themselves. 
Elections would be held in the Soviet Union in August of 1990, specifically for the Supreme Soviet but also for the new position of President of the Soviet Union. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) which by now has been following the path to liberal socialism (self-proclaimed ideology, in reality it is just social-market capitalism and centre-left, at least as of now) wins the parliamentary election with 57% of the vote and seats, so 257 seats, while other parties, like the centre-right Democratic Choice would win 20% of the vote and seats, so 90 seats. It is followed by Yabloko, the Agrarian Party of the Soviet Union (APSU), Liberal Democratic Party of the Soviet Union (actually far-right) and then political independents. For president, Mikhail Gorbachev would win 76% of the vote in the first round, beating out other candidates like Aman Tuleyev and Alexander Rutskoy. This gave greater legimitacy to the reformist path followed by Mikhail Gorbachev.
Although, not everyone is happy with these results, to say the least. A group of hardliners, led by Gennady Yanayev, but also made out of members of the military, the KGB, although this coup group would be limited due to the fact that the USSR wasn't so unstable. The reasoning for this coup d'etat would be that the Soviet Union has fallen to the evil West and its values and that the Soviet Union has lost its former glory. They attempted to kidnap Gorbachev, but they would fail during their attempt to seize emergency power. This hindered their attempts and they would also lose support among their own ranks and soon in a few days the coup would disorganize. This event in Soviet history would be known as the August Coup of 1990 and while it would be the final beat of the hardliners, the ones that remained continued in the shadows.
*1991:
The Mount Pinatubo eruption occurs in this year, it being the second largest vulcanic eruption , only being behind the Novarupta eruption in 1912. It would release 17 megatons (17.000.000 tons) of sulfur into the atmosphere, specifically the statosphere resulting in a 0.4 degree celsius cooling of the Earth, so down to exactly 1850 levels for around 2-3 years, until 1994 and by 1995-1996, temperature levels would recover to the level before the eruption. It would receive on the Volcano Explosivity Index (VEI) a 6 out of 8, due to it releasing around 10 km^3 (1,000,000,000 m^3) of ejected tethra, just like the Novarupta eruption.
Jamestown and Soyuz bases have begun accomodating Soviet and American astronauts and have become more so international research stations rather than outposts of hostile countries, with them having around 2.000 people, reaching the population of the Antarctic outposts. Corporations have also begun setting up shop on the Moon, for example, computers use Windows 90, while on the Moon, it being made by Microsoft, but not just that, helium-3 is mined on the Moon for fusion reactors and sent back to Earth using Space Shuttles, other stuff mined include rare-earth metals like lithium, aluminium, silicon etc. which are used in batteries, electric vehicles and many other things, but uranium and plutonium are also mined on the Moon for nuclear fission reactors. While there are officially 10 STS Shuttles (NASA) + 1 (USAF), there are tens if not hundreds of reusable STS shuttles operated by private corporations as part of NASA contracts. The lunar economy is beginning to take off, says NASA and that a new gold rush has just begun.
The company Reaction Engines Limited, a British aerospace company established in 1989 is working on the Skylon SSTO reusable spaceplane, which uses 2 two-cycle SABRE engines. In the atmosphere, up to 30 km and a speed of Mach 6, it uses atmospheric oxygen but then when pressure is too low and there is more so of a vacuum, the engine switches to its internal supply of liquid oxygen (LOX) which can get cargo into an orbit of 400 km around Earth and astronauts around a 200 km one. Basically, the SABRE engine is a jet engine when in the atmosphere and a rocket engine when it is in space. It can use this property to get to orbit with just one stage and be fully reusable. This would also act as a competitor to Virgin Galactic which has tapped through its SpaceShipThree the growing market of space tourism and Earth to Earth travel.
The Sierra Nevada Corporation has its first launch of the Dream Chaser to the Space Station Freedom using an Atlas V, the first of its kind, powered by 1 RS-56 on its first stage and 5 GEM-63/AJ-60A boosters, providing 1M lbs of thrust at lift off. The Dream Chaser is a lifting-body reusable spaceplane that will initially send cargo and later on people and cargo to the Space Station 
Freedom and even Mir, having the capacity for 7 people, or private space participants (also known as commercial astronauts). Dream Chaser is also set to launch on an Ariane 5 rocket from ESA, an H-3 rocket from JAXA and a Proton-K rocket from Roscosmos in the future.
The first exoplanet is found by the Arecibo radio observatory in Puerto Rico, a year before our own timeline due to more advanced technology, it being known as Poltergeist, with this radio telescope also being known for sending out the Arecibo message to interstellar space. In the same year, they would find another exoplanet which would be named Phobetor and were found orbiting the pulsar PSR B1257+12. NASA's Galileo spacecraft makes a flyby of 951 Gaspra in the asteroid belt before going on to study the Jupiter system. It was put into orbit in 1989 using the Space Transportation System (STS) with a Space Shuttle Atlantis before beginning its mission. 
 
The plan for 9/11 is finalized by Al-Qaeda, it involving 30 hijackers and 6 planes, 2 Boeing 757s, one from United Airlines and the other from American Airlines (one which would hit the Pentagon, another which would hit the Capitol Building) 2 Boeing 767s, one from United Airlines and the other from American Airlines, these being the American targets. There would be an additional 2 planes, 1 being an Ilyushin Il-96, from Red Wings and the other being a Tupolev Tu-204, from Kosmos Airlines, with the Ilyushin Il-96 targeting the House of Soviets and the other targeting Tower Vostok (Tower East). The attacks would also include Chechen truck bombings in Moscow meant to cause apartment collapses and also in the city of New York. They believed that the United States of America and the Soviet Union were together spreading infidelism and atheism to the entire world and that it was the duty of Islam and these acts to stop them in their tracks. They also believed that America should withdraw from its military bases in Iran, Hashemite Arabia and Saudi Arabia and thought that the presence of the American eagle in the Middle East was an attack on Islam in addition to this, they also hated that America was perpetuating the state of Israel, which followed judaism and had over time taken land from Arab countries like Syria, Egypt and was causing the shrinking of Palestine.
The United States, the Soviet Union, China, Canada, Japan, the EU and other countries agree to a proposal of the International Space Station that will have a rotating artificial gravity ring that could fit 40 people inside of it and provide Earth-like gravity inside, fixing the effects that microgravity would have on the human body, this also providing astronauts with more comfier living spaces and also offering them food, water, oxygen etc. The station would be powered by 16 solar arrays that have 70% efficiency, the best of any solar panels. It would also feature radiators, although it would feature small microgravity labs and would include observatories like a second Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer and other such spectrometers and even cupolasfor astronauts and also would include a nuclear fusion-based propulsion module. This station would be at 1,000 km above the Earth surface, making it harder to de-orbit and would also keep it safe from most space junk. Although, an actual space station would be recently launched today that being the Lunar Gateway Space Station and it would have American, European, Canadian, Japanese and Soviet modules. It is meant as a small rest stop before continuing on with a journey, it even having a Deep Space Transportation System meant for deep space travel beyond the Earth-Moon, essentially it gives you the choice of either landing on the Moon, staying in it, or going beyond. It has a near-rectillinear halo orbit around the Moon, allowing for 24/7 communication with Earth, having a periapsis of 3000 km and an apoapsis of 70000 km.
 
The first democratic elections are held in China and the Communist Party of China (CPC), led by Zhao Ziyang, wins 59% of the seats in the National People's Assembly, there are also being other political parties that participate like the Democratic Party, the Kuomintang, National Democratic Party for Tibet, Turkistan Islamic Party and others. Zhao Ziyang is also willing to reunite with Taiwan, bringing China back under one country. Zhao Ziyang also negotiates with the European Union, with the EU set to give Hong Kong to it in 1997 and Macau in 1999, with these areas of China following a one country two systems policy, meaning that they have a high degree of political and economic autonomy. China also does not suffer the reputation loss that it had because of the Tiananmen Square Massacre and instead its international approval and foreign economic confidence meaning that its economic growth is higher, reaching 1T$ by the end of this year. 
In this year, the United States, Mexico and Canada ratify the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which is meant to significantly lower tariffs and other trade barriers between these countries, as it eliminated most tariffs and superseded the 1988 CUSFTA signed between the USA and Canada, it would be one of the largest trade blocs in the world, it going into effect on January 1st, 1992. 
Also in this year, Mikhail Gorbachev creates a successor to the Comecon, that being the Eurasian Economic Union, which would include the Soviet Union, Eastern European countries (Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia), Mongolia, Finland and despite its name would also include Cuba. The EEU would serve as an economic link between all of these states and also technically as a free trade agreement between these, representing , a more modern a stronger and more competent version of Comecon.
*1992:
George H.W. Bush cannot run for a third term as President of the United States. In the 1992 presidential election in the United States, for the Republican Party would instead be nominated Bob Dole for President (who was George H.W. Bush's vice-president) and he would choose Jack Kemp as vice-president. The Democratic Party meanwhile would choose Bill Clinton as he won a large chunk of the delegates, representing the moderate, New Democrat wing of the party, which means he could have a great chance at winning the election. But in this election there would be a powerful third party candidate, that being Texan businessman Ross Perot, who was against NAFTA and rejected the offshoring of jobs to Mexico and to the Moon, called for a balanced budget amendment (even though the U.S. budget was in a fiscal surplus for quite some time now, at around 300-400B$, with the debt having fallen to just 24% of GDP - 3T$ only and set to be paid in full by 20 years), called for the creation of an e-democracy system, called for certain gun control. After being on CNN's Larry King Live, he would get on the ballot in all 50 states and announce his intention to run for President, positioning himself as a moderate between the two parties. Bill Clinton meanwhile advocated for the third way, a middle ground between social liberalism and neoliberalism, supporting NAFTA, even supporting LGBT+ marriage, he supported the fiscal conservatism of the H.W. Bush administration while at the same time supporting welfare reform in order to reduce poverty and he also vowed to keep universal healthcare and continue the low military spending regime, while Bob Dole would be more on the right, supporting tax cuts, slashing social programs, being pro-supply side economics, taking an even more right-wing economic approach than Bush, having one that was similar to Reagan.
The three candidates, Bill Clinton, Bob Dole and Ross Perot were neck and neck in the polls, with at one point Perot beating the others out in opinion polls with 39% for Perot, 28% for Clinton and 28% for Dole, however when November came, Bill Clinton managed to take the lead due to his excellent perfomance during the presidential debates, likely due to his great ability at listening and paying attention to crowds and his overall charisma, that exceeded that of his rivals. Yes, in the debates, Perot was included despite being a third party due to his heavy popularity. In the end, Bill Clinton would receive 40% of the vote, Bob Dole would receive 33% of the vote and Ross Perot would receive 26% of the vote. Clinton would win 351 electoral votes, Dole would win 186 electoral votes and Ross Perot would win 1 electoral vote, that being Maine's 2nd district. It is said that if Perot didn't run, Dole would have been very close to Clinton electoral votes wise or even have gotten more than he did.
The International Atomic Energy (IAEA) inspects North Korean nuclear power plants that were there and notices that some uranium had been enriched and that the country was going to unlock nuclear weapons by 2005 or 2006 and was planning for a withdrawal from the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The civil war in Afghanistan continues to rage on, with president Mohammed Najibullah calling for further Soviet aid to the People's Republic in its fight against the Mujahideen. Despite mounting casualties and constant shellings from both sides, little to no gains are being made and it seems that the civil war in Afghanistan may as well be permanent. Israel's Labor Party, led by Yitzhak Rabin, wins the election and forms a moderate center/center-left government, beating out the center-right/right-wing Likud Party. 
Zhao Ziyang, President of China, makes the Southern Tour, which represents a continuation and strengthening of the Reform and Opening Up. The president would go to Shenzhou, Zhuhai and Shanghai. During this time, he emphasized to Chinese military leaders that if the reforms and opening up weren't being promoted by them, they may as well be removed from their ranks. He also wished that Guangdong province would be as rich as the Four Asian Tigers (Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea) and he also called for the reform and opening up to be put into action at a greater pace, he also called for reunification with Taiwan. This would see greater levels of economic liberalization and privatization, expanding the special economic zones and also putting into place the first anti-corruption measures and finally it would lead to greater cross-strait relations with Taiwan and a reunification with the country in a one country two systems manner like Hong Kong and Macau in the future, which would be decided with a referendum set to occur next year.
1992 was designated as the International Space Year (ISY) by the United Nations, as it represented 500 years since Christopher Columbus discovered the American continent, this being proposed by U.S. Senator Spark Matsunaga and was approved by the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses for Outer Space. Many national space agencies would endorse this idea and the theme would chosen would be "Going beyond and remembering our Earthly roots", as such this year was used to promote space exploration and sustainable activities down here on Earth.
In this year and as part of the ISY, the People's Republic of China through the CNSA (Chinese National Space Administration) would launch the Long March 10 rocket, being powered by 7 YF-100K kerolox engines for its boosters and 7 YF-100K kerolox engines for its first stage, generating 4.4M lbs of thrust at lift off and could send 70t to LEO and 27t to TLI. This was the 9th mission of the Chang'e program, the first 3 missions were sending lunar orbiters, the next 3 missions would send lunar rovers, and the next 2 missions would be establishing a robotic research lab on the South Pole and this mission was the first crewed landing of a Chinese taikonaut on the Moon through the use of China's own rocket and space capabilities and not that of the Soviet Union or the USA through the Energia and the STS. The two taikonauts would land at the South Pole of the Moon, west of Shackleton crater and west of Jamestown and Soyuz bases. 
Meanwhile, NASA would send the Sojourner rover to the surface of Mars, send Juno on a mission meant to study the Jupiter system in greater detail. These two missions being sent using the STS rocket and Space Shuttle Discovery. Meanwhile, sitting president George H.W. Bush in an agreement with Mikhail Gorbachev and with convicing done by Democratic senator from Tennessee Al Gore would declassify decades of Project Corona spy satellite footage plus other Soviet spy satellite footage in order to gather data in regards to Earth's changing climate, with 50 years being enough to see the slow melting of the polar ice due to 0.3-0.5 degrees of warming compared to 1850. A message from the crew of Jamestown base was sent in multiple languages across the world calling for protection of our planet and the full recognition of it as a spaceship that we all belong in and one which we must sail with together. An exhibit with the words "Where Next, Columbus?" was opened at the National Air and Space Museum as recognition for the International Space Year (ISY). In other NASA news, The population of Frontier base on Mars would grow to 50 as it becomes its own research outpost and the first mining sites are created near it at Valles Marineris.
The European Space Agency (ESA) would begin the Cassini-Huygens mission sent to study the Saturn system, with Cassini being the spacecraft meant to orbit around Saturn and Huygens being the impactor that would impact the surface of Titan, becoming the first spacecraft to impact a moon of a gas giant (Titan), these spacecraft being named after astronomers Giovanni Cassini and Christiaan Huygens. The spacecraft would be launched on an Ariane 5 rocket. It would first make two flybys of Venus in 1993 and 1994, then Earth in 1994 for some gravity assists and to asteroid 2685 Masurky and Jupiter in late 1995, then it would make a flyby of Saturn's moon Phoebe in early 1998 and finally arrive in Saturn orbit in mid-1998, with the Huygens impactor also impacting the surface of Titan the next month. The mission would last for 20 years until the year 2018, before Cassini would be deorbited and re-enter in Saturn's atmosphere, this being ESA's contribution to the International Space Year (ISY). 
Japan, Canada and Australia's contribution to the International Space Year would come in the form of the X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM), it being an X-ray space telescope. It is one of the best space telescopes due to its instruments, specifically its Resolve, an X-ray calorimeter built by Australia, which has a range of -273.10 degrees celsius (0.05K) up to 5.5 trillion Kelvin and XTend, built by Japan, being an X-ray CCD camera and it is set to have a high energy resolution which would allow for very great X-ray images. JAXA would launch the XRISM with an H-3 rocket and it would reveal many secrets about our own universe, its goal being to create a very detailed chemical make up of the universe, provide pictures about the dynamics of galactic clusters and the flow of matter around supermassive black holes. It is positioned in a lunar orbit and would arrive in that orbit by late 1993. 
Roscosmos would launch the Spektr-RG, which is very similar to Hubble but is designed differently, it also being in a low-earth orbit and pretty much has the same goal and technological capability as the Hubble Space Telescope. It was launched on an Energia rocket and carried by the Buran space shuttle. It is Roscosmos's contribution to the International Space Year (ISY) and as I said is meant to complement the Hubble in its scientific missions. Another Soviet contribution would come in the form the Space Flight Europe-America 500, a goodwill ISY mission from the USSR to the USA as part of the first private spaceflight mission of TsSKB-Progress (a rocket building company) and the Soviet Foundation for Social Inventions, the goal being to improve trade and tech relations between the USSR and USA by launching on a Soyuz rocket carrying various items symbolizing peace and orbited the Earth for a few days before landing in late November 1992 in the U.S. state of Washington.
Other things done during the International Space Year (ISY) would be Australia's CSIRO launching satellites meant to study the Earth and its plant-based life, with the launch being done by the American Atlas V (which would win out over the Titan IV, the latter being replaced with the Atlas V). The alternative rock band, They Might Be Giants were designated as the Musical Ambassador for the ISY by NASA while looking for Apollo archive images and would release the album Apollo 34, for the Apollo mission that no longer happened due to Jamestown and operations there becoming more and more important. Conferences around the world would also be made in regards to the International Space Year and finally Canada, like Australia would launch its own satellites meant at better understanding the Earth and New Zealand would launch its first satellite.
The Commercial and Governmental Resupply Services (CGRS) contract would be finished for the upcoming International Space Station. NASA and the CSA would make use of the Cygnus expendable spacecraft and the fully reusable Space Shuttle (specifically Columbia and Kon-Tiki), ESA would make use of the fully reusable Susie spacecraft (not yet built), that replaces its current Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) spacecraft that is expendable. Roscosmos would make use of the Progress expendable spacecraft and the fully reusable Buran Space Shuttle, JAXA would make use of the expendable Kounotori (H-II Transfer Vehicle) spacecraft and the CNSA would make use of the expendable Tianzhou spacecraft. These would be the governmental contracts for the servicing of the ISS with supplies. 
Then for the commercial side of the contract, Sierra Nevada would use the Dream Chaser, a fully reusable spacecraft, Boeing would use the Starliner, a partially reusable spacecraft and Reaction Engines would use Skylon, a fully reusable spacecraft Through this there would be an almost constant flow of supplies to the ISS. The Atlas V would be used to launch the expendable Cygnus (NASA), the partially reusable Starliner (Boeing) and the fully reusable Dream Chaser (Sierra Nevada), the Space Transportation System would be used to launch the Space Shuttle Columbia and Kon-Tiki supply spacecraft, the Ariane 5 would launch the fully reusable Susie spacecraft, the Soyuz would launch the Progress expendable spacecraft, the Energia would launch the Buran Space Shuttle, the Long March 5 would launch the Tianzhou spacecraft, the H-II would launch the Kounotori spacecraft and the Skylon would be launched by Paul Allen's recently created Stratolaunch (using a plane the size of the Antonov An-225 Mriya) which would launch it from 20-30 km so that it can reach the 1000 km altitude of the ISS as a SSTO.
In other events of the year, the population of the International Lunar Base (which is a collection of bases on the Moon, mostly Jamestown and Soyuz) reaches 2500 while the mining outposts, where a lot of lunar economic activity is going with things like helium-3 mining, rare-earth metal mining and other forms of mining, reach a population of around 500 all of them being at the South Pole, below 70 degrees in latitude. The Treaty on Open Skies (also known as the Open Skies Treaty) is ratified by around 100 countries, way more than in our own timeline, it including now China, Korea, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Argentina, among others, the ones mentioned being notable real life refusers to join. Through this treaty, countries can exercise greater levels of confidence and trust when it comes to the transparency countries give and it also allows for unarmed means of reconnaissance, can reduce misunderstandings and accidents, promoting greater levels of peace and can improve relations between countries through increased awareness about each other and also can allow for arms control verification. 
*1993:
In this timeline, Czechoslovakia continues to exist thanks to the efforts of a liberal socialist Vaclav Havel and Mikhail Gorbachev, meaning it does not collapse into Czechia and Slovakia on the first day of this year. Also in this year, the Chemical Weapons Convention, an arms control treaty meant at limiting or even removing the stockpile of chemical weapons is signed and ratified by all 194 countries of the world and Bill Clinton is also sworn in as President of the United States after winning the 1992 presidential election against Bob Dole and finally Vaclav Havel is elected as President of Czechoslovakia.
Ramzi Yousef of Al-Qaeda conducts a terrorist plot, bombing the World Trade Center underground mall with a 606 kg urea-nitrate gas-enhanced device, this being a plot independent of that of 9/11, although KSM, one of the masterminds behind the planned 9/11, did help him somewhat in his operation. There is little damage, with only 6 people and only 208 people get injured, x5 less than in our own timeline, due to the building's 1 meter reinforced concrete, stronger visco-elastic dampeners, concrete-covered trusses post-1981 crash and other measures like an emergency-sprinkler system (upgraded over our own system and it was automatic) made it so that the damage to the underground wasn't as . 50000 people were evacuated from the buildings however on February 26th, 1993. In 1994, Yousef is arrested for 240 years and has been given two life sentences for the crimes he commited on that day. While the North Tower opened soon after the attack, the South Tower only reopened 1 month after the attack and its Observation Deck 2 months after, the Vista International Hotel reopened 1 year after the attack and the North Tower's restaurant was reopened 6 months after, this is however even more of a relative afterthought.
The World Health Organization declares tuberculosis a global emergency and also creates a global plan to eradicate diphteria, measles, polio, rinderpest, guinea worm disease, rubella and even others seeking to do all of these by 2015-2020 and the Soviet Union, China, Japan, United States, EU and Canada have dedicated already around 25B$ just in 1993 for this, aka expanding vaccination, improving sanitation, hygiene etc. all of which are measures meant at heavily reducing cases of these diseases and even eradicating them even in the poorest parts of the world. It also believes that heart disease, cancer, alzheimer, parkinsons , whooping cough and HIV will be great challenges in the 21st century that we will have to tackle.
Virgin Galactic's CEO Richard Branson announces that 1993 is the first year where they launched the SpaceShipThree spacecraft more than 400 times, specifically around 449 times at a price of 1500$/seat, allowing for 1796 people to become commercial astronauts (or private space astronauts) just in 1993 alone, these people going above the Karman Line of 100 km (reaching a max altitude of 115 km) before descending down on Earth, either back to Spaceport America or other designated airports such as Tampa International Airport, Palm Beach International Airport and as far as Tenerife Airport and Newark International Airport, it being a pivotal company in the field of space tourism and Earth to Earth travel, although there are complaints that Richard Branson's company is holding a monopoly on this industry. The first launch of Skylon also occurs this year, it being successful as it managed to get to Mach 6 by 30 km using and it successfully activated its LH2/LOX cycle afterwards and it went to an orbit of 400x400 km and it completed an orbit before landing back at its runway in the United Kingdom. 
The spaceplane Skylon would have an additional 2 launches in 1993, the second launch being that of 15 British cubesats as part of a competition hosted by Reaction Engines Limited and the third launch would be of 12 British astronauts, with the ticket costing around 200000$/seat, meaning these would be among the top 1% of British citizens financially. These astronauts would make 10 orbits before landing back at the Code F civil runway (4 km long) and would experience microgravity for 15 hours, the Skylon would also offer far greater chances of scientific experiments, as shown by the astronauts, one of them had biometric data, another had brought a whole chemical lab test kit and others had brought other science equipment on board. It also was far more ecological due to it using LH2/LOX after 30 km (which does not pollute at all) and also atmospheric oxygen to get to 30 km and it offered actual competition to Virgin Galactic.
The Commercial and Governmental Crew Services contract is finished, it being meant for the upcoming International Space Station. First we shall begin with the government contracts. For NASA and the CSA, the crew spacecraft would be the reusable Space Shuttle (Enterprise and Celestia), for Roscosmos the crew vehicle would be the partially reusable Soyuz and the reusable Space Shuttle Buran, for ESA the crewed spacecraft would be the reusable Space Shuttle Hermes, for JAXA the crew spacecraft would be the partially reusable Kounotori and for CNSA the crew spacecraft would be the partially reusable Shenzhou. For the private side of the contract, Sierra Nevada would have the reusable Dream Chaser spacecraft, Reaction Engines would have the reusable Skylon spaceplane and Boeing would have the partially reusable Starliner spacecraft. The STS would launch the Space Shuttles, The Energia would launch the Buran, the Ariane 5 would launch the Hermes, the H-II would launch the Kounotori, the Soyuz would launch the Soyuz spacecraft, the Atlas V would launch Dream Chaser and Starliner and the Long March 5 would launch the Shenzhou.
Israel and Palestine, Israel led by the centre-left Yizhrak Rabin and Palestine being led by the PLO's Yaser Arafat with American mediation led by centrist Bill Clinton, sign the pivotal Oslo Accord, which in this timeline actually brings about an end to hostilities, establishing Jerusalem as an international U.N. controlled zone that belongs to neither Israel or Palestine. Israel also agrees to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and begins to end its illegal settlements in both the West Bank and Gaza, with compensation for the families affected by this change. Diplomatic relations are also re-established between Israel, Palestine and numerous other Arab countries because of this accord and Israel's capital moves to Tel Aviv and Palestine's capital moves to Ramallah. This would be the first step of Bill Clinton towards implementing his democratic peace-based policy that may also come with a heavy arsenal if necessary, in line with democratic peace theory.
*1994:
Mikhail Gorbachev and Bill Clinton sign the Kremlin accords, which stops the preprogrammed aiming of nuclear missiles toward each's countries targets. The Channel Tunnel, also known as the Chunnel, is officially opened after 7 years of construction made by 15000 workers, connecting the countries of the United Kingdom and France through the Dover Strait, allowing for 30-40 minutes of travel between the two countries, using the Eurostar high speed rail, Nelson Mandela becomes the first Black president of South Africa and soon after it rejoins the Commonwealth of Nations. 
 
By this point, the Acela high speed passenger rail system in the United States has been expanded from the Northeast Corridor (Washington D.C. to Boston), it now also including rail lines from San Francisco to Fresno, San Diego to Los Angeles, Dallas to Houston, Miami to Jacksonville and finally from Chicago to Milwaukee. The Acela has brought back passenger rail as a popular source of travel across the United States due to it significantly reducing the time it takes to go from one place to another at a low cost. 
 
Soviet cosmonaut Valery Polyakov begins what would be his 700 day stay on the Space Station Mir, it lasting from February 1994 to January 1996. The Hubble Space Telescope, in low-earth orbit, takes photos of Pluto and its moon Charon. The Shoemaker-Levy comet impacts the surface of Jupiter, luckily clear images of it are captured so that they can be seen by the world.
Bill Clinton and the United States in this timeline intervene in the Rwandan genocide, toppling the Hutu-backed regime that was conducting a genocide against the Tutsi population and through this military intervention it would put Paul Kagame, who led a Tutsi resistance front against the Hutus into power. In this timeline, the Rwandan genocide would cause the deaths of only 40000 people instead of the 800000 people that died in our own timeline. The Hutus flee into Zaire, led by Mobutu Sese Soko.
Jeff Bezos creates the company Amazon, it being meant as an online delivery company, but also an internet provider company, not only making the amazon.com website for deliveries of products, but also setting up an internet project using weather balloons to give internet to rural areas and other areas which lack broadband access. Soon, his company begins becoming more and more popular and he eyes up a satellite megaconstellation in low-earth orbit to provide internet across the entire world and open up the wonders of this new technology to the entire world. 
Members of the United Nations all agree to declare net neutrality a human right, among the 30 other human rights mentioned in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, net neutrality being the idea that internet service providers (ISPs) should treat all data equally and that all data should come in at the same speed, none being faster or slower than another, basically it promotes equality among the internet's data. This has widespread support among individual internet users, but also among scientists like Tim Berners-Lee and tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Apple etc. due to the fact that it allows their data to flow in just as easily as any other data, without any ISPs slowing them down. Although, this thing is hated by ISPs like Verizon and AT&T, among others, although the "cool and epic" internet has gotten a huge victory, while ISPs have lost. 
In this year, the European Union lands its first men on the Moon as part of an independent mission, using the Ariane 5 rocket, not relying on the United States of America to ferry astronauts from the Moon and back. It has become the 4th country, after the USA, the USSR and China to independently send men to the surface of the Moon. It has sent two landers each with 2 astronauts to the surface of our Moon (Luna). The private company, Sea Launch, tests the launch of a Zenit rocket from the Equator, sending out a sea-based launch pad from California to the middle of the Pacific. An Equator launch increases its payload to LEO by 60%, which means it could send 22 tons instead of 14 into said or it, although the cost of building, maintaining the launch pad and ferrying it out to the sea are still something to consider. Sea Launch, an American private spaceflight company, was contracted by the Soviet Union to conduct payload launches into LEO from he Equator, which shows the magnitude of their international cooperation when it comes to the field of space exploration. 
The Space Shuttle Hermes, part of the European Space Agency's crew and supply fleet to space stations, has been recently tested as part of a test flight to the Space Station Freedom in this year. The issue of offshoring of jobs to the Moon has become a problem as there are now around tens of thousands of people working for energy, mining and construction corporations mostly, mining vital resources like helium-3, thorium, radioactive elements like uranium and plutonium, metals used in EVs and batteries like lithium, aluminium, silicon etc. and also . Tech companies have also begun setting up shop on the Moon as they offer the internet information through things like Windows 90 and Power Macintosh and internet service providers (ISPs) like Verizon offer broadband. Hydrogen is also mined on the Moon and water ice through electrolysis is separated into hydrogen and oxygen, to be used for rocket propulsion for lunar landers. Mars doesn't take off as well, only having 100 people instead of around 20000, because of its farther distance and also because of its less hospitable conditions compared to the Moon, for example, the frequncy of dust storms. Carbon nanotubes using electron dust repulsion and better vacuum cleaners did solve the problem of lunar dust, but Martian sandstorms are still quite the problem and plus Mars is not as useful for building up a economy like that on the Moon. 
In other events of the year, President Bill Clinton signs the 10-year Federal Assault Weapons Ban (weapons like the AR-15). The Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China agree to stop targeting their nuclear weapons at each other, just like the USSR did with the USA, Brazil wins the 1994 football World Cup, held in the United States, beating the country of Italy, Andrew Wiles would prove Fermat's Last Theorem, solving the 357-yr old mathematical problem proposed by Pierre de Fermat in 1637 and in Afghan Civil War news, the town of Kandahar is seized by Mohammed Omar, who creates the Taliban, it soon encompassing the south-west of the country, including Kandahar, by the later part of this year, dividing the anti-communist resistance and finally the World Wide Web Consortium is founded by Tim Berners-Lee, after leaving CERN. 
Ross Perot officially establishes the Reform Party after much pressure from his supporters, which were plenty, as seen through his 1992 presidential election perfomance, where he won 25% of the vote and 1 electoral vote in the U.S. state of Maine. His Reform Party also attracts the support of professional wrestler Jesse Ventura and real estate businessman Donald Trump, among others, his party promoting a policy of protectionism, opposing NAFTA, offshoring jobs to foreign countries, while also advocating for using the internet for democratic voting, a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution to make it mandatory for the budget to be balanced, campaign finance reform, congressional term limits, election day holiday and direct elections through popular vote, among other ideas, which were centrist overall, taking from the right economically and from the left socially. 
The founding of this party meant that the Republican Revolution of 1994 does not happen and instead Congress is split 50/50 between the Democrats and Republicans, ending the significant Democrat majority of the late Reagan, H.W. Bush and early Clinton administrations, this is because the Reform Party, due to its popularity, would make sure that close races that in our time went to the Republicans would go to the Democrats, the spoiler effect was also worsened for the GOP because Newt Gingrich, their speaker candidate, was more to the right, meaning that the Reform Party would steal more from moderate conservatives than moderate liberals. Jesse Ventura would also win the governorship for the state of Minnesota in the 1994 midterms and Plato Truman would become a Maine senator. Meaning that the Reform Party had one governorship and one senate seat.
*1995:
Microsoft's CEO Bill Gates announces the creation of Windows 95 would be a pure 32-bit only, not a hybrid 16-bit and 32-bit like Windows 90 was. It was marketed as a tune-up to Windows 90, it coming with a new version of Internet Explorer, had better hardware and anti-virus support, had a series of networking enhancements and a whole set of other improvements. Windows 95 would quickly surpass Windows 90 in popularity and become the most popular Windows 9X edition so far. 
The World Trade Organization (WTO) is established to replace the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), it including all countries of the world, except dictatorial countries like Eritrea, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia and non-participant states like Pacific island nations and micro-nations like Monaco and San Marino. Yes, even China and the Soviet Union. It has modernized and solidified the ideals of globalization and free trade which seem to be dominant, despite opposition as we approach the new millenium.
A group of far-right terrorists, led by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who followed a platform of neo-fascism, white supremacism, Christian nationalism and belief in that after the Cold War ended in the late 80s to early 90s, a New World Order, with its core being the United States, which promoted multiculturalism, globalization, neoliberalism and other sinful capitalist ideologies was emerging and that they had to stop it. McVeigh would be radicalized after the Waco Siege and would become a fierce hater of what he called the NWO and the US government's and corporate attempts to take away the rights of American citizens. As such, they would send a truck loaded with explosives to the North Tower of the World Trade Center and detonate it as soon as it hit the building with high speed, specifically it hit a window with a 27 km/h speed on the first floor and then detonated it, causing damage and fires all the way up to the 7th floor. The building would stand strong due to its post-1981 steel-concrete configuration and also its emergency sprinkler system that was automatic, which helped contain the fires. The Fire Department of New York (FDNY) was also able to quickly put out any remaining fires, due to it being on floors 1-7 only and not at very high floors. The building luckily doesn't fall because of the small destroyed load and also because of the connecting steel, concrete reinforced trusses and perimeter and core columns, which were also made of steel and reinforced with 1m concrete. The perpetrators would be arrested the same year. Debris from WTC 1 would hit WTC 5 and 6, although these would be very tiny and do little damage. Around 100 people would die and around 550 would suffer injuries. The sphere at the WTC Plaza would be rebuilt very soon, in just 1-2 weeks, it also having the names of the 100 people who died from this attack as a memorial. Floors 1-7 of the WTC 1 would be rebuilt in around 1-2 weeks as well and the tower would open to business as usual pretty soon.
The Thomas Paine Space Telescope, named after former NASA administrator Thomas Paine is launched to the L2 LaGrange point using the Space Transportation System's Space Shuttle Discovery. This telescope is a significant improvement compared to the Hubble Space Telescope as it features a 6.5 meter diameter gold-beryllium mirror, a higher resolution camera which is in the mid-infrared/near-infrared spectrum and even red/orange visible light, having a redshift of z=20, meant to go back even further in the universe's past. The telescope will not replace but rather complement the Hubble in their joint endeavour of unraveling the secrets about our universe and its history. It has loads of scientific instruments, besides its primary mirror, which will allow us to learn a whole alot about the distant past of our universe and not just that but also supernovas, gamma-ray bursts, objects within our Solar System, including Kuiper Belt objects. It also features a spacecraft bus, keeping it in place and it also has a sun shield, protecting it from solar radiation and other disturbances. It uses hypergolic, RCS thrusters meant for attitude control and to prevent deorbiting from its L2 point. 
 
In the same year, the Lunar Crater Radio Telescope (LCRT) is also finished, it being positioned on a crater on the far-side of the Moon, meant to stop or reduce atmospheric and radio disturbances to its operations. These two telescopes came from a Post-Hubble/Arecibo contest, with these becoming the winners as part of NASA Institute of Advanced Concepts in 1990. It has a diameter of 1.5 km and the reflector would have a diameter of 400 m. The LCRT's antenna would be 1 km wide and as the name suggests it is built on a crater. It is significantly larger than the Arecibo telescope, being 700 m larger. Through its properties, the LCRT can scour for very long radio wavelengths unlike any other radio telescope that has ever been built, allowing it to study the universe's past, specifically its Dark Ages, offering a very needed opportunity to all of us, which began 370000 years after the Big Bang and lasted for the next 100 million years, so from 13.8 billion to 13.7 billion years as per the Standard Model of Cosmology, if it is correct and the LCRT confirms its theories. 
 
In other events, South Africa abolishes capital punishment, John Major, from the Conservative Party, is narrowly re-elected as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Jacques Chirac is elected the President of France, eBay is founded by Pierre Omidyar, who is today a French-born Iranian-American billionaire. A total solar eclipse is visible from Iran, India, Thailand and Southeast Asia and the Indian government renames the city of Bombay to Mumbai.
The Thomas Paine Space Telescope announces the discovery in 1995 of around 30 new exoplanets, even offering detailed atmospheric compositions due to its infrared spectroscopy. Keep in mind, by this point, only 5 exoplanets would've been discovered in total and this came only from radio telescopes down here on Earth. The Lunar Crater Radio Telescope would also announce the discovery of a batch of 24 new exoplanets, aka planets outside of our own Solar System. The Thomas Paine Space Telescope has also revealed its first ever images captured as part of its deep field image, which are indeed very stunning, as seen below. We're only including one very stunning image for obvious reasons.
 
Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union wins re-election for President, him being part of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), which followed centre-left "liberal socialism". He would defeat Yero Gaidar of the Democratic Choice, a center-right party, Grigory Yavlinsky of the centrist liberal Yabloko, independent Yuri Vlasov and a whole set of other candidates. Zhao Ziyang of the Chinese Communist Party, who also follows Gorbachev's brand of politics and China is now also a multi-party state also wins re-election for the President of China. 
*1996:
The 1996 United States presidential election has happened. The candidates would be incumbent president Bill Clinton and incumbent vice-president Al Gore, for the Democratic Party, no surprise there. The Republican Party would pick Steve Forbes for President and Jack Kemp for vice-president. Now, for the major third party, the Reform Party, Ross Perot would once again run for President, this time with Pat Choate, an American economist, as his running mate. While in this timeline, Ross Perot would not be barred from participating in the presidential debates by the Commission on Presidential Debates, his momentum was still small and also both candidates were political moderates, meaning a lot of his voters would go back to them. Important issues in this election would be the rise of Japan economically (which has a GDP of 18T$, close to that of the US'S 22T$ and set to surpass it soon), America's foreign policy (globalization vs isolation), space exploration and the future of the space program and social issues like gun control and gay marriage. Although, it would seem like both main party candidates were pretty similar on most issues, which did give some credence to Ross Perot's Reform Party. The results of the election would be as follows: Bill Clinton would win 48% of the vote, winning 359 electoral votes, Steve Forbes would win 40% of the vote, winning 179 electoral votes and Ross Perot would win 12% of the vote and zero electoral votes. So yea, Bill Clinton wins re-election, due to a strong economy, a growingly optimistic world, a world order based on international cooperation and liberalism, aka American values he helped bring and other popular things he did. Congress would also go back to being a slight majority for the Democratic Party. 
On December 8, 1996, Bill Clinton of the United States would sign the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free trade agreement between the countries of Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Thailand, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam meant at curtailing Japanese economic influence and increase that of the United States in order to make sure it is the top power in the world. While Japan is unlikely to become a military power, the fact that it can become and has become a large economic player does worry the United States geopolitically, as it obviously does not want to lose its top position, which could also come with the Dollar losing its global reserve status, as the Yen and to an extent the Euro are beginning to become more and more popular. A growing number of authors, political analysts, people in general and many others are thinking that while the 19th century was the British century, the 20th century was the American century and the 21st century would be the Japanese century. It was truly becoming a land of the rising sun as it begins surpassing the USA in many sectors of the economy. 
Cosmonaut Valery Polyakov concludes his 700 day inside of the Space Station Mir, returning back to Earth. His stay inside of Mir is the longest of any stay by any astronaut up to that point. The last crewed missions to the Space Station Freedom and the Space Station Mir are concluding, as these are now to be commerated as true gateways towards learning on how to explore, live and make use of the conditions offered by space and how it can help us down here on Earth. But now, it is time to move on, says NASA and Roscosmos, these space stations will be deorbited in 1997, around the same time the Americans finish their next-generation Space Shuttle, which is based on nuclear fusion power using deuterium-helium 3 fusion (and even lunar refueling if necessary) and allows for interplanetary travel: It taking only 1 month to get to Mars and another month to get back says NASA. Either the new Space Shuttle, known as the Pathfinder, will refuel on the surface of the Moon using helium-3 tanks and deuterium tanks (made from electrolysis and separation of water from or from refueling on the Space Station Gateway - in lunar orbit), if needed. While the Soviets are also building up their own rocket known as the Photon. Both of these are pretty similar, as they're both fusion-powered, vertical take off, single-stage-to-orbit rockets, however the Pathfinder is a spaceplane and the Photon is not and the Pathfinder can also act like a plane/glider, unlike the Photon. The crew and supply contracts to the ISS have been changed to include the Pathfinder Space Shuttle, while the Photon will launch a modified Soyuz spacecraft.
Chinese President Zhao Ziyang, from the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the president of Taiwan, Lee Teng-hui, from the Kuomintang (KMT) meet in Taipei and later Beijing after the reunification referendum concludes, with 54% of the people of Taiwan voting yes and 46% voting no. Taiwan officially becomes part of the People's Republic of China, but it follows a one country two systems approach. Meaning that while they're officially part of the PRC, Taiwan (also known as the ROC) is free to have its own economic and administrative policies, however things like defense are under the hand of China. This is also something that will happen to Hong Kong in 1997 and Macau in 1999 after the United Kingdom and Portugal respectively give them back to the People's Republic of China. As such, Taiwan is a special administrative region of China, free to keep its capitalist economic system, its own currency, legal/legislative system and the same human rights/freedoms for 50 years, until 2046. Although this ain't as problematic in this timeline because China is already democratic, even if still having some elements of authoritarianism.
In 1996, the Thomas Paine Space Telescope discovers an additional 250 exoplanets, while also offering detailed atmospheric compositions of these mentioned exoplanets. Alongside this, it also discovered remote very old galaxies which formed right after the Big Bang. For example, JADES-GS-z13-0. Thanks to the TPST and a whole host of laboratories/telescopes around the world, we have also managed to create the first picture of a black hole, that being the one at the center of our galaxy, Sagitarrius A. The Lunar Crater Radio Telescope (LCRT) would also make stunning discoveries itself, discovering radio signals right after the Big Bang, itself finding 200 exoplanets and it also studied the first stars and galaxies like TPST, expanding our knowledge even further.
The United Nations creates the Sustainable Development Goals, meant to outline how countries should develop themselves beginning the next century, 2000/2001, it having the goal of no extreme poverty by 2030, zero hunger, clean water/sanitation, affordable clean energy throughout the world, decent economic growth and work, reduced gender and economic inequalities, strong international institutions and responsible consumption. Also, the U.N. has expanded the right to freedom of religion to include atheists and agnostics and it has set in 1996 on October 17th of each year the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. 
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, after his internet weather balloon project known as Project Loon, which managed to offer 20 million Americans who live in rural/mountainous communities access to year-round internet for low prices through a network of 5000 balloons at all times in the air, begins Project Kuiper, a satellite megaconstellation project using a fleet of 3500 KuiperSats (the name of the Project Kuiper satellites) to provide internet broadband across the entire world in places where it cannot be accessed. Already, the first 170 satellites have been launched, 86 of them with an Atlas V rocket and 84 with an Ariane 5 rocket, one of the USA and one of the EU as part of its contract. The United Space Alliance which is made of Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Rockwell International has also changed its name to the United Launch Alliance and also its logo.
*1997:
Bill Clinton is inaugurated for his second term as President of the United States. Also in January of 1997, the Supreme Court of the United States officially recognizes same-sex (LGBTQ+) marriage as conforming with the Equal Rights Amendment (also known as the 27th Amendment) and the 14th amendment in a recent court ruling, with same-sex marriage being a key campaign promise of the Clinton administration. The LGBTQ+ rights movement is also stronger in this timeline as a sort of point of divergence after the space race and the Cold War, meaning that the EU had it by 1991, then Canada by 1993. Movements supporting LGBTQ+ rights like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Queer Nation and GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation), among other movements have celebrated this moment in American history. One of the first things Bill Clinton would also do in his second term would be the removal of the Hyde Amendment through a narrow congressional vote, allowing for once again federal Department of Healthcare & Human Services funds to be used for abortions. 
Tony Blair, the leader of the Labour Party of the United Kingdom becomes prime minister after a landslide election victory against incumbent prime minister John Major of the Conservative Party. He also holds the beliefs of the Third Way, just like Bill Clinton, expanding the influence of Anthony Giddens, the creator of this middle ground between social democracy and neoliberalism, following both Keynes and Friedman. Hong Kong is returned to China on the model of one country two systems, where Hong Kong while officially a specially administrative region of China, retains the same economic, administrative, legal and legislative system that it had before, this for around 50 years until the year 2047, where it would change to the system of the mainland. This system has also been put into place with the reunification of Taiwan and China and will later be put once again with Macau. 
Space Station Freedom and Space Station Mir are officially deorbited, re-entering over the atmosphere in a position that allows the remaining debris to land at or near Point Nemo in the Pacific Ocean, the furthest place from any land in order to make sure that people or towns don't get hit by space station debris. This was done jointly by both the United States and the Soviet Union (NASA and Roscosmos) on the same day, . Both countries have recognized the role each station had in expanding humanity's scientific understanding of the cosmos and how humans would live in outer space and it also offered us information on tethered and untethered spacewalks, space-biology, space-medicine and a whole other host of fields. They will truly be missed, but something even grander is about to come.
The United States officially launches the first module of the International Space Station, that being the Propulsion Module into a low earth orbit of 1000 km periapsis and apoapsis using the Space Shuttle Pathfinder, it being a nuclear fusion powered spacecraft. It would be launched on a Lockheed C-5 Galaxy from an altitude of 15 km, saving quite some delta V while also reducing atmospheric drag and air resistance for the spacecraft. After delivering the module, the Pathfinder would manage to deorbit and successfully land at the Kennedy Space Center's Shuttle Runway, which was extended to have a third (a second one was added due to the influx of private Space Shuttles) runway for the Pathfinder, although the spaceplane, like the previous shuttles can land at any airport if needed. 
In the same year, the Photon rocket of the Soviet Union would launch the microgravity laboratory of the International Space Station, the Photon rocket being launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome and it is also a nuclear fusion powered spacecraft. In this year, two modules would've been sent the propulsion module and the microgravity laboratory module. The Photon rocket will be a cargo and crew supplier for the ISS, sending a modified Soyuz crew spacecraft and a modified Progress cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station. It like the Pathfinder is also capable of interplanetary voyages in short times.
Also during this year, the Space Shuttle Discovery, with its crew of 7, with 4 conducting EVAs to repair/improve the Hubble Space Telescope. During this mission, the Hubble's scientific instruments were upgraded, it received better thermal blankets and had a whole host of other maintenances meant for its 15 yr life span, until the early 2000s, where it will most likely be decommissioned. Although, this mission would see the addition of an inflatable heat shield for Hubble, with it being put in a museum according to NASA once due to its very significant contributions to the field of spectroscopy and the mapping of our universe. 
President Bill Clinton of the United States signs into law a bill that increases the earned income tax credit (EITC) and the child tax credit (CTC), with the EITC now having a maximum of 10000$/person and the CTC being at around 1500$/child, allowing for further poverty reductions, with poverty in the USA falling from 20% to 10% in just 10 years because of the passage of this bill. Clinton also begins taxing the richer classes more while offering tax cuts for the poor, like the usual Democratic Party policy, this means that inequality remains at its low levels of the 1970s and 1980s and doesn't begin rapidly rising. 
The merger of the companies Boeing and McDonnell Douglas is complete. Also in this year, Al-Qaeda conducts a truck bombing in Bosnia-Herzegovina, part of Yugoslavia, this is because of Bosnian islamic extremists, which just shows the precarious state of Yugoslavia as it is multi-ethnic and multi-religious. Also in this year, the ThrustSSC (SuperSonic Car), a British car, it being the world land speed record at around 1228 km/h, being the first land vehicle to ever go faster than the speed sound and as such it passed the sound barrier, also known as Mach 1. Also in this year, the 64-bit era and 128-bit era of video games would officially begin, it being known as the sixth generation of video game consoles. 
 
*1998:
In this year, new modules to the International Space Station (ISS) are added, this includes the universal docking of the station and the center part of the artificial gravity habitation ring and a second Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (meant to detect antimatter in the Earth's magnetic field/Van Allen Belt and even dark matter), these being added by the United States of America with its Pathfinder Space Shuttle. The Soviet Union sends the radiator modules to the ISS using its Photon rocket. The European Union sends its own microgravity laboratory, so does Japan. 
The Cassini-Huygens spacecraft as part of the European Space Agency (ESA)'s mission arrives at the Saturnian system, with the Huygens being deployed to land on the surface of the Titan, while the Cassini has inserted itself into an orbit around the planet Saturn. Immediately within the first year it has had quite the info generated, with Huygens confirming the presence of 400 trillion barrels of oil reserves on Titan (x300 more than on Earth), alongside very high concrentrations of natural gas and liquid hydrocarbons. It also has very high concentrations of methane on it. The Huygens and Cassini spacecraft have also confirmed that Titan has a lot of liquid water on it, but filled with methane and that it has some amounts of water ice and ammonia on its surface. It also has a primarily nitrogen-based atmosphere plus some methane, but little to no oxygen and its temperatures are -180 degrees celsius, just like Saturn. Regardless, it has positioned itself as a pretty good candidate for a beyond asteroid belt colony for humans. The Cassini-Huygens was launched as part of the International Space Year (ISY) in 1992.
In this year of 1998, around 240 KuiperSats would be launched into low-earth orbit, using Atlas V rockets, meaning that the United Launch Alliance (ULA) provided 60 launches for Amazon's Project Kuiper in 1998 alone, with the Atlas V being an evolved expendable launch vehicle. Around 180 countries are meant to have access to internet using the satellite services offered by the KuiperSats. But what's even more interesting is that Jeff Bezos has founded his own spaceflight company, Blue Origin, it being a space tourism company initially with a New Shepard Rocket (suborbital, liquid-fuelled rocket) that will then be replaced by the New Glenn, a fully reusable two-stage rocket that will be powered by nuclear fusion (2H-3He) propellant. The New Shepard will in the same year have its first 5 test flights before beginning to fly its first space tourists next year. New Shepard lands its first stage booster and its crew capsule reenters the atmosphere and safely touches down near the launch pad (LS1 - near Van Horn, Texas) using its parachute. It also features an in-flight abort system, not common among other rockets.
 
The Space Shuttle Pathfinder immediately becomes built on mass by private companies operating on the surface of the Moon, specifically for mining, energy and construction, aka companies like Exxon Mobil, Chevron, General Electric, Walsh Group and other such companies. Not just American companies, but also European companies and other companies have contracted the use of Shuttle Pathfinders for their missions. Economic activity also expands on Mars and companies are already looking to expanding to the asteroid belt due to the presence of heavy valuable metals, but also water ice from the Jovian/Saturnian moons and potentially carbon from Venus. The Pathfinder will become key to this as for example it takes just 2 months to go from Mars and back, 1 month to go from Venus and back and 4-5 months to go from Saturn and back. Compared to the Photon, it can carry more payload inside of it, meaning it could bring back more resources home with less rockets needed and it is fully reusable, unlike the Photon which mostly ditches its first booster nuclear fusion stage (except for some missions) and its second stage is only partially reusable. NASA has recently sent a mission to asteroid Psyche, launching it on the Space Shuttle Discovery and the STS rocket.
A space station was made using the Space Shuttle Pathfinder by the United States, it being in an orbit around the planet Mars, although astronauts from countries like the Soviet Union, EU and Japan, and other space allies can go to the station itself. This space station represents the first of such spaceport to be in orbit around another planet of the solar system (Mars). The name of the station is known as Space Station Ares. Also, NASA's Galileo probe sent to the Jovian system discovers for the first time a liquid ocean underneath a thick crust of ice on its moon of Europa, increasing the possibility of life within our very own solar system. It has the same function as the Lunar Gateway in that it is sort of just a pitstop or a refueling point to go on further.
 
The Good Friday Agreement is signed between the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland in this year, between Prime Ministers Tony Blair (UK) and the Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, ending the period of violence known as the Troubles, which saw ethno-nationalist clashes between unionist and nationalist forces, the former being pro-Britain and the latter being pro-Ireland. This would enter into force in December 1999. While Bill Clinton, who was instrumental in making sure Britain and Ireland would finally get along, did not appear, he did send Senator George J. Mitchell to appear on his behalf. This agreement would also bring devolution of powers to Northern Ireland, with Tony Blair doing this at the same time as he gave devolved powers to Scotland, Wales and London, meaning that these places had local powers over some things and also had their own democratically elected parliaments. The Kosov War also does not happen in this timeline as Yugoslavia stabilizes as its economy begins to recover and begins to be stable politically without Tito.
The World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations (UN) officially announces the eradication of polio and measles, the 2nd and 3rd diseases to be radicated after smallpox in 1979-1980. The controversial vaccine study by Andrew Wakefield is also not published, it being considered the greatest medical hoax due to a series of butterfly effects by this timeline. The world in this timeline also is able to eradicate/almost eradicate more diseases than our own real life world due to the much more advanced technology, among other things. 
*1999:
Abdullah II succeeds his late father King Hussein of Hashemite Arabia, becoming the next king of the country. He ascended onto the throne of Hashemite Arabia and is still today the king of the country as part of the Hashemite family. His parents were his father King Hussein as mentioned previously and his mother was Princess Muna Al-Hussein, who is still alive as of today, 2023. His mother was British at birth, but she changed her name after marrying Hussein.
The Monica Lewinsky scandal, which began emerging a year earlier, almost causes the removal of President Bill Clinton of the United States, although luckily he is acquitted by the United States Senate, after the House narrowly voted to impeach him for this scandal after it went to the Republicans (in a slight majority) in the 1998 midterm elections. The Columbine High School massacre occurs, where two Colorado teenagers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold open fire on their teachers and classmates, killing 12 students and 1 teacher and then themselves, a total of 15 deaths and also 21 injuries. Luckily, the attempted bombing would fail, reducing the magnitude of the disaster, but this does force Congress to pass a series of gun control legislation in a narrow vote, with moderate republicans tipping over the vote. For the first time, a gun license system would be put into place nationwide: Before you buy a firearm you have to attend a firearm safety course, then you have to sign an application at your local police department, give your fingerprints and not only is the FBI database checked out, but also that of the Department of Health, local health, state police and Department of Defense, making it much more likely for gun owners to not be mentaly insane people . The boyfriend loophole is also closed and there are now greater levels of mental health subsidies, among other things this new gun control law passed. After this plus the assault weapons ban (until 2004) will cause significant reductions in gun crime and suicide.
Nuclear fusion would become an increasingly popular source of energy production and consumption across the world as around 800 nuclear fusion power plants have been built across the Earth and around 10 of them on the Moon and 2 of them on Mars, generating around 40% of the Earth's energy (nuclear fission makes up 40%, renewables make up 20%) and 100% of the Moon and Mars's energy. Helium-3 has also become very cheap, with prices falling from 1500$/g in 1980 down to just 50$/g, allowing a lot of helium-3 to be shipped back to Earth from the Moon to fuel the nuclear fusion economy. Deuterium, the second component, costs just 10$/g, due to it being found in water at 150 ppm overall. 
United Airlines officially merges with Continental Airlines, 13 years before our own timeline. EgyptAir Flight 990 crashes, killing all 217 passengers on board inside a Boeing 767. The sovereignty of Macau is transferred from the Portuguese Republic to the People's Republic of China, with Macau becoming the next special administrative region (SAR) of China, alongside Taiwan (until 2046), Hong Kong (until 2047), it remaining as such until 2049. It has quite some autonomy economically and administratively, but it is still part of China, even if quite autonomous and the last Israeli settlement in the West Bank is given to Palestine, finishing the Oslo Accord.
===The 2000s===
*2000:
The 2000 United States Presidential election happens on the 7th of November, 2000. Since Bill Clinton cannot run for a third term, his vice-president, Al Gore easily becomes the new Democratic nominee for President and he chooses John Kerry as his president. The Republicans pick Elizabeth Dole, who would be the first female presidential candidate and is also the husband of former pres. candidate Bob Dole, she also being a moderate politically. She picks John McCain, the second place candidate, for vice-president and the Reform Party picks businessman Donald Trump, who by this point has become a well-known celebrity due to his cameos in shows like Home Alone 2 and even going on WWE and other TV shows. He also is well-known for his business company, The Trump Organization, which also has sites in the EU, Japan, the USSR, China and India. Trump would pick Oprah Winfrey, the famous talk show host of the Oprah Winfrey Show for vice-president. Al Gore (D) would narrowly win the election with 273 electoral votes, winning 45.7% of the popular vote, while Elizabeth Dole (R) would win 265 electoral votes and 44.9% of the popular vote and Donald Trump of the Reform Party would win 8% of the popular vote and 0 electoral votes and Ralph Nader of the Green Party would also win 0 electoral votes and 1.4% of the popular vote. Republicans would complain that the Reform Party acted as a spoiler for what would've been the first female president and heck this was quite the hot button issue at the time. But alas, Al Gore would be sworn in next year as the next president of the USA and Lady Dole has said that she is willing to run once more next time in 2004. 
 
The merger between America Online (AOL) and Time Warner that cost 180B$ does not happen in this timeline, which has huge ramifications on the internet going forward, for better overall. In simple terms, the internet remains a rainbowy hub of community bubbles of "lolling, sharing and blogging of all forms" as imagined by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web and does not turn into the digital town square we know of today. While there is a corporate presence on the internet through the web portal and online service provider of America Online, but also through the operating systems of Microsoft and Apple and the internet service providers like Comcast, AT&T, Vodafone and Verizon (although net neutrality is respected across the world) and also the news corporation sites of MSN, NBC, CNN, ABC and the government PBS, there are a lot of open-source blogs, forums and encyclopedias (like Wikipedia). E-mails are also a more popular means of communication than social media, even in the 2020s and social media is almost irrelevant in this timeline, with only MySpace being somewhat popular.
 
The United Nations holds the Millenium Summit, a meeting among all of the world's leaders from 6 to 8 September 2000. The goal of this summit was to discuss the role of the United Nations in the coming years of the 21st century. It was the largest gathering of world leaders in the history of the United Nations and of humanity. This summit reaffirmed the 21st century commitments of the Sustainable Development Goals (also known as the Millenium Development Goals) of eradicating poverty, reducing child mortality, to combat HIV/AIDS, Malaria and other diseases, to develop a global development partnership, to have 100% clean energy, achieving universal primary education and empowering women and bringing on gender equality across the entire planet. After this summit, the Millenium Declaration would also be signed, which stresses the importance of international human rights and humanitarian laws under the United Nations Charter + treaties on sustainable development and also seeks observance by all of nations of the Olympic truce, also promoting the values of: Freedom, Equality, Solidarity, Tolerance, Respect for nature and Shared responsibility. 
 
After the addition in 1997-1998 of the Propulsion Module, Microgravity laboratories and the Radiator modules + the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer 2, in 1999 a docking port was added and its fusion power reactor was added. In 2000 meanwhile, there would be added the integrated solar trusses and a quarter of the rotating ring. The first expedition to the International Space Station (ISS), carrying 10 astronauts would occur. 5 would be launched aboard Space Shuttle Pathfinder, 2 would be launched aboard the Photon rocket on the new Soyuz spacecraft, 1 would be launched aboard Space Shuttle Hermes, 1 aboard the Shenzhou spacecraft and another aboard the DreamChaser, a private spaceflight participant from India. So the station for this year has 5 Americans, 2 Soviets, 1 European, 1 Chinese and 1 Indian. The astronauts of this first mission would stay for around 500 days before going back to Earth, surprisingly not affected by microgravity, space motion sickness and a whole host of other previous problems while inside the spinning artificial gravity ring. A lot of science would indeed come from this mission.
The European Union has the first launch of its Ariane 6 rocket, which is a nuclear fusion powered rocket, it also having 4 small P-120 boosters that are also fusion-powered. It is made up of two stages + 4 boosters. The first stage is reusable, while the other parts are expendable. For its first flight, it sent a series of Galileo satellites plus university/individual/small corporation cubesats into low-earth orbit and then geosynchronous orbit (for the Galileo satellites). Japan also unveils its H-4 rocket, which is also a fusion powered rocket, but it is expendable and not partially reusable like the Ariane 6. 
Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple introduces the macOS X, while Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft introduces Windows Me (Millenium Edition) for homes and Windows 2000 for businesses. Virgin Galactic purchases Stratolaunch, Paul Allen's company in order to acquire his very massive mothership plane (which has been used in Skylon launches) that can allow for 40 km altitude flight and greater means of travel for its SpaceShipThree. Air France Flight 4590, a Concorde also doesn't crash soon after it takes off meaning the Concorde is still in operation to this day and isn't completely gone by 2002-2003.
In other news, Grigory Yavlinsky would become president of the Soviet Union, him being member of the growingly popular centrist Yabloko party, beating out the CPSU candidate, who was his vice-president, Alexander Yakovlev and also the Democratic Choice centre-right candidate, who was businessman Uzan Dzhabrailov. The parliament would still be dominated by a CPSU-led coalition, which also included agrarian and feminist parties.
*2001:
The 3rd millenium has officially begun on January 1st, 2001. Also on this exact day, the Breakthrough Starshot mission, carrying 1000 nano-size probes equipped with gram-sized solar sails, going at 10% the speed of light using the energy of a 1 GW laser array (this after the Space Shuttle Pathfinder launches it to low-earth orbit) and it has the goal of going to the Proxima Centauri system, this also coming after exoplanets in that system were discovered, these being Proxima Centauri B, C and D. These probes are to be the first interstellar probes and the first probes in human history to go outside of our own solar system, which is considered to extend up to 1 light year, or the end of the Oort Cloud. The Proxima Centauri System is the closest star system to our own, being just 4 light years away from Earth. After arriving at the system in 2041, the probes will communicate a message to the Lunar Crater Radio Telescope (LCRT), that will take 4 years to arrive in order to confirm the success of the mission. The probes will study Proxima Centauri and its 3 planets, with 250 solar-sail probes orbiting each body and conducting scientific studies of them.
Al Gore is officially sworn in as the new President of the United States, being Bill Clinton's former vice-president and a member of the Democratic Party, after narrowly beating Elizabeth Dole, the Republican Party presidential nominee, with John Kerry also being sworn in as the next vice-president and John McCain who was Dole's VP nominee would be defeated.
 
Hurricane Erin, a category 5 hurricane travelling at 200 km/h hits on September 10th the East Coast of the United States, around the states of Virginia, Maryland and New Jersey, the next day on September 11th, it travels up towards New York, Massachusetts, Connectitut, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, causing quite the storm and powerful flooding in New York City. Around 1000 people die and another 2200 are injured because of this, however the response of Al Gore and government is praised as he provided the necessary aid and relief to the affected communities. By the end of the month, the hurricane has gone past Maine and is into New Brunswick, before then going up to the Labrador Peninsula and then dying out in the very cold Greenland in November/December. 
30 Middle Eastern passengers enter American Airlines Flight 11 (Boeing 767), United Airlines Flight 175 (Boeing 767), American Airlines Flight 77 (Boeing 757), United Airlines Flight 93 (Boeing 757), Red Wings Flight 387 (Ilyushin Il-96) and Kosmos Airlines Flight 61 (Tupolev Tu-204) as part of their plan for the September 11th attacks, targeting WTC 1 and 2 buildings, while they were meant to take off all at 7:59-8:09 AM, in order to make the plot rapid and seemingly out of nowhere, the only flight that took off in time was AA11 at 7:59 AM, with the Soviet flights each taking off at 8:14 AM and 8:16 AM. The other American flight to take off was Flight 77 at 8:34 AM, while Hurricane Erin and the air space closure at 9:00 AM in the northeast kept UA175 and UA93 grounded. The September 11th attacks would be prevented as while AA11 was hijacked at 8:22 AM (with the hijacking taking 9 minutes, due to some passenger resistance from CEO and former IDF officer Daniel Lewin, a flight attendant and the air marshall) as it turned towards New York City while over Rome (NY), F-15s would be scrambled and set to arrive at 8:43 AM, while AA11 would've been 14 minutes away from its target, a passenger resistance at 8:39 AM would see the hijackers lower the plane to try to kill them all, but the passengers storm the cockpit and they desperately do a pull up maneuver while at 2000 meters and turn away from NYC and towards the west, to LA. Luckily, AA11 is not shot down due to a quick passenger comm to air traffic control. The F-15s would guide AA11 to an airport landing spot at Pittsburgh, reaching it by 9:07 AM. Meanwhile, AA77 took off at 8:34 AM and was hijacked by 8:56 AM over West Virginia. By 9:04 AM, it was communicated to NORAD that AA77 was hijacked and it was approaching the Pentagon. Sadly, the 58 passengers (including the 5 hijackers) would die after the F-16s sent shot it down with a missile or two while it was 8 minutes away from the Pentagon at 9:15 AM. UA93 and UA175 were grounded and later the Middle Eastern "hijackers" would be arrested and trialed after this plot was discovered in the later parts of the day. This was all information gathered up by this timeline's version of the 9/11 Commission. According to the data, the targets of the 4 flights were the Twin Towers, the Capitol and the Pentagon. The air space would be opened once again by 12:00 AM, after it was made sure there weren't any other hijacked planes that were being used as essentially missiles.
Meanwhile in the Soviet Union, RW387 would take off at 8:14 AM and KA61 would take off at 8:17 AM. The first plane would be hijacked 8:44 AM while the latter would be hijacked at 8:49 AM (the first set to arrive to its target at 9:06 AM and the latter at 9:08 AM) Both of them would be sent towards their targets in Moscow, although luckily desperate flight attendants on both planes would communicate with airline emergency lines before being killed soon after, which would result in MiG-31s taking off at 8:54 AM and intercepting KA61, while MiG-25s would intercept RW387. These being Soviet aircraft capable of going past Mach 2.5, which meant that they could intercept them in the quickest time, which is exactly what happened as sadly 337 passengers (including 10 hijackers) would die in total on both planes due to the shooting down of the planes as they were just less than 10 minutes away from their targets. Although, this was considered a victory against Al-Qaeda, it was clear that they needed to find the perpetrators. 
However though, the Chechen Ichkheria would be created in cooperation with Al-Qaeda and the Chechen independentists, immediately taking over Grozny and the region that was Chechnya, pushing out the small Soviet troop garrison present in the area. They would also wage a series of apartment bombings in the city of Moscow, killing around 220 people and injuring 500 others, although their scale wouldn't be as big as in our own timeline. Two Al-Qaeda truckers in the United States would attempt to bomb the Deutsche Bank building near the WTC Complex, but the bombs failed to detonate and they would be arrested.
While this was a pretty complex point in world history, it wasn't as traumatic and is overall a footnote, a pretty interesting one but still a footnote nonetheless. The response to it would also not be as harsh, with the only thing happening being the restriction of pocket knives, maces and guns inside planes, the reinforcement of cockpit doors, the heavy expansion of the air marshall program and the changing of the view on hijackers, with resistance becoming more encouraged in the minds of the passengers. The surveillance state, while not as intrusive as with the PATRIOT Act, it not getting passed, does still exist at least to a degree. The Twin Towers are still standing, the Pentagon is not hit, neither the House of Soviets and the Tower Vostok and the Capitol is not hit. Heck, only around 615 people died from the disasters and not 2996 people and most of those deaths came from saving even more lives as AA77, RW387 and KA61 were shot down by American and Soviet interceptors, this being either forgotten (like the 1993 WTC bombing) or just seen as a heroic moment, so yea not as world-changing as the real life 9/11. What is certain however is that the USA and the USSR are looking for the perpetrators, but this does not involve a full on invasion.
The European Union launches a crewed mission to Saturn's moon of Titan, having brought using a few Ariane 6 launches the main rotating habitation outpost, alongside greenhouses for plants and food and also water tankers and other essential equipment and supplies. Around 6 astronauts will live on this base initially, seeking to grow Titan into another outpost for Earthlings, As such, the EU becomes the first nation to land humans on this planet's surface. Electrolysis can also be used to create water and rocket propellant (especially deuterium). Its thick atmosphere also allows for plants to better grow than say on Mars, even if is not perfect. It will be our glipse into the outer Solar System. It took just 4 months for the astronauts to get there, which does mean improvements will have to be made to travelling there in the future. According to ESA, this mission is merely a test for permanent presence there, sort of like the temporary colonies in the Americas.
The Psyche mission is launched by the United States of America and it is the first serious asteroid mining mission to ever be undertaken, it being launched by the Space Shuttle Pathfinder. As the mission name suggests, the mission will go to asteroid 16 Psyche in the asteroid belt, NASA estimating that its value is at around 10 quadrillion, as it has a lot of highly valuable commodities, like platinum, gold, nickel and iron. The Psyche probe will extract 1% of it, costing 1 trillion and will sell those samples in order to generate revenue for the government, seeking to not only do a profound scientific test, learning more about this asteroid and its history but also as an economic test as it hails the beginnings of a new economic age, that of asteroid mining. It arrives in 1 month there and returns in 1 month as well, using its own nuclear engine. The samples are sold and earn NASA quite the revenue, which go back into the American economy.
The 2001 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP7) would take place from October 29th to November 10th in Marrakech, Morocco and it would see leaders of 180 countries meet to discuss how they should tackle other problems in regards to fossil fuel emissions: As while nuclear fusion and other technologies saw significant reductions in CO2 emissions from 20 billion tons per year in 1990 down to just 4 billion tons year in 2000, further emission reduction could not be done due to the fact that there were no popular alternatives to concrete/steel construction emissions, agriculture emissions, airline/shipping emissions, landfill burning emissions and even some more subtle ways of emissions like sound and light pollution. With scientists outlining that while warming will remain relatively low, if emissions continue then in around 200 years warming may become uncontrollable (although obviously people don't think this long term so it didn't hit many headlines). The agreement would for the first time ever put into place some measures meant to address this, with countries ratifying measures such as creating dark sky reserves, implementing greater levels of afforestation (to not only offset CO2 emissions and reduce them, but also to reduce sound pollution and heat waves), reducing deforestation especially of tropical forests in Indonesia and Brazil, tripling the amount of green hydrogen used, expanding synthetic meat laboratories on Earth, create concrete using hemp in order to reduce emissions, electrify construction furnaces, encourage the development of sustainable fuels and other carbon reducing methods for ships/planes and begin transitioning to less emission intensive feeding methods for livestock. This agreement basically just confirmed what countries were already beginning to do and just "vaguely" made it look international.
 
However there were problems in the fossil fuel transition from the get go, especially with petrostates. Although surprisingly these would be solved at least somewhat. Saudi Arabia would make Jeddah (and to a degree Riyadh) a sort of Las Vegas of the Middle East, another gambling capital of the world, besides just Las Vegas and Macau and it would open up the cities of Mecca and Medina to tourists that were not muslim, which was controversial among very Islamic communities, but was necessary. It would also use its vast deserts to be a key generator of solar power, while also having a few fusion power plants of its own. Saudi Arabia would also begin liberalizing itself politically, allowing women to drive, ending oppressive Sharia law and becoming more progressive, even decriminalizing homosexuality in 2000, in order to open itself up to foreign investment, especially from the West. Meanwhile countries like the UAE and Qatar would have an easier time as they already begun to transition away from petrostate status and would become just very touristy places. Iran would make riches of off a strong foreign investment market but also of a strong electric automobile industry, it also having a strong metals mining industry of iron and chromium in order to replace oil and gas.
 
The International Space Station (ISS) has received the Integrated Truss Structure (ITS) of solar panels, specifically a set of 12 large solar arrays which have even greater efficiency than those on Space Station Mir and Space Station Freedom. This was sent by the Space Shuttle Pathfinder. The Soviets, Japanese and the Europeans would finally send another pairs of laboratories, some artificial gravity based others microgravity based, finishing the ISS after just 4 years and with a cost of 500B$ for this megaproject in space. It is set to accomodate 100 people including 25 visitors at maximum and will allow for these astronauts inside to actually live a more normal life, not so cramped, even having their own small beds/spaces and bathrooms to do their stuff, representing quite a step forward from the Gemini capsules, then the SSF modules and now the ISS modules. A whole host of private companies and governments will operate and use this space station for various purposes as it orbits 1000 km above the Earth's surface and will also have a whole host of science. Many companies have been contracted to send cargo and crew to the station, such as Sierra Nevada, Boeing, Reaction Engines, Stratolaunch (bought out by Virgin Galactic) and recently Blue Origin. The governments part of the ISS project are the United States, Soviet Union, Japan, European Union, People's Republic of China, Vietnam, Canada and India. There are around 125 astronauts inside of the station at all times from all of these countries, plus a few visitors from other countries.
 
In 2001, right in the first year of Al Gore's presidency, the massive dot.com bubble would burst all across the world. The Dow Jones would fall by 50% pretty quickly, from 26000 down to 13000, also seeing unemployment rise from 3% to 10% (job losses most often seen in the tech sector) and the US GDP contracting by 3%. This deep recession would also spread to other countries, with the EU seeing a GDP contraction by 2% and . In this timeline, big tech companies would not only be in the USA (Microsoft, Apple, Google, AOL, Playstation etc.) and Japan (Sony, LG, Nintendo but also in the European Union (Nokia, SAP, Logitech, ASML etc.), Soviet Union (VK, Yandex, Nortal, Skype etc.) and to an extent China, which has made this crisis worse globally. The Nikkei Index fell from 42000 down to 30000 and the NASDAQ Index fell from 5000 down to 3000. While the USA, USSR and EU get scratched, their economies would heal and China would relatively be unaffected, only growing by less than 10% for this year, Japan would begin what would be known as its Lost Decade as its GDP would stagnate at around 16T$ even to this day, with its tech bubble being the most noticeable, as its GDP declined from 18T$ to 15T$, a 5% decline and it would remain at 15-16T$, only rarely going above 18T$. 
This crisis would lead to what was known as the tech bailouts, which essentially cemented tech companies as too big to fail companies, with the United States government under Al Gore announcing almost a trillion dollars in bailouts to tech companies like Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and others that were on the brink of failing or at least falling from grace. This would however draw huge disapprovement from left-wing voices within the United States, with vocal critics including Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, however these bailouts would still go through not just in the USA but in other affected areas like the EU, USSR and Japan, them being in the trillions of dollars, basically, governments chose to help those who caused it rather than the innocent people who are affected. While yes, the people did receive some stimulus economically, it was still mostly tech companies and the "1%", around 80% to be exact. 
Windows XP is officially released by Microsoft to retail in October of 2001 and unlike Windows Me, Windows XP would become a very popular version of Windows as it was defined as technologically revolutionary, with this timeline's Windows XP being just as advanced Windows 7 in 2009, while still keeping the classic XP aesthetic that we in our own timeline knew and love, as critics said that it had increased perfomance and stability compared to Windows Me and it also was more advanced, having the option of 128-bits, it allowing greater use of search engines, e-mails, forums and everything that made the internet the wild west hub of communities where people with similar interests could gather. Besides the tech bailout, the release of XP did help in bringing back Microsoft to its pre-dot.com bubble position. 
Another event of spaceflight in 2001 that was important was the launching of New Horizons from the Moon (this time) by NASA, with its goal being to make a close flyby of Pluto and its moon Charon, and also some other Kuiper Belt system objects in order to expand our understanding of the outer solar system. Its journey is set to take just 4 months, arriving there in December of 2001 while having been launched in August and it has offered far greater and clearer pictures of not just the dwarf planet Pluto (it was made one 10 years earlier than in our own timeline as better technology allowed Eris and others to be discovered earlier). The picture below id far clearer than the ones taken by the Hubble and recently the Thomas Paine telescopes. After its mission being complete by January 2002, it will drift into interstellar space (outside of the heliopause at 115 AU) at a speed of 0.16% of light (1.7M km/h). This is only behind the 1000 solar sail probes going at 108M km/h at 10% the speed of light, these having already crossed the heliopause a week into their mission and are now as of the end of 2001, they're at 6200 AU away from the Sun and rapidly leaving, as they're set to arrive at Proxima Centauri in 2040 and are the first interstellar spacecraft of humanity.
*2002:
The Soviet Union begins an invasion of Chechnya, after many failed negotiations with the Chechen Republic Ichkeria. Within a day or two the entirety of Chechnya is occupied by Soviet troops and Ickheria/Mujahideen members and leaders such as Dudayev, Yandarbiyev, Umarov, Ibn-al Khattab and many others were rounded up, charged for mass murder/terrorism and executed. This was because of the 2001 Moscow apartment bombings which killed hundreds and in addition to this, they also up to a thousand Soviet soldiers in Chechnya during their violent uprising and also bombed other apartments in Chechnya and even in Dagestan, killing hundreds in addition to the deaths caused by 9/11. Justice has been served on their side.
The United States after failing to negotiate with the Taliban on extraditing what it believes to be key . Decides to order a cruise missile strike on a road that leads from the Panshir mountains to Pakistan, surprisingly managing to take down Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri, key figures of 9/11. Then, a joint Soviet-American search team in the form of military drones manage to find and kill Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as part of Operation Anaconda, with him being found in around the Kandahar region of Afghanistan. Also the "communist" (at this point its just anyone anti-Taliban) side of the Afghan Civil War manages to retake Jalabad during this whole moment. Al Gore's approval ratings would go back up from his abysmally low 39% (due to the dot.com bubble) to a better 43% because of these victories in killing the guys who caused 9/11, although the approval jump would not be as high as the issue ain't as politicized and it is only known for something less relevant than the irl version of it and the dot.com recession still looms on as unemployment is high. Al-Qaeda is essentially in disarray as literally all three main figures were killed (aka no proper leadership exists now, anarchy) and other members are being hunted down to be trialed as they too had links to this grand plan of Bin Laden and KSM. They truly got knocked out. 
In this year, NASA does the very successful Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART), it being the first planetary defense mission of the agency. The mission would see the successful impact of the DART probe of the asteroid Dimorphos, a moon of Didymos. While neither asteroids posed a threat to Earth, their characteristics made them suitable for such a mission. The Space Shuttle Pahtfinder would launch the probe. Before impacting an ESA cubesat, LICIACube, was deployed in order to film the impact done by the DART spacecraft of the asteroid and the Thomas Paine, Hubble Space Telescope, Lunar Crater Radio Telescope and a whole host of other telescopes on the Earth and Moon were all redirected in the place where Didymos was to capture this historic moment. The DART spacecraft would also use a very new ion thruster known as the NASA Evolutionary Xenon Thruster (NEXT). 
Al Gore, after having signed into law 700B$ bailouts for big tech companies to allow them to survive after the dot.com bubble burst and the recession that came because of it. The American Senate and House, from both the Democratic and Republican parties would agree on a bipartisan 850B$ omnibus piece of legislation that would see increases in the child tax credit from 1200$ to 2100$ per child, sharp increases in food stamps, from 100$/month to 250$/month and TANF is also increased from 150$/month to 200$/month all of this until the year 2005 as part of a sunset policy and the EITC is also temporarily increased. In addition to this, further high speed rail will be approved and there will be other extensive infrastructure repairments and expansion (both in highways and even public transit) in order to drive economic growth as 2002 is also estimated to see economic decline, even if only of 1%, also the bill makes the assault weapons ban indefinite and it also allows for bailouts to the Chrysler Corporation of 62B$ and also to Raytheon of 39B$, but also 16B$ each to banks like Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, totaling an additional 150B$ in corporate bailouts.
Unemployment is only down to just 8% from the high amount of 11%, real wages are growing at a snails pace, the American economy is also sluggish (with growth only coming back in 2003 and it is set only for 2%) and the Republicans have just won the midterms, with the Senate Majority leader William Frist and House Speaker Bob Barr and now Elizabeth Dole, Gore's Republican rival in 2000, is setting herself up for a rematch where this time she beats him, with primary polls showing that she is still the favorite among the Republican Party especially with the dot.com bubble burst affecting many Americans. 
Two new massive nuclear fusion rockets have their maiden launches, the first is the Vulcan Centaur, made by the United Launch Alliance (ULA) and serves as a replacement to the Atlas V and Delta IV Heavy, with companies which have had contracts for them now having them for Vulcan. It is a superheavy rocket that can send 150 tons to LEO (due to it being powered by fusion) and 75 tons to TLI, more than the Atlas V and Delta IV Heavy. Besides its massive first stage it also features 4 fusion-powered boosters that give it even more thrust at lift off. When it detaches its first stage, its engines are reusable while the first stage is expended, it being considered smart reusability by ULA. The AR-1 (made by Aerojet Rocketdyne) engines have an inflatable heat shield that is used for reentry and splashing down, it then being recovered by a drone ship to be used in later flights. Speaking of the whole slew of rockets that will launch from Cape Canaveral, creating SLC-42, SLC-43, SLC-38 and SLC-39E, but also SLC-51 in order to handle the massive amount of rockets that have to launch from this place. Although some are complaining that the water deluge systems used by rockets consume A LOT of water, say groups like Greenpeace, which is not good. The Vulcan Centaur in 2002, its first year would have around 25 launches.
The second rocket is Blue Origin's New Glenn, which had its maiden flight carrying a group of KuiperSats, around 100, first to LEO (40 of them) then they would be deployed in Mars orbit, around 23 of them and then 37 of them would be deployed in an orbit around Titan, alongside these KuiperSats there would also be a lander sent to Titan, near the EU outpost on the surface. New Glenn is a fully reusable rocket powered by nuclear fusion. Its first stage powered by 7 BE-4 fusion engines and its second stage by BE-3U engines (which are nuclear fusion-based modifications to the BE-3 engine which was used on New Shepard). The first stage is reusable, landing on a drone ship after stage separation and the second stage is also reusable, it splashing down on a "bouncy castle-like structure" in the ocean, with both of these then being dragged out to land for further use. It can send 200 tons to LEO and around 100 tons to TLI. In this maiden year, New Glenn, due to its rapid reusability would have 40 launches, most of them KuiperSat missions to low-earth orbit, sending around 2875 of them so far to LEO, providing rapid satellite internet across the world, but it would also send missions (in the form of equipment and other cargo) to the Moon and Mars and two missions would even see the usage of a modified Blue Origin Shepard capsule for ISS cargo missions.
President Grigory Yavlinsky of the Soviet Union and President Al Gore of the United States meet at Moscow and not just them, this includes other leaders of other nuclear armed states, like France, Britain, China, Pakistan and India, signing the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START). The USA and USSR will limit the total number of warheads that they have to just 1500, while France and Britain limit theirs to 200, China to 150 and Pakistan and India to 100, dropping the number of nukes to a record low of just around 2000 warheads, down from the 12000 warhead amount of 20-30 years ago. This truly shows just how far nuclear non-proliferation has gone throughout the decades and shows that we can keep the good of the Atomic Age while removing the bad and can show that we can work together to prevent our extinction.
 
The countries of Norway, Sweden and Austria officially announce that they're joining the European Union (the now federal country), expanding the size, population and economy of the mentioned country. This also reduces the number of countries to around 177, down from 179. Switzerland also joins the U.N. in 2002 after decades of isolationism and neutrality making the reduction in the number of countries be just by two and not by three. The European Union would in 2002 become the world's second largest economy at 18T$, after Japan would fall to fourth place due to the dot.com bubble burst bringing about its lost decade as even the Soviets would catch up to it and become third place. The Euro would also become the second most popular currency, slowly beginning to chip away at the power of the Dollar as it is also even more valuable than it, 1 euro is 2 dollars.
The Sea Launch spaceflight company, which previously launched from one former oil rig floating in the ocean at the Equator has expanded its business to replacing and then launching them from the Equator as it can offer 60% increased payload to LEO, with it transforming former oil rigs into rocket launch ocean platforms from the Earth's Equator, launching from them using Zenit-3SL rockets satellites into low-earth orbit from private contractors (and even the Soviet government). It has been hailed as a great way for former oil rig workers to re-integrate into the economy as they're still working within their own old workplaces that they're adapted to, they just need the job training for rocket and other tech and stuff. People praise the SL company for its endeavours.
Elon Musk, who just like in our own timeline previously owned X.com and later PayPal would create SpaceX, a spaceflight company that according to its CEO had as its main goal getting humanity to go beyond our own solar system, believing it is in the best interest for today and in the longterm that humanity chases this endeavour of being an interstellar civilization and that the significantly reduced cost of spaceflight compared to about 40 years ago allows for this. The first rocket of the company, known as the Falcon 1 (which was named after the Millenium Falcon in Star Wars) would have a dozen or so launches carrying small satellites to low-earth orbit from either weak governments like Malaysia, but also from universities or private individuals/small companies, with the Falcon 1 being powered by liquid fuels (LH2/LOX). However, due to the success of the Falcon 1 (in this timeline having 25 launches from 2002-2003), Musk is shifting to the Falcon 9, which would utilize nuclear fusion and would fill in the medium-lift nuclear fusion rocket market. Basically, he is reaching his goal step by step.
*2003:
The European Union's space agency, the European Space Agency (ESA), launches the Euclid Space Telescope (a Korsch-type telescope) it being special as it has a 600 megapixel wide-angle camera that can record from the visible light to the near-infrared spectrums of the electromagnetic spectrum. It also has a 1.2 meter diameter mirror and can also measure the redshift of galaxies out to a value of 2, allowing it to go back to 10 billion years in the past, its goal being to better understand dark energy and dark matter by more precisely measuring the acceleration in the expansion of the universe (with there being a confirmation that the universe was expanding at a faster and faster rate). Despite some appealing contracts from Blue Origin's New Glenn, Roscosmos's Photon, NASA's Space Shuttle Pathfinder and ULA's Vulcan Centaur, ESA would eventually choose to launch it on its own Ariane 6 rocket, even though all the mentioned rockets above could carry the Euclid to its designated spot of the L2 Lagrange point. Also in this year, ESA would launch using a Roscosmos Soyuz rocket the Planck telescope and it would then launch using Blue Origin's New Glenn the Gaia telescope, all going to the L2 point, which is also inhabitated by the Thomas Paine Space Telescope (TPST). The Planck Space Telescope (PST) will measure anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and provide a very precise map of it and the Gaia Space Telescope (GST) will very precisely measure the position, distances and motions of stars, all of this obviously for space science and understanding our very own universe. NASA has also partnered with ESA to participate in these science missions.
The world's economy would begin to grow after the dot.com recession finally, thanks to low interest rates, expasionary fiscal policy and economic bailouts to the tech companies. In other news, it seems sustainable aviation fuels (biofuels) have begun to be just as cheap as regular kerosene, these SAFs are great because they don't result in significant levels of pollution. Boeing has rolled these out on the Boeing 757 and Airbus has recently rolled them out for the Concorde, alongside Boeing, with the planes being surprisingly easy to convert from kerosene to biofuels. Also, electric arc furnaces are beginning to be popular as they're cheaper than the regular gas-based furnances, with kitchens also shifting to electricity for microwaves, for ovens etc. beginning a significant reduction in emisions from these sectors. Hemp is also being used for the first time for concrete and green hydrogen is just beginning to be scaled up for steel production and also for renewable energy storage alongside batteries.
While synthetic meat, aka meat grown from animal cells in a laboratory, started out in the 1990s and was meant as a food source for people on the surface of Moon and Mars who did not have access to things like livestock, prices for it have begun to shrink thanks to funding from companies like Microsoft, Amazon, but also McDonalds, KFC etc. and even the government, with the FDA having approved the first batch of synthetic meat in the mid-1990s to be rolled out in stores across the USA, with other countries following suit. The World Economic Forum (WEF) also became key to promoting synthetic meat among venture capitalists, CEOs and government leaders and so by 2003, synthetic meat would surpass livestock meat in popularity as people would see the appeal in them: an eco-friendly to eat the thing we truly enjoy. Synthetic meat would also turn out to be cheaper than livestock meat due to the fact that it doesn't require as much work to make.
The Human Genome Project is completed in this year, it being a very important scientific experiment funded by governments such as the USA, EU, Japan, China, Soviet Union, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Hashemite Arabia, Iran, India and Vietnam, with many universities from these countries also working on this very grand biology project. In this year, 99% of the human genome was sequenced to a 99.9% accuracy. Later, by the 2010s and 2020s, 100% of the human genome and all of its 3 billion pairs would be sequenced also being assisted by the upcoming artificial intelligence technology, all of this with a 99.9999% accuracy level, far higher than the human level of accuracy. 
Mars makes its closest approach to Earth in 60000 years, specifically, it was 55 million km away from our own planet. Because of this, extra interest was given to the said planet as such more cargo missions happened this year, alongside crew missions than compared to other years of the early 2000s. Also, Mars has a population of 15000, the Moon has a population of 100000, Titan has a population of 2000 (European and American outposts mostly, but also from other countries) and even Mercury has a population of 100. Europa is also being explored and it is found that it has an ocean underneath thanks to the Juno mission and the Clipper mission was sent to take samples from Europa and return them and to also find out more about this moon of Jupiter.
A breakthrough has come recently as Caltech has managed to test for the first time space-based solar power, launching the payload with a Vulcan Centaur rocket from the United Launch Alliance (ULA). The advantages of this are that it can collect way more energy due to there being no atmospheric disturbances, it can better face the Sun than Earth-based solar power and is more efficient. It uses wireless power transmission through microwave transmitters to send energy to receiving antennas (rectennas) and then the energy goes through the transmission lines just like any other energy source say nuclear fusion or renewables. This was proven successful for the first time on this moment and today in 2023 in this timeline it makes up a small percent (around 2%) of the world's energy generation.
Westfield, the famous shopping company which received the 99 year lease for the Underground Mall of the World Trade Center, which has now become known as WTC 8 or Westfield World Trade Center, just like how the hotel is known as WTC 3 or Marriott World Trade Center. It has also been renovated to be a brand new 21st century mall, attracting more consumers to go shop in it.The mall has truly become a part of the World Trade Center complex and it now rivals other famous malls, such as the World Financial Center mall right next to it, across the street. 
The Pioneer 10 spacecraft gives out its last signal while it is 81.5 AU (or 12.2 billion km) away from our planet, Earth. Meanwhile, the Voyager 1 spacecraft is at 90 AU, while the Voyager 2 spacecraft is at 65 AU. The New Horizons spacecraft, recently launched in 2001, is at 187 AU from the Earth, having finished its study of the Kuiper Belt, which includes dwarf planets Pluto, its moons (including its larger one, Charon), but also Arrokoth, but it had also mapped comet 67P (for short) which is near Jupiter. The 1000 Breakthrough Starshot nanoprobes, which are travelling at 10% the speed of light, are at 1230 AU (or 1.89 trillion km, or 0.2 light years). Pioneer 11 had lost contact with Earth in 1995. Currently, there are 1005 human-made objects approaching or already beyond interstellar space, basically being in an escape velocity away from the Solar System. The quickest to reach another system (Proxima Centauri) would be the Breakthrough Starshot probes. 
The European Union and the Soviet Union sign a very important free trade partnership which comes in the form of the EU joining the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU). Also, the EU signs a free trade agreement with the countries in the continent of Africa, essentially expanding EU economic influence. Its economic growth is now massive due to these FTAs, same with that of the USSR, even to a lesser degree. Grigory Yavlinsky, the liberal Soviet president has allowed for this detente and improvement in relations, alongside EU president Romano Prodi, who is also a liberal. The EU economy is set to surpass that of the USA by 2006 if all goes well. There are rumors, especially within the USA that there are plans for the creation of a single currency in the EU, the Post-Warsaw Pact area and the USSR that is to rival the U.S. Dollar. While these concerns come from both sides of the spectrum, it is more present in the Republican Party, which is calling for action in order to preserve the Dollar's status as a global reserve currency and to ensure that the USA continues to remain the world's most powerful country militarily and economically.
 
Asteroid mining begins to pick up steam as it is seen as the future of mining in outer space, with Psyche being the first to start this trend in 2001. There seems to be a growing race between countries such as the USA, EU, USSR and others on mining the most asteroids so as to generate the highest level of economic growth and prosperity. While the USA was the nation who started it, it seems that the EU and its ESA is in the lead as of now, having mined the most asteroids. 
*2004: 
The 2004 United States presidential election begins, it being between Republican presidential candidate Elizabeth Dole (who also ran in 2000) and this time vice-presidential candidate Lincoln Chaffee. Dole positioned herself as a sort of center-right conservative, while her running mate was meant to appeal to centrist liberal Democrats. For the Democratic Party, Al Gore would be the presidential candidate and John Kerry would be the VP candidate. The main issues in this election would be the economy (as unemployment is still at around 6.5% and the dot.com recession still being fresh in people's memories), foreign policy (as the EU and USSR are beginning to catch up with the United States) and space exploration. Elizabeth Dole would manage to narrowly beat Al Gore due to his low approvals and the economy still being in a sluggish state, becoming the first female president of the United States. Bob Dole would also be the first First Gentleman in American history. 
Philippe Petit, the famous French tightrope walker would for a 30-year anniversary of that famous 1974 moment where he tightroped across the Twin Towers, would do this exact tightrope on the Twin Towers, somehow receiving the permission to do so for a maximum of 30 minutes for this special occasion before he would stop and walk towards the Observation Deck (roof) of the South Tower, where he came from, ending this very risky walk. This was basically just a repeat of that 1974 walk, although now there weren't threats to his life and there weren't police on the rooftop waiting to apprehend him. There would be many onlookers on the roofs, the towers's floors, in other buildings and on the streets below as he was conducting his walk. This would happen on the 7th of August, 2004, the same day as the original and 30 years after it.
Observations from the Thomas Paine Space Telescope, Euclid Space Telescope, Spektr Space Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope confirm relativistic modified newtonian dynamics (MOND), also known as tensor-vector scalar gravity, also being able to fix the problems it had when it comes to the cosmic microwave background and anisotropies thanks to observations from the Planck Space Telescope. Relativistic MOND has become the replacement for general relativity and newtonian dynamics, although general relativity is a pretty good approximation and heck even is pretty much like relativistic MOND in most things not concerning dark matter, while relativistic MOND just as easily fits with newtonian dynamics in our own day to day life. When it comes to dealing with the problem of dark matter and galaxies spinning too fast to actually be stable and other problems which led to dark matter being proposed in the first place.
 
Chechen terrorists attempt to kill the autonomous SSR's governor, that being Akhmad Kadyrov as part of a stadium bombing, which did kill 35 people, however Kadyrov would luckily not be assassinated, only suffering some injuries, which required sending him to the hospital. This means that in this timeline, his son Ramzan Kadyrov does not become the governor of Chechnya. The weak Al-Qaeda, now led by Saif al Adel due to the fact that the two top guys: Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri were killed as part of a cruise missile strike by an United States destroyer. This Al-Qaeda would still however conduct the Madrid train bombing, killing 192 people in the process.
 
A multi-national space station is established in the asteroid belt (in between Mars and Jupiter) to be a sort of port to collect the asteroids mined and to make shipping the asteroids back to Earth, Mars or the Moon easier and to allow for more efficient economic growth generation. This was done as part of a United Nations initiative, but also as part of the wishes of private space companies, who thought that this space station would also benefit them. The space station would be made out of an asteroid itself and would feature a rotating artificial gravity ring in order to improve its role as a harbor. 
Nintendo, the Japanese console game company, officially releases the Nintendo DS. The tallest bridge in the world, the Millau Viaduct over the Tarn in the Massif Central mountains in France officially opens. NASA's hypersonic scramjet, known as the X-43, reaches a top record speed of Mach 9.6 or 11265 km/h it being an uncrewed craft. The Burj Khalifa, the building that will become the second tallest building in the world at 828-830 meters tall after its completion in 2009, begins construction in this year. MyDoom is first identified, it being a computer worm that especially affected Microsoft Windows and it used the medium of e-mails to spread like wildfire.
The United States, in cooperation with the European Union through their space agencies NASA and ESA launch the MESSENGER spacecraft on a mission meant to provide a very detailed picture of Mercury, both geologically and image-wise. This is the first of such a space mission to the planet Mercury, as it is not really that fit for human habitation and while probes have been sent to Mercury in the past years (most famously Mariner 10), none of them will study the planet like how this probe would, which just shows the improvements that have happened in spacecraft technology. The mission will last 10 years, until the year 2014, where its spacecraft would crash into the surface of Mercury.
A disputed prime ministerial election where Grigory Yavlinsky's party, Yabloko, narrowly lost to Gennady Zyuganov's party, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, by a few percentage points. It is said that the election was rigged, however true this is, it still led to the Green Revolution, which saw a re-run of the 2004 parliamentary election and of this time the re-election of Grigory Yavlinsky as the prime minister of the Soviet Union. It is clear that whether the case was with that 2004 election that now Yavlinsky is in his second term and is capable of making more of his ideas a reality, which has unknown implications for the Soviet Union. 
For the first time ever, two space shuttles, specifically two unmanned Pathfinder shuttle spaceplanes belonging to private companies operating on the Moon crash in lunar orbit in a historical moment, luckily nobody would die (because they were unmanned), although there was cargo in those spacecraft, but due to their stock of nuclear fusion fuel for the returning trip to Earth, it meant that once they crashed, there was a very brief explosion (briefer than that on Earth due to the fact that there isn't an atmosphere) and then the two shuttles were seen as space junk. This accident would prompt the establihsment of the Federal Space Administration (FSA) in the United States, which essentially takes over from the role of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), it monitoring all spaceflights, which are represented as happening at above 100 km (aka the Karman Line) in order to prevent further accidents and to create a stronger tracking system that prevents such errors as apparently it came from a radar error where one plane was shown to be slightly further than it actually was, making a pivot away from the other plane impossible and causing the crash (by plane I meant the Pathfinder Space Shuttles). 
The United Nations Office on Outer Space Affairs remarks that the space market has reached a record high, entering the trillions of dollars, this being because of the emerging asteroid mining economy being exploited by multiple countries like the USA, EU, Russia, China, Japan and other space powers like India and Vietnam, but also because of the fact that the Moon is becoming a new hub for humanity, thanks to circular, artificial gravity-based cities and outposts, with the Moon having a record population growth thanks to mastery of artificial gravity, laboratory-based meat-growth and overall farming, water reusability (through very easily purifying piss and other forms of desalinization) and recent breakthroughs in technologies called CRISPR, which are also beginning to expand on Earth. Electricity is also provided with nuclear fusion. The same technologies are also used for bases on Mars and Titan, with this tech also being used for space stations around Venus, which are chosen instead of living on the planet's surface due to the very thick atmosphere and very high temperatures. 
The European Union officially surpasses, 2 years ahead of schedule, the United States of America as the world's largest economy after higher than expected GDP growth. This moment saw a temporary decline in the American stock market, but it also saw a sudden growth in the Euro's reserve status in Central Banks as it is poised to become the next global reserve currency , it also having a far higher value than the Dollar, with 1 euro being 2 dollars. This was because of the EU's growing influence in Africa and Latin America, the EU's growing asteroid mining and Moon blue/white-collar work and other things as analysts are predicting this to be once again be the European century. As of 2004, the EU had a GDP of 26.2T$ and the USA had a GDP of 25.7T$, with these countries then being followed by the Soviet Union with 19.9T$, Japan with 15.3T$, then China with 5.8T$, Canada with 4.4T$ and Australia with 3.5T$, the world is far richer in this timeline due to its far greater presence in space and the greater space and internet economies of this timeline. This surpassing of the EU also came because of the fact that it is not as regulationist as it is in our own timeline, being better at digitalization and not being as bureaucratic, although obviously market regulations still exist.
*2005:
Elizabeth Dole is inaugurated as the next President of the United States and also as the first female president, being a member of the Republican Party and so is her vice-president, Lincoln Chaffee. The inauguration has a larger than usual number of people due to the historic moment the first female president represents in the United States, as women only received voting rights nationally just 85 years ago, in 1920. 
Pope John Paul II, dies in 2005 just like in real life, with millions of Catholics (and some non-Catholics) going to mourn for him at the Vatican. He was known for his role in spreading the spirit of the democratic revolution in Eastern Europe, seeing the fall of authoritarian, closed communism and the rise of new democracies in 1989. He is succedeed by Pope Benedict XVI on April 19th of 2005, 17 days later. 
A mission is sent to Europa in order to drill for the water kilometers below the ice in order to find out if there is microbial/bacterial life outside of our own planet. The ice is drilled and a couple hundred grams of water is collected, it also including what would potentially be bacterial life. After the capsule returned to Earth and was sent to NASA, to be locked up in a vault, it was discovered that there is indeed life outside of our own planet, but obviously bacterial in nature. The mission which is considered an extension of Europa Clipper has also detected the presence of hydrothermal vents that keep this underground ocean warm.
The first hurdle of the Elizabeth Dole presidency would turn out be Hurricane Katrina, a category 5 hurricane that would hit states in the Gulf of Mexico, like Louisiana, among others at a peak speed of 280 km/h. The response to this hurricane is however better than that of the George W. Bush presidency, with FEMA rushing in much quicker than in our own timeline in order to save more lives. The U.S. Coast Guard, the New Orleans Police Department, National Hurricane Center and the National Weather Service would be commended for their actions, just like in our own timeline. Instead of 1836 people dying from the hurricane, only around 680 people would die, a number almost x3 that of the real life number. After the disaster, E. Dole approved many measures which greatly increased the safety of coastal cities from flooding and hurricanes through a bipartisan infrastructure bill, the first time such measures were put into place.
The Airbus A380 has its first flight from Toulouse and this first flight is successful. The aircraft is hailed as a superjumbo jet based on sustainable aviation fuels and it is also liked due to its high space and high passenger capacity and also for its great first class services. Over the years, airline companies like Emirates Airlines, Singapore Airlines, Etihad Airways, Lufthansa etc. would buy these aircraft for various reasons.
An attack on the multi-national Jamestown base (jointly owned by many countries, including the USA, EU, USSR, China, India and Japan) occurs, specifically on its outer edge as what appears to be a gun man has shot a hole using an assault rifle, the goal being to depressurize the inside of the building in order to kill as many people as possible. Luckily this does not mean a full depressurization as this building has its own independent pressurization system, but still this attack causes the deaths of 6 people, including one heroic individual who just barely managed to restore the pressure system before dying of hypoxia. 2 other people would receive injuries. Luckily this wasn't as worse as it could've been. The lone shooter would turn out to be a member of Al-Qaeda, who hid these connections to go on the Moon, working for a company. Because its obvious that Al-Qaeda doesn't have spaceflight capabilities.
The Large Hadron Collider discovers the Higgs boson as part of its first run in this year, it being more if not just as advanced of a particle accelerator and also built quicker due to higher funding for CERN from the EU. The Higgs boson scalar boson with a spin of 0. This particle is known as the particle that gives all other particles mass and it has been referred to in pop science as the god particle. The Higgs boson is a massive (125 GeV) scalar boson and it has a spin equal to zero, thus it being a scalar boson and it also doesn't have an electric or color charge. This boson is generated by the excitation of the Higgs field, a quantum field and through the Higgs mechanism, which is connected to this boson, elementary particles like quarks and electrons (and others) have mass.
President Elizabeth Dole announces a series of protectionist measures as part of the PROTECT Act citing the growing economic threat on America's national security from the European Union and the Soviet Union. These come with the following: 60B$ given towards semiconductor manufacturing in the United States, a subsidized national campaign to buy american products and to produce things right here in the United States, this campaign is known as Made in America, increased subsidies for infrastructure and streamlining of the regulatory process. Dole would announce that the USA is aware of the threat of the EU as it recently surpassed it economically. The Federal Reserve has also taken measures to increase the value of the United States Dollar (USD) in order to prevent its upcoming dethroning by the Euro (EUR) when it comes to global reserve currency status. These measures are meant to not only reduce trade with the EU but also with the Soviet Union so as to prevent them from dethroning the USA economically and potentially militarily.
Meanwhile, around the same time the European Union begins making its first military steps overall, with its military budget growing to a record high, same with the amount of ships, fighters, etc. It is clear that the EU is also aiming to retake its place as the world's military hegemon . Although what's interesting is that because of great relations between the EU and the USA, a lot of EU countries already have some small military bases in the USA. The EU has increased this year the number of military bases both at home and abroad. This has also forced the USA to end its post-Cold War attitude of reducing spending as seen in the H.W. Bush, Clinton and Gore administrations, increasing military spending for the first time. 
The EU has also begun to implement its own subsidy of 60B$ towards semiconductor manufacturing in the European Union, through the Europeans Chips Act, it having the same goal as the American one and being overall very similar. The EU has also in this same year signed a trade deal with South American countries, beating the United States to it. The EU also seems to be beating the United States when it comes to asteroid mining, which will have growing importance in this century and it also seems to have surpassed in the new space race all things considered, even though overall they maintain international cooperation. Relations between the USA and EU have soured, going from great, to decent.
 
An important event happened in Afghanistan during the decades-long Afghan Civil War as the People's Republic of Afghanistan and the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan have joined forces together, possibly mediated by the Soviet Union, led by Grigory Yavlinsky. The leader of this new Republic of Afghanistan, with its capital at Kabul, which is to fight against the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (Taliban) with its capital at Kandahar is Hamid Karzai. It is said that the Taliban are harboring Al-Qaeda leader Saif al Adel, but this is not yet confirmed by American intelligence.
 
SpaceX, after a row of successful launches with the Falcon 1 is finally able to launch the Falcon 9, which is powered by nuclear fusion and has the added capacity of having a reusable first stage that will land either on a drone ship or a landing pad. It will be mainly used to launch the company's fleet of internet satellites, known as Starlink, but will also provide other types of launches towards not just Earth orbit but also interplanetary space due to its fusion-based propulsion.
*2006:
Gravitational wave observatories in the United States, the European Union, Japan and the Soviet Union have chosen to collaborate in order to provide far clearer and greater amounts of data when it comes to these gravitational waves, which are predicted by the general theory of relativity. More specifically, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the United States, the Virgo Interferometer in the EU, Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector (KAGRA) in Japan and have published stunning findings when it comes to gravitational waves, 2006 being considered an important year in the field of gravitational waves as the first direct observations of them were made.
Space junk is becoming an increasing problem, especially due to the growing number of satellites not just in Earth orbit but also in Moon orbit, Mars orbit et cetera. The number of satellites orbiting the planet Earth has grown to a whopping 50000 especially through global navigation systems like GPS, Galileo, GLONASS, BeiDou, QZSS and IGNSS, these being from the USA, EU, the Soviet Union, China, Japan and India, these also being known as satnavs, but there are also private internet provider satellites not just from Blue Origin's KuiperSats but also from SpaceX's Starlink and also internet/telcom satellites from Verizon, AT&T, Telecom, Vodafone et cetera. This could pose huge risk to private orbital space stations like Blue Origin's Orbital Reef Space Station, but also to the International Space Station and to overall space operations in the future. As such ESA and NASA have collaborated and succeeded in the first mission to remove space junk from low-earth orbit through the CleanSpace Initiative, which will remove a few inoperable objects in orbit. However, the Moon also has the same problem it having 2500 satellites in its orbit and Mars has around 1500 satellites in orbit, all meant for various purposes. Titan also is dealing with 100 satellites, with Venus, Europa and Mercury having a similar amount of artificial satellites. What's worse is that there are millions potentially of such debris that is travelling at orbital velocities, affecting human outposts in orbit not just around Earth but other planets and moons as well.
Due to the fact that in this timeline the 9/11 attacks do not happen and neither the 2005 London bombings (7/7), Tony Blair does not announce his intention to resign by 2007 and instead in this timeline serves until the year 2010 and is overall far more popular as the United Kingdom isn't dragged into Afghanistan and Iraq, as such in the present day, Tony Blair is remembered more fondly than in our own timeline, with even the 2008 recession being just a needle of bad in a haystack of good, being known for implementing gay civil partnerships and later marriage (in this timeline), increased EU integration, implemented national minimum wage and had a pretty redistributionist welfare policy. His heavy handed police and surveillance policy also doesn't exist because of the previously mentioned events not happened. 
The first mission returning dust from a comet, from NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) known as Stardust is concluded. It collecting dust samples from the comet Wild 2 and it also collected samples of cosmic dust, sending them all back to Earth and it also flew by and studied asteroid 5535 Annefrank. It was also announced that the probe had collected interstellar dust, it coming from a place outside of our own solar system which was a shocking discovery. 
A multi-billion dollar effort to create the first room temperature superconductor, it beginning in the late 1980s, has finally had results, creating a superconductor at temperatures of 22 degres celsius, 1 atmosphere of pressure (1 atm) and high values for the critical magnetic field and current density, utilizing a hydrogen-rich material known as beryllium hydride (BeH2), it having been funded by the Emperor of Japan and other rich Japanese companies such as Sony, Shinkansen, TEPCO, Hokkaido Electric Power Company, Nintendo and even other non-Japanese companies such as Samsung, LG, Naver, General Electric etc. with this superconductor even having entered testing for a maglev train and it managed to reach record speeds of 637 km/h. Now the goal is to scale this up to global electrical grids as it has been demonstrated by many science labs to be true and has been replicated not just in Japan but also in other places like the EU, USA, China, Korea and India. This will have revolutionary effects as it will greatly improve the efficiency of energy transmission and storage, consumer electronics, electric motors, information tech, maglevs, healthcare & imaging and many other things. This will also be very useful in the field of space travel propulsion as most rockets now use nuclear fusion and may even make nuclear fusion propulsion a reality not just in rockets but maybe even in planes and cars, say some, but whatever the case, this is still the most revolutionary tech ever.
A team of technological universities across the world, these being Caltech, MIT, Oxford, Cambridge, Tsinghua, Zurich, Toronto etc. have teamed up in cooperation with NASA, CSA, CNSA, JAXA and ESA to provide the rocket launches, providing space-based solar power throughout the entire world, creating a satellite megaconstellation across planet Earth, adding an additional 3000 satellites after launching them to space in just a years worth of time, giving power across all continents this time using lasers to send the power and not microwaves so as to reduce atmospheric disturbances and to provide more power. Space-based solar power is becoming increasingly popular as Caltech and NASA showed that this is possible and thanks to reducing costs of this technology in recent years, allowing for more energy to be given to more people as the world population is growing.
The United Nations votes overwhelmingly to establish the Human Rights Council, Michelle Bachellet is elected as the first female President of Chile. After the midterm elections in the United States, the Senate is split 50-50 between the Republicans and the Democrats, while the House now has a narrow majority for the Republicans, down from the large majority previously present. The Playstation 3 is released by Sony and Microsoft releases Windows Vista (which looks more like Windows 7 after a last-minute design change). In Afghanistan, the Republic of Afghanistan (also known as the Northern Alliance) receives air support from the United States as part of a decree by president Elizabeth Dole, receiving some anger from non-interventionist Republicans like Ron Paul and also the Northern Alliance makes offensives near the Kabul Area and the central Shia area of the country, although the war is still pretty much locked as the offensives are small.
The Cassini spacecraft discovers a geyser-like emission of vapor, dust and small-crystals and would later arrive at the concluson that there is indeed water below the ice of Saturn's moon of Enceladus. The MP4 Watch becomes available to consumers. Sunnis in Iraq, in cooperation with Al-Qaeda do car bombings in Sadr City and Baghdad killing around 215 people and injuring another 50 because of these bombings. 
*2007:
Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, introduces the first and original iPhone at the Macworld keynote in San Francisco, while in our timeline it saw a starting a new era in smartphones with this invention, surprisingly it seems that people prefer keyboards, with BlackBerry in this timeline remaining popular. The flop of this invention means that Apple is now only known for Mac OS and iPod, meaning that its size ain't as big as in our own timeline, with a main selling point being that it allowed for faster and better typing while not sacrificing the phone's space, essentially BlackBerry would somehow manage to win the smartphone race. This is because of the unveiling of the BlackBerry Key, which would beat the iPhone 1 in many ways. 
2007 represents the 50th anniversary of the International Geophysical Year (IGY) spanning from 1957 to 1958, as such the United Nations would sponsor the International Heliophysical Year (IHY) that is going to span from 2007 to 2008, it being a homage for the 50th anniversary of the IGY. Not only has this IHY proposal received various support from the UN, but also from many space agencies and space companies, who are willing to contribute to heavily expanding our understanding of planetary science and the heliosphere. 
As part of the International Heliophysical Year, the European Space Agency (ESA), a supporting agency of the IHY, would launch a mission known as the Verrier-Galle mission, launching a probe to the planet Neptune and lander to land on Neptune's largest moon it being named after the two people who have most to do with the discovery of Neptune, with Verrier creating the mathematical predictions for its existence in the summer of 1846 and Galle was the one who was able to confirm it through observation using the Berlin Telescope in the autumn of 1846. This mission has the goal of providing a vast amount of knowledge about the Netpune system and its largest moon Triton and whenever it also has an underground ocean, like Enceladus and Europa. The last time a mission went to Neptune was Voyager 2 in 1989. It is set to take a year to get there and begin its studies. 
 
In this year, as part of the International Heliophysical Year (IHY), NASA launches the Parker Solar Probe, its goal being to make observations of the outer corona of our own Sun, it will approach the Sun being just 7 million km from its center, basically entering the Sun's atmosphere, although it is made in a way to prevent it from just falling into it or to just burn up. It is named after a living person, that being Eugene Parker, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago and it also has a memory card containing the names of 1.1 million people, mounted on a plaque and inside of the spacecraft's antenna. 
The Intercontinental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) publishes its fourth assessment report, confirming that humanity is on track to solving the problem of climate change and that tipping points, like the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, will most certainly not be met as humanity has successfully transitioned to nuclear fusion energy, sustainable aviation fuels, synthetic meat, electric transit and has begun to, in growing numbers, employ recycling, while also beginning to rapidly transition towards sustainable building (green buildings) through LEED standards.
 
In 2007, The World Trade Center completes renovations that have it be awarded LEED Gold by the U.S. Green Building Council. As part of these renovations, the buildings have dramatically increased their energy efficiency, applied green cleaning supplies and pest control products, recycled paper products, recycled content carpets, recycled paint, and also installing ultra-low flow fixtures in the building's bathrooms, as per the GBC's review. This being applicable to all 7 buildings, not just the Twin Towers (owned by Silverstein Properties), but also WTC 3 (owned by Marriott), WTC 4, 5 and 7 (owned by Silverstein Properties), WTC 6 (owned by the U.S. Customs Service) and WTC 8 - The Underground Shopping Mall (owned by Westfield). Other renovations underwent in the 2000s include adding thicker fireproof of 75 mm and of mineral wool in all other buildings and not just the Twin Towers, while also widening the stairwells and adding photoluminescent markings/trackling lights and ESFR sprinklers in WTC 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7. 
Andrew Joseph Stack III would write on the site embeddedart.com a note expressing his disillusionment with the government, the bailout of big tech companies during the dot.com recession, politicians, corporate conglomerates, trade unions, health insurance companies, the Catholic Church, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and would also say that the 9/11 attacks were staged by the United States and Soviet governments in order to increase their popularity and to maintain their monopoly on violence. The note also mentions his troubles in Initially, he wanted to hijack, on a lone-mission, a Boeing 757 and crash it into the Federal Reserve building while it was going to fly on a East-West coast trip, but realizing that post-9/11 security measures which made it illegal to have mace, guns and pocket knives on planes, improved security detection/monitoring, federal air marshals on most if not all flights and reinforced cockpit doors, he instead opted to use his Piper Dakota single-engine light aircraft on a suicide attack mission, which had 300 liters of fuel in addition to 2 gasoline fuel containers he brought on board which carried in total 100 liters of fuel, opting for them as they were more flammable. He would take off from Georgetown Municipal Airport and crash it at a whopping 338 km/h (more than its max speed of 250 km/h) due to rapidly descending from 4 km onto the target. The attacks would see the deaths of 6 IRS employees in the building (out of the 190), instead of 1 and there would be 27 injured, due to the worse fires brought on by the impact. The perpetrator would also die.
A dispute occurs between the United States and the European Union over the ownership of asteroid Palma, a very valuable asteroid worth 5.21 quintilion, the United States was the first to identify it using the Thomas Paine Space Telescope (TPST) and also the first to send a probe, but the European Union was the first to send an actual mining ship to the area, which prompted an American response to send its own mining ship, arriving soon after. Right now, these mining ships are at a stand still as to whoever should be the one to claim ownership of the asteroid and which should tug it to Earth/Mars orbit for it to be mined and this could escalate further. It is not yet known what to do with it as both sides insist on it fully belonging to them, becoming the first of what would be potentially be many such space disputes and escalations. Besides this stand off, there would also be protests by Americans in America demanding that the EU recognize them as the rightful owners as they were the rightful firsts to get to it and protests by Europeans in the EU demanding that America recognize them as the rightful owners as they were the ones to actually send a mining ship to it, thus rightfully being first.
NASA, besides launching the Parker Solar Probe, also launches the Keppler Space Telescope as part of the International Heliophysical Year (IHY) in order to detect Earth-sized planets orbiting other stars (exoplanets). In its first year, the KST discovers a record 2278 exoplanets in a single year, by the end of 2007, there are 19811 known exoplanets in 14612 planetary systems, with 3110 systems having more than one planet, this coming because of observations not just by the Keppler Space Telescope, but also by the Thomas Paine Space Telescope, the Lunar Crater Radio Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope and other telescopes on the Moon, Earth and Mars and it, the Keppler Telescope, is positioned at an L2 LaGrange point compared to the Sun and Earth.
The Russian Orthodox Church announces that it is switching to the Revised Julian Calendar for dating Christmas (reverting it back to December 25th and not January 7th), which also prompts the Jerusalem Church to do the same thing and quite a few other churches which had previously stuck with this church's decision to switch to the Revised Julian Calendar, something which was already done by the Romanian, Bulgarian and Greek churches and even churches within the Soviet Union, such as the Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian Churches but also the Ukrainian church. The Revised Julian Calendar was created in 1923 by Serbian scientist Milutin Milankovic as a more accurate version of both the Julian and Gregorian calendars and it was meant to align the dating of Eastern Orthodox churches with those of Catholic and Protestant churches (as this calendar is aligned with the Gregorian calendar from 1600-2800). 
In late 2007, the housing market bubble would burst in the United States, with de-regulatory banking policies implemented under Alan Greenspan being the main cause for this massive bubble. This would be very terrible news for the United States as it faced the brunt of this recession the most, as the US Dollar was losing credibility fast especially with this recession and that further solidifed the Euro as the top, global reserve currency. Because of this, the economy would decline by 15% (similar to Great Depression levels) in 2008 from a high of 26T$ down to just 19T$, falling to third place, behind both the EU and the Soviet Union, which only had 2% contractions. What was worse was that Dole was pushing in austerity policies, cutting spending significantly, which further aggravated the economic crisis as unemployment would rise to a record 25%. Meanwhile other countries like the EU, USSR, Japan and China begun pushing for keynesian stimulus and for QE (quantitative easing). This truly seemed like the collapse of the United States as a global superpower and it did have aftershocks to the rest of the world.
*2008:
The European Union (and the Swiss government) would approve the construction of two science megaprojects, these being the Future Circular Collider (FCC), which has a circumference of 100 km, almost x4 bigger than the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), it being configured for hadron-hadron collisions, proton-proton and heavy ion collisions, electron-positron collisions and electron-hadron collisions. The VLCC would also make great use of beryllium hydride superconductors (at room-temp) and make use of much greater energy levels than those of the LHC, far improving the science operations that could occur from the construction of such a collider and it is said that it could be key to unlocking the truth about quantum gravity, or that it could make us closer to it through higher energy levels in the TeVs. This project is set to cost 22B$ and is set to bring in a plethora of science knowledge.
The second project the EU has approved is the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), which will be the largest telescope in the history of mankind when finished, as it will have an aperture of 39.3 meters and an area of 978 m^2 and has the largest primary mirror of any telescope ever built, it having in addition to it 4 other mirrors. Its goals are to greatly increase the number of exoplanets we know of and discover and to also offer detailed compositions of their atmospheres, mostly Earth-like exoplanets and it will also allow astronomers to probe the earliest stages of the formation of planetary systems and the formation of water and organic molecules around protoplanetary discs around stars in the making and will also provide further understanding when it comes to the formation of primordial galaxies, stars and black holes and to also make a direct measurement of the universe's expansion.
For the first time institutions of learning have to teach students about Martian geography (Areography) and Lunar geography (Selenography). This is because of the fact that there is now a massive, multi-national and private presence on these bodies, with the Moon having 1.5 million people and Mars having 250000 people. 2008 was considered this pivotal point where other celestial bodies were truly being integrated and made part of our human experience, especially through the means of geography. other human colonies outside of these two include Mercury (1000 people) Titan (500 people), Venus (200 people), asteroid belt space stations (100 people), Europa (50 people) and Enceladus (10 people). While the issues of microgravity and all of the problems caused by it have been solved through the use of artificial gravity, there is still the communications barrier caused by the constant speed of light that makes extraterrestrial human settlements more isolated the further out you go from our own planet.
By 2008, high speed rail, especially with maglevs due to the introduction of beryllium hydride (BeH2) room-temperature and ambient pressure superconductors, has become the main mode of transportation across the world. This is because of the fact that they are cheap, go very fast (top speeds of 650 km/h) and releases very low CO2 emissions and it is also, surprisingly, not that loud. Countries like the United States, European Union, Soviet Union, Taiwan and Japan have built thousands if not tens of thousands of kilometers of high speed rail which has made it a popular alternative to planes/cars for long-distance and medium-distance travel. The countries of China, India, Vietnam, Turkey and Eastern European countries are also rapidly building up high speed, maglev train lines.
Things for the United States economy are still terrible, as unemployment has reached record levels of 25% and the economy has declined significantly. Elizabeth Dole, after some pressure from corporations, agrees to sign the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, which would bail out failing financial institutions and banks, sadly though the scope of this bailing out is limited due to the fact that the United States's credit rating has declined significantly and also the U.S. Dollar is no longer the global reserve currency, which means the USA ain't that free to spend its money however it wishes. Whatever the case may be, almost everyone was furious, the Occupy Wall Street was rejuvenated, Democrats were and even hard-line Republicans were lashing out against Dole. Her approvals fell to a low of 24% and even her own vice-president, Lincoln Chaffee said that he wouldn't run for the Republican nomination for the upcoming election. 
The year 2008 would see economically some unlikely nations to rise to new levels of economic prosperity, these being the People's Republic of China, which has reached 15T$ (5th in the world, behind the USA, Japan, Soviet Union and the EU), others include Canada which has a GDP of 5T$, Australia with a GDP of 3T$, India with 2T$ and Switzerland with 1T$ all being rapidly growing economies and growing centers of economic might. All of these countries have also grown during the 2008 recession . Geopolitical analysts predict that the EU and China will become the new top hegemons of the world, just like how the USA and the USSR were once thanks to their growing economic and military might.
The 2008 elections in the United States of America would take place. The Republican Party would pick Mitt Romney and he would pick as his running mate Tim Pawlenty, with Mitt Romney narrowly beating Ron Paul in the Republican primaries. The Democratic Party meanwhile would pick Hillary Clinton (narrowly beating Barack Obama in this timeline) and would pick as her running mate Bill Richardson. Because of the fact that the Republican Party was so unpopular (with E. Dole having less than 25% approval by the end of her second term). Dole would endorse Romney which probably hurt his campaign even more. Unsurprisingly, Hillary Clinton from the Democratic Party would manage to easily defeat Mitt Romney from the Republican Party, beating them 413 electoral votes to just 125 electoral votes.
The Jeddah Tower is built as part of the Jeddah Economic Development City project, which is meant to heavily expand Jeddah and increase the economic growth of Saudi Arabia in the post-oil era. Saudi Arabia has become a success story when it comes to petro-states/fossil fuel states transitioning into a new kind of economy and being more prosperous than ever before. The country has legalized gambling and gay marriage in recent years and has made women equal to men within the kingdom, in order to drive up foreign investment and economic activity, while Islam is just symbolic as the kingdom has embraced sexual equality and pleasure over "Islamic values" in order to keep itself alive in this post-fossil fuel age. It is also known for having the world's largest concentrations of solar power due to its large desert.
The Thirty Meter Telescope, which by this year, is the largest telescope ever and it is the largest visible-light telescope on Mauna Kea and it has a large 30 meter mirror. Its purpose is to study the cosmic micrograve background (the afterglow from the Big Bang), the early universe, improving our understanding of relativistic MOND and dark energy (defined by the cosmological constant Λ - for now) and advancing multi-message astronomy, but uniting multiple telescopes to generate a far grander observation, say unifying the TPST, LCRT, the Hubble, the VLT and a whole host of other telescopes in order to understand more about our own universe and it also features advanced optics and state-of-the art instrumentation. This was finally finished by NASA after 4 years of construction and is so far the first of the generation of the super-massive telescopes (over 25 m). 
*2009:
Yugoslavia joins the European Union on January 1st 2009. This came after years of the country prospering economically by opening up to the world and flushing away instability and opening up to the West, it already have been a sort of neutral country when it comes to this East-West divide. This came because of the election of a center-right government in the early 2000s and the following growth in prosperity which led to an increase in popularity in joining the EU. In the early 2000s, the flag of Yugoslavia was also changed, removing the red star symbolizing communism. As previously mentioned, the European Union in this timeline is an actual country, a greater extension of the post-WW2 European project. 
President Hillary Clinton is officially inaugurated on the 20th of January, 2009. She is the second female president of the United States, following her predecessor Elizabeth Dole. This also means that there is another First Gentleman in the White House, it also being the first one to be a former president, that being Bill Clinton. Hillary Clinton would have to deal with a very heavy recession and also increasing political divisions and polarizations within the United States caused by this recession, which has also been referred to as the Second Great Depression. She also has to deal with the rise of the European Union and the People's Republic of China.
NASA officially launches the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (NGRST), sending it to an Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange point, in a place where the Euclid Space Telescope (EST) and the Thomas Paine Space Telescope (TPST) are, among others. It will be a sort of cousin to the Hubble, with it being able to provide far better images than it ever did and while it has the same focal length as the Hubble, it provides a wider field of view. Its goal is to search for exoplanets using gravitational microlensing, probing the chronology of the universe and growth of cosmic structure, measure the effects of dark energy (through baryon acoustic oscillations observations of distant supernovae and weak gravitational lensing), verify the consistency of general relativity and the curvature of spacetime. It would be named after American astronomer Nancy Grace Roman, who was NASA's First Chief of Astronomy, who was still alive in 2009 when it was launched, only dying in 2018. Its goal is to complement telecopes like Euclid, Thomas Paine, Hubble, LCRT, GMT and a whole host of other telescopes in order to allow for a broader reach of scientific discoveries.
The European Space Agency (ESA) would launch the Planetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO), its goal being to search for planetary transits across a million stars, discover rocky exoplanets around yellow dwarf stars, subgiant stars and red dwarfs, with the emphasis being on Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars where water can exist in a liquid state and finally its goal is to study stellar oscillations/seismic activity in stars to measure stellar masses and evolution and enable the precise characterization of the planet host star, including its age.
A spaceplane, owned by SpaceX, meant for commercial travel, carrying 81 passengers, crashes into Mons Huygens, the tallest mountain on the surface of the Moon at 5.6 km tall due to pilot error as he was trying to descend to get a closer view of the mountain and to have people enjoy the stunning view of it, while he thought he was higher up he was actually coming in right towards hitting it at a speed of 1500 km/h, in a sub-orbital trajectory, taking off from a lunar runway. SpaceX would provide condolences and monetary payback to the families affected by this crash and says that it will attempt to reduce cases of pilot error and prevent something like this again.
Countries begin recovering from the Great Recession of 2007-2009 as the European Union (EU) has positive economic growth alongside most other countries, however other countries that were worse hit, such as the United States itself, still see economic contraction, despite heightened, keynesian-level action from Clinton's government even if less so than in 2008, with the recession lasting until 2010 within in that country due to the recession being more like depression and unemployment still remains pretty high, at 20%, down from a peak of 25%. 
As part of the International Year of Astronomy, as designated by the United Nations, 400 years after Galileo Galilei made his first astronomical studies with his telescope and Johannes Kepler published his Astronomia Nova. The United States and Japan cooperatively send a mission meant to explore Jupiter's moons (the Galilean moons) Callysto, Io, Ganymede and Europa through a probe mission and 4 landers to each of them. Solar sails and nuclear fusion drives have allowed these probes to immediately reach their destination. Other things that would happen this year as part of the IYA would be a mission to Sedna, the farthest known dwarf planet in the Solar System which would be made easier by the presence of solar sail technology, this mission being meant to surpass the limits of our astronomical capabilities. 
A conflict between the European and Chinese military bases in Djibouti occurs over derogatory messages shared by either side towards the other, which saw for a small period a time small arm clashes between the two sides, this conflict being worsened through the discovery of a Chinese weather balloon over the European Union, with an Eurofighter Typhoon shooting it down over Germany. However, thanks to the efforts of President of the European Union Martin Schulz and Chinese President Wen Jiabao, this crisis was averted and did not lead to greater military escalations and the countries would begin to amp up the Open Skies Treaty once more in order to fix their differences. However, the space agencies of the European Union (ESA) and People's Republic of China (CNSA) and their space forces (EUSF and CNSF) were the first to come to terms and agree to keep and strengthen their existing cooperative ties, thus there were no clashes in space and on other celestial bodies. 
2009 sees the People's Republic of China become the second largest economy in the world, behind the European Union, as it is virtually unaffected by the Great Recession and it has built a massive maglev high speed rail network and done other massive infrastructure and economic projects as part of Keynesian economic stimulus, with countries like Japan, Soviet Union and the United States, the countries it surpassed having a far slower recovery from the Great Recession. This has helped China elevate itself as an economic and military power rivalling that of the European Union, the Soviet Union, Japan and the United States.
Hamas, a Palestinian anti-semitic and radically islamist terrorist organization, takes over the Gaza Strip, something which has alarmed Israel and Palestine, with Ehud Barak, PM of Israel and Mahmoud Abbas, President of Palestine, one from the Labour Party and the other from the Palestine Liberation Organization taking action to fix this. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) would have a 7 month siege of Gaza until Hamas was defeated and Gaza would fall back under Palestinian control, removing Hamas from power. Luckily this didn't require the intervention of a foreign power like the European Union and the United States and instead was solved by Israel and Palestine themselves. The Gaza Strip would be returned to Palestine after a brief occupation by the IDF. 
A Chinese probe sent to study Japan's large magnetosphere has been able to finally detect the long-hypothesized presence of metallic hydrogen within Jupiter's hot and gravitationally compressed interior. Metallic hydrogen A European probe has also been able to in the same year confirm the presence of metallic hydrogen within Saturn's interior as well, confirming that the very intense pressures within these large gas giants can indeed cause hydrogen to become a partially liquid metal. Metallic hydrogen is known to be an electrical conductor and it is also hypothesized to be a superconductor at room temperature, although this isn't confirmed (the second part).
CEO Elon Musk of the company SpaceX moves to the planet Mars, which has become a new hub for human exploration as it is the most populated (by humans) planet besides Earth. He has done this using his new Starship rocket, which is the world's largest and most powerful nuclear fusion rocket and it also provides quite the living space for 100 people on his trip. Besides himself, he has brought an armada of libertarian Musk fans, with his goal being to turn Mars into an independent Wild West of the Solar System. He and his fans (that were willing to go along with him on this journey) settled in the American territory of Mars, in an unpopulated part. Who knows what the wild man is planning to do. His company SpaceX has become a pretty popular company, especially in the realm of space tourism, even at times beating Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, the pioneers of this industry, which has allowed Elon Musk to become a very wealthy billionaire, in the realm of Bill Gates and Larry Ellison.
===The 2010s===
*2010:
At the Antihydrogen Large Physics Apparatus (ALPHA), CERN has been able to contain a record 400 antihydrogen atoms, using these atoms, even if they live for a very short period of time, to research the spectral propreties of antihydrogen. In other news, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer 2 on the International Space Station (ISS) has confirmed that it has detected 25 antihydrogen, 15 antihelium-2 and 15 antihelium-3 atoms over the course of its observations, this being because of properties of the Van Allen radiation belt and Earth's magnetic field that allows for these atoms to form in the first place. Antimatter can be very useful in many things and as such, these scientific efforts are pretty important for our understanding of not just physics, but also of technologies like medical imaging, which requires positrons.
A Boeing 757 co-pilot would crash the Boeing 757-231 plane into the Marriner S. Eccles building of the United States government as part of a suicide attack. The plane took off at 9:26 AM, after a 26 minute delay. The plane carried around 102 passengers on a transcontinental flight from Washington D.C. to Los Angeles, meaning the plane had in total around 40 000 liters of fuel (biofuel). The co-pilot had 22 years of flight experience as a 757 co-pilot up to that point, also having 6 years of flight experience as a Cessna pilot, meaning he was skilled and could perform the maneuvers required to hit the building. He was for most of his flight career pretty normal, although after the 2008 recession he would grow more radical, turning to libertarian thinkers like Ron Paul and even worse thinkers like , believing that the United States was being destroyed from its very core and that it required a laissez-faire revolution to restore it, starting it with destroying the main Fed building, according to diaries found by the FBI in his D.C. home and forum posts and he also believed in a series of conspiracy theories, like the CIA assassinating JFK. The plane would be hijacked at 10:00 AM, 34 minutes after it took off, when the pilot went to the bathroom, he locked the reinforced cockpit door and had used tear gas to subdue the air marshall before hand and then tranquilized him. It seems metal detectors failed to find these. He would turn right back towards DC, announcing that the plane was returning to the airport (in actuality, it was going to hit the Fed building) and despite a passenger resistance beginning at 10:14 AM after realizing what was going on, the reinforced door meant that they couldn't get through and it was too late when the plane hit the building at 10:31 AM, killing all 102 passengers plus the two pilots (including the hijacker co-ilot) and the air marshall, but also killing an additional 847 people in the building, totaling 952 casualties, this being the single worst terrorist attack in US history (as 9/11 was averted) but luckily, Ben Bernanke, Fed Chairman and the Treasury Secretary survived as they weren't in the building at that moment. The Boeing 757-231 hit the building at 901 km/h and had hit the northwest portion of the building and reached a low altitude of 14 meters upon impact, meaning that it was very visible to people on the street and had even deafened some people temporarily with its 120-130 decibel sound. A huge part of the building was destroyed on impact and heavy fires were initiated due to the tens of thousands of liters of sustainable aviation fuel. 
The European Space Agency (ESA) announces the completion and opening of the Extremely Large Telescope, the world's largest telescope, is made of 5 mirrors, with the primary mirror being 39 m in diameter, the secondary mirror 4 m in diameter, the tertiary mirror 4 m in diameter, quaternary mirror 2 m in diameter and the quintary mirror is 3 m in diameter. It was built at record speed and was opened in record time, being opened in 2010, 2 years after construction began. It has a light gathering area 250 larger than Hubble (1000 m^2). It will be supported by adaptive optics, six laser guide star units and multiple large science instruments and will correct for atmospheric distortion. Its goal is to look for Earth-like exoplanets and other extrasolar planets, but also the direct imaging of larger planets and characterization of their atmospheres. Furthermore, the ELT's suite of instruments will allow astronomers to probe the earliest stages of the formation of planetary systems and to detect water and organic molecules in protoplanetary discs around stars in the making. Thus, the ELT will answer fundamental questions regarding planet formation and evolution. By probing the most distant objects the ELT will provide clues to understanding the formation of the first objects that formed: primordial stars, primordial galaxies and black holes and their relationships. Studies of extreme objects like black holes will benefit from the power of the ELT to gain more insight into time-dependent phenomena linked with the various processes at play around compact objects. The ELT is designed to make detailed studies of the first galaxies. Observations of these early galaxies with the ELT will give clues that will help understand how these objects form and evolve. In addition, the ELT will be a unique tool for making an inventory of the changing content of the various elements in the Universe with time, and to understand star formation history in galaxies. One of the goals of the ELT is the possibility of making a direct measurement of the acceleration of the Universe's expansion. Such a measurement would have a major impact on our understanding of the Universe. The ELT will also search for possible variations in the fundamental physical constants with time. An unambiguous detection of such variations would have far-reaching consequences for our comprehension of the general laws of physics. 
In the People's Republic of China, elections for President unfold, the candidates being: Hu Jintao of the Communist Party of China (CPC), Ma Ying-jeou of the Kuomintang Party, Bo Xilai of the Socialist Labour Party of China, Chen Weidong of the Maoist Communist Party of China (MCPC) and James Soong of the People's First Party. The CPC is officially a far-left party, adhering to socialism with chinese characteristics, but in practice it is a center to center-left party, being in favor of democracy , free speech, the rule of law initiated by Zhao Ziyang and is in favor of the capitalist economic reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping and expanded by Zhao Ziyang and subsquent leaders. It is sort of the dominant party within the country and its candidate is Hu Jintao, who was endorsed by the president from 2000-2010, Wen Jiabao. The Kuomintang is a centre-right party, believing in a form of moderate nationalism while also advocating for more conservative economics, believing that the capitalist reforms of initiated in the 1980s and 1990s should be taken further and that China should increase the amount of free trade agreements it is in. It is led by Ma Ying-jeou. The SLPC is led by Bo Xilai and it is a left-wing party, who is opposed to the capitalist reforms done by the CPC due to the inequalities generated by the capitalist reforms, seeking insted socialist economics and also it is socially conservative, however it is pro-democracy. The PFP led by James Soong is a simple centrist nationalist party while the MCPC led by Chen Weidong is a party that seeks to return to the Maoist past of fully state-planned socialism and totalitarianism, believing that to be been the better state of China than the one today. Hu Jintao of the CPC would win a majority, 57%, meaning the CPC gets 1696 seats, with the other parties getting less and it means Hu Jintao becomes president.
The interplanetary presence of humanity continues to grow as the Moon's population grows to a whopping 3.2 million people, the population of Mars grows to a record 400 000 people, the population of Titan grows to 50 000 people, the population of Asteroid Belt grows to 20 000 people, the population of Mercury grows to 10 000 people, the population of Venus orbital stations grows to 2 500 people, the population of Europa grows to 2000 people and the population of Enceladus grows to 1000 people. However, a huge chunk of the human population is still on Earth as there are 7 billion people, just recently hitting this milestone. The Moon has around 5000 satellites orbiting it, these being artificial, human made satellites, while Mars has 3000, Titan has 2000, Venus has 1000, Europa has 300, Mercury has 250 and Enceladus has 200. Earth has an overwhelming amount of satellites at 120 000, providing very accurate navigation data, very fast internet and great access to telecommunications through satellite TV, with the problem of space junk being at least somewhat mitigated through sustainable space junk practices and space junk removal missions.
*2011:
*2012:
*2013:
*2014:
*2015:
*2016:
*2017:
*2018:
*2019:
===The 2020s===
*2020:
*2021:
*2022:
*2023:
*2024:
Category:Timelines
Category:The Timeline of a Space Lover