So here I am, mapping one idea after another and nuking hundred and hundred pages of blah blah blah techno-babble. It's like Sisyphus and his goddamn rock.
Last victim of the trimming is 1972, a gargantuan chapter, way too long. Will probably extract the whole damn thing into a separate file, keep some few bits and nuke everything else into oblivion.
Main problem is that NASA has way too much options on its plate, and if each one is detailed, the whole thing balloons out of control.
So, without fanfare...
January 1972
With the Shuttle miserable demise the last bit of Mueller and Paine Space Task Group, Integrated Program Plan was dead and buried. But Nixon needed California aerospace workers votes for the coming presidential election, so early 1972 he lit a fire under NASA ass to start anew – and quickly. He made clear it would be manned spaceflight last chance. Mercifully for the space agency George Low, then James Beggs, got the message and produced a blueprint by July 1972.
It was like a blizzard. A series of contractor bidding wars raged: for rockets, manned spaceships, space tugs, space station designs. The new blueprint had also to take into account present and future lunar exploration; an hypothetical reborn space shuttle; and leave enough money for big space science missions: Hubble, Viking, HEAO, Grand Tour.
At the end of the day, the new NASA long range plan, presented to Nixon on July 4, 1972 focused on a modular space station as its centerpiece; supported by Big Gemini crew taxi, Apollo lifeboat, and Agena logistic vehicles. Truth was, the space station program was calibrated to keep the Shuttle and the Moon afloat.
The Shuttle, because a rematch was bound to happen... someday: to make the Space Station logistics more affordable; even if the case for a Shuttle II was troubling... and precarious.
The Moon: because nobody could figure what the fuck were the Soviets were doing there. So better to keep lunar exploration alive, with or without Apollo: just in case.
...
NASA got Big Gemini on Titan IIIM, with support from the Air Force. To apease North American Rockwell, Apollo would survive: as a space station lifeboat. The ubiquitous Agena got the space tug job and also unmanned logistics to complete Big Gemini – rebranded Helios - with a common pressurized module. The remaining stock of Saturn IB would be expanded, and so would the last Saturn Vs, to lift a modular space station.
The said station used S-IVB and S-II hulls, dry-workshop style. Overall shape was of a four blade propeller: S-II as the hub, S-IVB as the blades. The station would de facto provide a colossal volume to its crew: Skylab, cubed. Skylab B was to be dismantled: its workshop turned into a ground based mockup, its ATM dispatched to the new space station.
The Air Force and NASA accepted to study a merge-up of Saturn IB and Titan IIIM in the shape of the SATAN launcher: SRMs with S-IVB on top, eventually with a more powerful engine than old J-2. It would be complementary of the hypothetical Shuttle II, both using a XLR-129 which was de facto funded: as was the F-1A.
And thus...
S-IC survived, on Saturn V and perhaps as the Shuttle II booster; gaining the F-1A in the process;
S-II survived, on Saturn V and as a space station dry workshop module;
S-IVB survived, as a space station dry workshop module and upper stage with the XLR-129;
Apollo survived, as the space station lifeboat;
And some bit of the LM also survived, as the Apollo Telescope Mount.