His plan is simple; many of those who worked for or advocated space travel cited the science fiction of Robert A. Heinlein as their inspiration.
Proxmire's political career ended when this culture of science fiction fans boycotted Wisconsin cheese in response to his Golden Fleece Awards.
The new timeline is far more technologically advanced; solar power satellites can be seen in the night sky, a lunar colony exists, and a mission to Mars is underway.
The healthy Heinlein turned out to be as skilled an officer as he would have been an author, and is now an admiral with great influence over an equally healthy space program – he denies the Russians spacecraft, but has placed a number of cosmonauts on the Mars mission as payment for fusion bombs to be used in the ship's ORION drive.
[1] In 2010, however, Strange Horizons described it as "execrably toothless satire", calling it "desperately unfunny, unsophisticated, self-congratulatory stuff" that "reeks (...) of crassness",[2] while science fiction scholar Brooks Landon considered that what was most remarkable about the story was "its faith that Robert Heinlein was such an exceptional individual that his life would have changed the future no matter what his occupation.