Some Of My Favourite Things #1

(I said before I was going to do a couple of lists. I've now decided not to, since the Internet is mostly made up of lists and pictures of cats. So I thought instead I'd start an occasional feature about machines I really like for one reason or another. Here we go!)

NASA is going back to the Moon on a ship called Orion. Its basically an upgraded Apollo capsule, and it is not the first space ship called Orion. Back in 1958, General Atomics started work on Project Orion, a fiery old-testament spaceship propelled by nuclear bombs. The thing was supposed to weigh 4000 tonnes, 400 of which made up a pushed plate connected to the rest of the ship by 5-storey high nitrogen filled shock absorbers. The plate was there to absorb the focused blast from fusion boosted fission devices thrown out the back of the ship. The thing was ridiculously primitive, yet incredibly powerful. It is the only proposed spaceship capable of taking off from the Earth's surface and performing an interplanetary voyage with a single stage. A scaled down version to fit a Saturn V upper stage was also proposed. The fallout would have killed people, which is why it was ultimately never built (the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 was the immediate reason), although a test of the pusher plate was performed with conventional explosives.

This is probably the most optimistic thing ever attempted by man. This was an interplanetary spacecraft that was supposed to be made from regular steel. The mass budget included a two tonne barber's chair. The missions were planned on the assumption that the General Atomics design team (which included physicist Freeman Dyson and bomb designer Ted Taylor) would be going along for the ride. This machine was a serious attempt to take the bombs that razed cities to the ground and use them to create for real the space opera adventures of the forties. It was Space Odyssey before Space Odyssey was even made.

Like most of spaceship proposals Orion was hopelessly uneconomic. By the time the designs were finally filed away, the only justification for its continued existence was the unfounded suspicion the the USSR was conducting a similar project. All that is left now are a few design projects under the much less alarmist heading of "pulsed plasma propulsion", and the General Atomics building- a cylindrical office the exact diameter of the 4000 tonne proposal.

Completely useless, absurdly dangerous, absolutely practical and God damned exciting.

References: Mostly taken from Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship by George Dyson. George is the son of Freeman, and interviewed first hand many of the people who worked for General Atomics. The book is a bit of a mess, but full of first hand accounts of an atomic spaceship.

There's also this: http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=679#more-679 which has a picture of the 4000t proposal,

and this: http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/index.html for all your atomic rocket needs.