Status
Available
Call number
Publication
Allen Lane (2002), Hardcover
Description
The race to the moon dominated space flight during the the 1960s yet, during the late 1950s and early 1960s, the US Government sponsored a project that could possibly have sent 150 people on expeditions to Mars or Saturn.The project was code-named Orion and centred upon the effort to develop a fast, manoeuvrable, nuclear-powered space vehicle for long-range voyages in space. The proposed 4000-ton spaceship would be propelled by nuclear bombs but, strictly classified, the project was never given a chance to succeed or fail - due partly to its apparent absurdity - but its mix of sublime physics, madcap engineering, and a cast of Cold War warriors and would-be inter-galactic engineers made the mission a tantalising what if story.In this book George Dyson, son of physicist Freeman Dyson, one of the original project team, pieces together the story his father could only tell him in fragments at the time.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member RobertDay
This book tells the story of one of the most audacious proposals ever to emerge from America's military/industrial complex - the creation of spaceships powered by exploding atom bombs. Improbable though that may sound, the American government expended considerable sums of money and tied up a team
The project arose out of the wartime work on the Manhattan Project; after the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there were those in the scientific community who were exceptionally conflicted over what they had done. On the one hand, they were deeply engaged in the scientific problems that building atomic bombs posed. On the other, they could not avoid a sense of responsibility for the massive loss of life they had enabled. "The physicists have known sin", said Robert Oppenheimer; and Edward Teller was a vocal proponent of the peaceful uses of nuclear weapons, such as using atomic bombs to speed civil engineering projects. Using such weapons to power a spaceship fell into this category.
There was a side-effect of the proposal. For various technical reasons, the science and technology worked better when the spaceship was bigger. The early proposals for a test vehicle were for something with an all-up weight of 250 tons; the first full-scale prototype would have weighted 4,000 tons and have a diameter of 135 feet. Later plans called for vessels of 10,000 tons - and in those days before atmospheric testing was banned, these ships would be launched from ground level, with a 1.1 kiloton explosion every second.
This was not just a wild idea sketched on the back of an envelope; it was a wild idea that was fully costed, with the engineering worked through and the science fairly well understood (though there remained areas where there were unknowns which the team wanted to explore further in smaller-scale - but fully nuclear - tests. Eventually, though, it became untenable, mainly because of inter-service rivalry (the US Army considered anything nuclear to be their responsibility because it was ordnance, and lived in fear of getting to the Moon to find they had been beaten, not by the Soviets but by the US Air Force; the Air Force considered they should have the project because it involved flying; NASA was set up as a civilian organisation in the middle of this, but were already fairly committed to Wernher von Braun and his chemical rockets, even though the unit cost of lifting a ton of payload using Orion was a fraction - say a hundredth - of the cost of Apollo, and you still had a working spaceship at the end of the mission instead of a twelve-foot bit off the top of the rocket); and increasing concern over nuclear fallout and the various test ban treaties that came into force through the 1960s.
But the idea persists; current thinking about pulsed propulsion systems draws on the Orion concept, even though achieving fusion by targeting deuterium pellets with high energy lasers is at the same time far cleaner and more politically acceptable, though it presents more technical hurdles to leap. The original Orion concept is not dead, however; launching large vehicles rom the ground has been replaced by assembling them in high orbit via conventional launches, and then using nuclear explosions to break orbit for a voyage to Mars or beyond. And some of the papers on the Orion project are still classified, mainly those dealing with controlled yield micro-munitions.
The book itself is a bit of a mixture; there are quite detailed technical sections; other parts read a lot like personal memoirs, as George Dyson collected a lot of material via interview. His father, Freeman Dyson, was one of the theoretical physicists recruited to the project from the UK; oddly, the concept Freeman Dysion is best known for nowadays, the Dyson Sphere (a megastructure by means of which an advanced technological civilization can collect the entire energy output of its star; astronomers are debating over whether there are candidate stars currently visible which are having Dyson spheres constructed around them) is not mentioned in the book. The narrative works on a number of levels: there is the story of the project itself; an account of what the scientists from the Manhattan project did next after 1945; a company history of the defence contractor General Atomics, itself a sub-division of General Dynamics; and even elements of local and social history of post-war California. That GA attracted so many of the best minds on the planet to La Jolla must, in some way, have sown the seeds that led to Silicon Valley some thirty years later.
I had heard of Project Orion; but I had always assumed that it was purely a paper proposal. It was not. The USA gave all the signs of being quite prepared to cut metal on this project, making the utopian future of 'Star Trek' at least theoretically possible. There were those who wanted to offer the Soviet Union a place on the project as a gesture of goodwill and a step towards peace. This seems dreadfully naïve now; yet faced with the horror of nuclear war, the scientists reasoned, any attempt to forge goodwill between the superpowers would be worth trying. And the prize? Elon Musk talks today about making the human race into a space-faring civilization by the 2030s; Orion offered this prospect in the 1960s. The team were preparing mission profiles for a journey to the moons of Saturn by 1970; and the technology of a 10,000 ton spaceship offered the first chance for interstellar voyages. An ocean liner-sized spaceship held the prospect of being able to make the trip to Alpha Centauri, 4 light-years away, in 150 years; obviously, well beyond one lifespan, but in a large enough vessel, not impossible on a generational basis. Perhaps, the book closes by asking, Orion is an idea whose time may still yet come.
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of some of the finest minds for a period of seven years, exploring the feasibility of such a proposal and even carrying out a few (non-nuclear) experiments to prove the concept.The project arose out of the wartime work on the Manhattan Project; after the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there were those in the scientific community who were exceptionally conflicted over what they had done. On the one hand, they were deeply engaged in the scientific problems that building atomic bombs posed. On the other, they could not avoid a sense of responsibility for the massive loss of life they had enabled. "The physicists have known sin", said Robert Oppenheimer; and Edward Teller was a vocal proponent of the peaceful uses of nuclear weapons, such as using atomic bombs to speed civil engineering projects. Using such weapons to power a spaceship fell into this category.
There was a side-effect of the proposal. For various technical reasons, the science and technology worked better when the spaceship was bigger. The early proposals for a test vehicle were for something with an all-up weight of 250 tons; the first full-scale prototype would have weighted 4,000 tons and have a diameter of 135 feet. Later plans called for vessels of 10,000 tons - and in those days before atmospheric testing was banned, these ships would be launched from ground level, with a 1.1 kiloton explosion every second.
This was not just a wild idea sketched on the back of an envelope; it was a wild idea that was fully costed, with the engineering worked through and the science fairly well understood (though there remained areas where there were unknowns which the team wanted to explore further in smaller-scale - but fully nuclear - tests. Eventually, though, it became untenable, mainly because of inter-service rivalry (the US Army considered anything nuclear to be their responsibility because it was ordnance, and lived in fear of getting to the Moon to find they had been beaten, not by the Soviets but by the US Air Force; the Air Force considered they should have the project because it involved flying; NASA was set up as a civilian organisation in the middle of this, but were already fairly committed to Wernher von Braun and his chemical rockets, even though the unit cost of lifting a ton of payload using Orion was a fraction - say a hundredth - of the cost of Apollo, and you still had a working spaceship at the end of the mission instead of a twelve-foot bit off the top of the rocket); and increasing concern over nuclear fallout and the various test ban treaties that came into force through the 1960s.
But the idea persists; current thinking about pulsed propulsion systems draws on the Orion concept, even though achieving fusion by targeting deuterium pellets with high energy lasers is at the same time far cleaner and more politically acceptable, though it presents more technical hurdles to leap. The original Orion concept is not dead, however; launching large vehicles rom the ground has been replaced by assembling them in high orbit via conventional launches, and then using nuclear explosions to break orbit for a voyage to Mars or beyond. And some of the papers on the Orion project are still classified, mainly those dealing with controlled yield micro-munitions.
The book itself is a bit of a mixture; there are quite detailed technical sections; other parts read a lot like personal memoirs, as George Dyson collected a lot of material via interview. His father, Freeman Dyson, was one of the theoretical physicists recruited to the project from the UK; oddly, the concept Freeman Dysion is best known for nowadays, the Dyson Sphere (a megastructure by means of which an advanced technological civilization can collect the entire energy output of its star; astronomers are debating over whether there are candidate stars currently visible which are having Dyson spheres constructed around them) is not mentioned in the book. The narrative works on a number of levels: there is the story of the project itself; an account of what the scientists from the Manhattan project did next after 1945; a company history of the defence contractor General Atomics, itself a sub-division of General Dynamics; and even elements of local and social history of post-war California. That GA attracted so many of the best minds on the planet to La Jolla must, in some way, have sown the seeds that led to Silicon Valley some thirty years later.
I had heard of Project Orion; but I had always assumed that it was purely a paper proposal. It was not. The USA gave all the signs of being quite prepared to cut metal on this project, making the utopian future of 'Star Trek' at least theoretically possible. There were those who wanted to offer the Soviet Union a place on the project as a gesture of goodwill and a step towards peace. This seems dreadfully naïve now; yet faced with the horror of nuclear war, the scientists reasoned, any attempt to forge goodwill between the superpowers would be worth trying. And the prize? Elon Musk talks today about making the human race into a space-faring civilization by the 2030s; Orion offered this prospect in the 1960s. The team were preparing mission profiles for a journey to the moons of Saturn by 1970; and the technology of a 10,000 ton spaceship offered the first chance for interstellar voyages. An ocean liner-sized spaceship held the prospect of being able to make the trip to Alpha Centauri, 4 light-years away, in 150 years; obviously, well beyond one lifespan, but in a large enough vessel, not impossible on a generational basis. Perhaps, the book closes by asking, Orion is an idea whose time may still yet come.
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LibraryThing member CharlesFerdinand
The story of the project to use nuclear bombs to propel spaceships. Truly amazing.
LibraryThing member WDMyers
Nicely written by the son of one of the principals. Seems like the most extreme science fiction, but all true. Every word.
Check mout Freeman Dyson and His son George in the excellent book "The Starship and the Canoe" by Kenneth Brower.
Check mout Freeman Dyson and His son George in the excellent book "The Starship and the Canoe" by Kenneth Brower.
Subjects
Awards
The Economist Best Books (2002.9)
Language
Original publication date
2002
Physical description
368 p.; 8.82 inches
ISBN
0713992670 / 9780713992670