Project Orion

The nuclear pulse drive was conceived of H-bomb designers Stanislaw Ulam and Cornelius Everett at Los Alamos in 1955.

This lead to project Orion being developed by 1958 to make a spacecraft powered by mini nuclear bombs for propulsion, its design was workable and we could have landed on Mars well before 1969.

But after the "Bay of Pigs" leading to the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962 the space nuclear test ban treaty came into being in 1963, killing off project Orion. Finally funding was deleted entirely in 1965.

It is still interesting to view the ideas the General Atomics team had for exploring Mars and other solar destinations such as the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

It was also proposed that Orion could theoretically be used for interstellar voyages.

Comments on the Youtube film

Maybe one day this project will be revisited as the size of the bombs required and level of radioactive fallout level has improved greatly since the 1958 design. Shame the film kept showing as a backdrop the dramatic massive test nuclear explosions leading viewers to a false understanding of Project Orion.

The tonnage could now be reduced allowing for smaller more frequent bombs as ablative protection materials have progressed also computing power to control detonation, there may be ways to improve the lift efficiency of the blast using magnetic containment to shape the plasma produced. The issues of fallout are critical but as Freeman Dyson pointed out in the film that if the fallout was dramatically reduced it could become viable to fly, we already currently receive radiation fallout due to nuclear tests and from natural radioactive sources, it becomes an issue of mitigating risk to human health (1 million people each year die to traffic accidents yet we allow cars!).

Interesting to see some 1958 ideas for how Elon Musk is now working for a human Mars base.

Video by Rhys Taylor of Astronomical Institute, Prague Link to his site