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In 1958, Project Orion was formed at General Atomics (a defense contractor), seeking to design spacecraft powered by nuclear pulses — in other words, bombs. The project designed incredibly large vessels, with theoretical sizes ranging up to 400 meters in diameter and weighing 8,000,000 tons. The ships were intended to travel to Saturn and Venus carrying large crews — but the project ended in the early 1960’s without building a full-scale vehicle.
The project involved, among others, physicist Freeman Dyson. Nearly forty years after the project was canceled, you can listen to Dyson’s son George describe Project Orion in a TED talk from 2002. He includes a variety of insider info, and it’s fascinating stuff (if you can get past his somewhat haphazard delivery):
George Dyson went on to write Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship. You can also learn more about Project Orion on Wikipedia, or at this fan page.
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The Orion drive is one of the most efficent and least complex spacecraft drives one can imagine. I used this methodof propulsion in my novel, THE HIVE, as China attempts to beat a US/Russian/EU mission to an alien artifact that has been discovered inside the solar system.
Chris Berman
http://www.freewebs.com/chrisbfla
posted by Chris Berman on 1-7-2009 at 8:40 pm
I was one of two illustrators assigned to the Orion Project in the early sixties, working on model 2, an eighty-foot diameter craft the size and shape of Mt. Palomar observatory. I was skeptical until I saw footage of scale model tests off Pt. Loma. Our job was to envision hypothetical scenes of the Orion being deployed in potential space exploration and produce full-color hand renderings (pre computer) for presentation purposes. Efforts to obtain copies of the work I did has hit a brick wall; everything from that period is still classified.
posted by James Bryant on 7-6-2009 at 10:27 pm