They expected to start their grand tour by 1970. But when I looked at the page for Dyson’s book on Amazon, I found a review by an influential reader, one Jeff Bezos. Wrote Bezos: “For those of us who dream of visiting the outer planets, seeing Saturn's rings up close without intermediation of telescopes or charge-coupled devices, well, we pretty much *have* to read ‘Project Orion.’ In 1958, some of the world's smartest people, including famous physicist Freeman Dyson (the author's father), expected to visit the outer planets in ‘Orion,’ a nuclear-bomb propelled ship big enough and powerful enough to seat its passengers in lazy-boy recliners. Well, we’re making progress on the first type of nuclear rocket, and for the moment I guess I’ll just have to be content with that. And there’s an argument that this treaty doesn’t effectively ban nuclear explosions used for space propulsion. The Limited Test Ban Treaty prohibits nuclear explosions in outer space, but among space major powers only the United States and Russia are parties France and China, for example, are not. Kennedy reportedly gave a one-word answer: “ Attitude.”) (Asked the difference between the Atlas rockets that launched astronauts into space and the Atlas missiles aimed at Moscow, President John F. Some might argue that nuclear explosives would violate the Outer Space Treaty’s provision forbidding “nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction” in orbit, but nuclear explosives aren’t necessarily nuclear weapons. The Orion never flew (though a model powered by high explosives called the “ Hot Rod” did), but maybe it’s time. Will Bezos get his wish to visit outer planets? Orion worked better when it was big and could in theory have attained a fraction of the speed of light, and certainly would have been fast enough to go anywhere in the solar system in a reasonable time. (The Orion team’s motto was “Saturn by 1970.”) All of this is recounted in George Dyson’s fascinating book, Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship. Specialized bomblets would go off below a big pusher plate, shoving the spacecraft (hard!) in the other direction. Orion was a spaceship powered by (small) nuclear explosions. Not the boring space capsule of the same name being developed today, but the project of the 1960s that involved eminent physicist Freeman Dyson and famed nuclear weapons designer Ted Taylor. Nuclear thermal propulsion is great, but if you want real performance, you have to go with another kind of nuclear propulsion: Orion. Nuclear thermal rockets are about twice as efficient as the best chemical rockets.īut I mentioned that there are two kinds of nuclear rockets. The only way to have both at once, high efficiency and high thrust, is to go nuclear. Generally, the problem with rocket engines is that you can either make them highly efficient but with very low thrust (like ion drives) or give them powerful thrust with low efficiency, like a chemical rocket. ( Chemical rockets, like we use today, depend on a chemical reaction - basically, a controlled chemical explosion - to produce the hot gas.) Back during the 1960s, we experimented with nuclear rockets of this type, known as “nuclear thermal rockets,” under projects Rover and NERVA. The first type of nuclear rocket uses a nuclear reactor to heat a reaction mass - hydrogen, or even water - and expels it from a thrust chamber as fast-moving gas. Shouldn’t we have nuclear rockets by now?Īctually, we had them a long time ago. In the 1960s, the United States experimented with two types of nuclear rockets. One is now in the budget again, and I think the other should be.
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