Project Orion

Dr. Strangelove has been and always will be one of my favourite films. A masterpiece of the atomic era, that satirizes the tensions of the cold war and that came frighteningly closer to reality than many originally believed. But amidst the threat of nuclear war, and the quest for military superiority, began the space race.

Readers who are familiar with space flight may have heard of the ill-fated Project Orion¹, an idea for a spacecraft propelled by a large stockpile of nuclear weapons. Theoretically possible of reaching 10% of the speed of light, an Orion powered starship could reach Alpha Centauri in 44 years—less than a human lifetime. Not only that, but the technology needed to construct it has been readily available since the sixties².

Perhaps most interesting however, is that this was (and still is) a serious proposal, and backed by several recognizable names. Particularly that of Freeman Dyson, who most famously gives his name to the concept of the Dyson Sphere, a sparse shell of orbiting satellites surrounding a star using its light for power.

In 1968, he authored a paper entitled Interstellar Transport, which gave figures for the possible payloads of an Orion based design. There were several designs for ships, ranging in mass from 2,000 to 8,000,000 tonnes on the launch pad. That’s right. Orion would lift off from earth, 8Mt in weight, and make it into space, all on the backs of warheads specially designed to provide the maximum propulsion. Once in space, the ship would be capable of reaching anywhere else in the solar system within a matter of days or weeks. It’s worth mentioning that each launch would lead to a not-so-insignificant amount of fallout, and possibly civilian casualties—never mind the insanity of stacking several thousand bombs on top of each other and detonating them.

Unfortunately, the project was cancelled and no ships were ever produced. We can only wonder how the Space Race might have gone had the project continued.

I’ll try to write another post detailing Project Daedalus from the British Planetary Society soon, and its resurrection in the form of Project Icarus.

Footnotes