One of the problems of living such a busy work life is falling behind on reading books that have been around for a while. I finally have managed to complete “Project Orion” by George Dyson, the son of the famed scientist and writer, Freeman Dyson. The book recounts the story of how various US government agencies and some private contractors got together in the late 1950s and early 1960s – the project was finally halted in 1965 – to develop a rocket that would be launched by firing nuclear bombs underneath it. The basic idea was that you could put a seriously large rocket into space and fly it major distances – such as to Mars – by firing a nuke underneath the rocket, and use the force of the blast to push against a plate underneath the craft. By using this method, craft could travel far further than using the liquid fuel rockets developed at the time by the likes of von Braun and other engineers. There is a lot of complex engineering and scientific material in this book, which may send the head of a non-scientist spinning, but after working through this book, I get the strong impression that there is no insuperable obstacle to the technology actually working, although there seem to be practical issues such as how to avoid nuclear fallout problems near launch sites and how to avoid areas becoming seriously contaminated. Even so, we may hear again of nuclear rockets, although to assuage fears, I reckon they will be called plasma rockets instead.
Several things struck me about the period in the late 50s and early 60s when this project operated. First, the race by the US to beat the Soviets in space clearly was a massive impulse for technical and engineering advance, but it also sucked vast amounts of taxpayers’ money into a variety of projects, many of which came to nought. The book raises the old issue of whether military/other competition between states does generate significant new knowledge that would not otherwise be generated (I remain unconvinced). Second, there was a remarkably tolerant attitude among the public – at least until the mid-60s – towards big scientific projects of all kinds, including nuclear power. These space projects were cool. This was the age, after all, of Alan Shepherd, John Glenn and Chuck Yeager. All of these men were heroes in the media as well as renowned in their own profession. Nowadays, it is a different story, although as Dale Amon of this site regularly reminds us, a tremendous amount of good work is going on to promote commercial spacefaring. Even so, in the time when the rocket was being developed, the environmentalist lobby that has done so much to lobby for restrictions in certain areas was hardly visible on the radar. Reading about the scale and number of nuclear tests in the Pacific or in the western US desert, for example, reminds me of how long ago the 1950s are in some ways.
A final thought about this excellent book: it demonstrates how the US federal government and its agencies developed a huge and sprawling bureaucracy to run different space projects. At times, I found it hard to follow the ins and outs of all the various acronyms representing different agencies of government as the scientists and adventurers begged and campaigned for funding. After a while, I started to drown in alphabet soup. After reading this remarkable book, I am more convinced than ever that when space flight technologies really do take off, they must do so as far away from the maw of the State as possible.
And on that final note, here is an author I really recommend.
Project Orion was brilliant and in the 60s the essentials of lifting aircraft carriers into space were solved (with gigantic problems of fall-out etc). The really cute thing was the economies improved with larger launchs! In this way it was the same as scaling the ekranoplan (GEV/WIG) concept that the bigger the better.
But short of a general evacuation of the planet nobody (not even me) is gonna wear that number of atmospheric Hydrogen bomb blasts.
The space elevator is the next option. Goddamn it that would be awesome.
Or some fucker could just go ahead and build a SSTO variable cycle space-plane. It’s been discussed since at leas Eugene Sanger in the 20s.
And I guess in the context of the 50s/60s space race it does seem more pacific to launch a rocket on top of a bomb than vice versa.
Very interesting book. I think it was Dan Delong’s copy (maybe Doug Jones), and I read it in the offices of XCOR the day after the first SpaceShipOne 100km high flight.
Seemed appropriate 🙂
Despite the coolness of Orion, the complete insanity of Project Pluto was a lot more fun.
You will find more about Project Orion in John McPhee’s book, “The Curve of Binding Energy”. McPhee wrote a long profile of nuclear physicist and bomb designer Ted Taylor, and described Taylor’s progress to working on non-proliferation. The description of Taylor taking apart a flashlight and placing a cigarette at its focus so her could light the cigarette with a nuclear bomb is interesting. Taylor touring New York and Boston describing how small a bomb it would take to destroy various monuments and buildings (including the WTC) is eerie.
Nuclear power for in-space propulsion is still a live idea. A few years ago Sean O’Keefe at NASA tried to get a nuclear powered trip to Jupiter called Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer (JIMO) going. It a great idea because when the probe got to its targets it would have a large amount of power for its science package. A huge increase over what is available with solar arrays or RTGs.
The project stumbled when the Vision for Space Exploration i.e. Moon & Mars became the agency’s central strategy. Its now on the far back burner but someday they could revive it. Nuclear ion propulsion makes sense and I’m sure that someday it will be the preferred way to move around the solar system.
The space elevator project is cool, but who is going to write the liability insurance ? If something goes wrong it could hit the Earth with the pent up energy of several hydrogen bombs.
I saw a fascinating TV program about Project Orion. It’s the sheer excitement of the age – scientists able to dream outrageous dreams and blow up as many nukes as they liked just to see what happened.
The idea was to blow up a nuke under the ship roughly every second. This clearly caused “a bit of a jolt”, so basically, the bigger and heavier the ship was, the better; a lightweight construction would just accelerate too much between each jolt. They envisaged something roughly the size of a navy submarine.
Freeman himself had a wonderful glint in his eye when talking about what a sight it would be, rising from a launch pad in the ocean.
And then there’s Project Babylon, with its famous but somewhat controversial patron.
I’ve been curious for some time as to whether it would have worked. I’ve got a suspicion there’s some sort of problem with it – or why has nobody pursued the idea since? – but I’ve never found out what.
Possibly that it can’t really be used as a weapon, unlike rocket-based launch systems (immovable, and too easily located and countered), so there’s maybe less interest in funding.
Of course, you would still need rockets to get more fragile cargos launched – but it ought to be able to provide abundant raw materials in space. Physics only imposes a cost of about 20 kWhrs per kilogram to escape – something like twice its weight in gasoline. All the rest is a consequence of having to carry your fuel along with you.
Nuclear powered ion drive makes a great deal of sense once you’re up there – the problem has always been the first couple of hundred kilometres. But there’s many more ways than reaction engines of approaching that problem.
There’s an article on Space Review about that very point.
See http://thespacereview.com/article/920/1
Basically, due to some modern cleverness, the idea of launching payloads into space from a Supergun seems quite feasible.
Manuel,
Excellent! I wonder if that’s what ‘BFG’ really stands for? I can think of an alternative.
Last year in Canada I visited the National Film Board archive and watched a documentary about ‘nuclear engineering’.
The first real project would have been the creation of a new, sea-level Panama Canal, using about 1000 nuclear bombs.
Cancelled, thankfully.
A Project Orion launch was used in the Larry Niven/Jerry Pournelle book Footfall. Very cool, good book too.
Taylor,
Only the ascender/descenders would fall hard. Assuming they weighed no more than the heaviest aircraft flying today, they would come straight down from a relatively stationary start and land in the vicinity of the earth end of the elevator. Furthermore, I highly suspect that, in order to convince passengers to board, each a/d would be equipped with a parachute made out of the same super-ultra-light weight material as the elevator ribbon and sized for a soft landing.
The ribbon itself would fall like the very lightweight ribbon it is. The problems with a ribbon failure would be not at all cataclysmic but rather of the “what do we do with this big friggin mess of thousands of miles of the stuff” nature. But even that I suspect would be solved to some extent by scavengers taking as much of the stuff as they could. It would probably be commercially recycled as other products. (Unless it gets really cheap to make, not likely yet.) It would probably make an excellent matrix to use in carbon fiber composite construction. A ribbon failure could be following by a bunch of really tall skyscrapers made out of carbon fiber.
The bigger problem would be the space end of things flying off into space without its tether to earth. But that distance and direction can be well calculated.
I seem to remember that the U.S. Navy put probes into space (“Jupiter C”?) but were not really allowed to talk about it much (so the Soviets got the credit – although it may be that S1 was the first probe to orbit the Earth going bleep bleep).
Rather similar to all those films about “breaking the sound barrier” that were still be made years after Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in the Bell X1 in 1947.
Of course the X plane program was sabotaged by the judgement to go for non reauseable rockets (although there are rumours that Yeager took an X15 into space years before anyone was supposed to have done).
In fact NASA even insisted on using its own rockets – till they got bored with them blowing up on the pad, and accepted military ones.
If there had to be a government space program I would have preferred a military controlled one – even better two military ones. One U.S. Navy and one U.S. Airforce (or for strict constitutionalists “United States Army Air Force”, as Section Eight, Article One of the Constitution does not give the power for a seperate Air Force even though balloons existed at the time – after all the United States went through W.W. II without a seperate Air Force) one.
As for space flight.
The logical way is well known.
Use a space plane to get up to a space station (using hotol type suck in technology to go most of the way, and PERHAPS a small rocket to finish the job) and then CHANGE SHIPS at the space station.
A big space ship (nuclear or not) is best built and kept in space anyway – not messing about in a gravity well like Earth.
However, even space planes have not been done (the Shuttle is not a proper space plane – it is a hybrid and, perhaps, a botched hybrid).
Which is irritating as nonnuclear suck in planes could not only go to a space station (perhaps with a bit of help) but could also go to the other side of the world (say Australia) in a couple of hours.
As for technolgy, the last period of really fast development was perhaps the United States in the late 1940’s – which carried on till the 1960s (everything from supersonic aircraft, to transistors and lasers).
But then taxes and government spending in the late 1940’s were tiny compared to now.
As late as 1950 total government (Federal, State and local) spending in the United States (even with overseas aid) was below 25% of G.D.P. (to put that in context, it about half of what it is in Britian at the moment).
The level that the Anglo Australian economist Colin Clark argued was still consistant with long term progress.
Since that time the burden has increased to such a level that real (as opposed to seeming) advance for civilization is not really to be expected.
“But American living standards are higher now than they were in 1950” – so they are (in some ways). But what has happened is that technolgical advance and capital investment has been exploited (that takes time).
Whether present living standards can be maintained is a moot point (although the United States is not quite the credit bubble economy Britain is – it is hardly healthy either. there is a American credit bubble financial system [although not as bad as the British credit money bubble] entitlement spending is out of control [although not as much as the British Welfare State] and manufacturing industry faces problems [although not as bad as in Britain]).
But certainly a “Jetsons” style high tech future of incredible living standards is not to be expected (and it would have been possible – had statism not increased).
As I type this I hear that the E.U. Central bank is shoving tens of billons of extra fiat money into the Euro banking credit bubble – because of trouble do with links to the American real estate bubble.
I wonder how many people know that the British one is worse than the American one.
Mid,
Absolutely right about the elevator tether. I just think they’re such an awesome idea. I thought of it myself in principle as a kid and then at university I met a girl writing a MSc thesis on the idea. I just thought “wow”. I mean they’d look so cool!
Paul,
My understanding is that the X-15 et al were dumped purely for Apollo. Apollo was wonderful but was essentially a stunt rather than part of a rational, long-term, programme of development. Then Apollo was canned and the cash went into the Shuttle and… now Nasa are back to the future with a moon-shot program which looks eerily like something Buzz Aldrin would find very familiar. But then Nasa seem to have more of a desire to expand more into office space than outer space.
As far as Britain is concerned… Well our space endeavours basically consist of putting a man up quite a tall ladder in Swindon… Hotol and it’s descendent Skylon looked great but are as far as I’m aware dead. Shame, Skylon looked like a proper space-ship and was a commercial venture.
Ah, but then aerospace in Britain was conclusively fucked-over by HMG since WWII.
I realize when I re-read my comment that I left out a lot of my non-obvious design and configuration assumptions (like ascenders designed capable of self contained re-entry lunar lander style plus a great many more). Obviously, parachutes don’t work until it gets down to the atmosphere etc but I quick posted less than half an answer.
Add me to the list of Nick and RAB for posting d’oh comments. Who’s turn next?
Shameless namedropping there, Bruce 🙂 What I find amusing about having a copy of that book here at the hangar is that George’s sister, Esther, is in investor in XCOR. It’s a very small planet, indeed.
Oh I fully intend to annoy the crap out of everyone in the rest home in a few decades from now by dropping your names at every opportunity, after you’re rich and famous.
Speaking of which … I happened to be wearing my Go Burt, Go shirt down the street here in Wellington two weeks ago when some random person stopped me and asked if I knew there’d been an explosion (I did). It *is* a small world and even here in NZ a lot of people know what is going on in Mojave.
I hate to disappoint, but Orion is unlikely to be revived. The reason, Freeman told me a few years ago, is that Orion was too expensive and would be unable to compete with, for example, the XCOR vehicles.
There were technical problems, also, but he thought that the cost was the killer.
NASA’s most recent foray into nuclear propulsion, on the other hand, foundered not because of cost but because of technical shortcomings. Among other things, the power to weight ratio was too low to yield more than marginal utility. Sean O’Keefe didn’t understand the importance of that ratio.
Yes, as I said Nick M., a “nonresuable rocket” – that is what the Apollo sat on – a Saturn 5 (not quite a “big firework” as it used liquid fuel and that concept was only developed in the 1920s – but close to a “big firework”).
The Shuttle is not a space plane – either of the rocket sort, of the various suck in sorts (which are better, at least till one gets to the edge of space).
It is a straight up rocket on the way up, and a glider on the way down.
As a non technical person the whole concept strikes me as crazy (comming in without power to deal with a problem?). I am not surprised there are problems – I am astonished that the thing works as well as it normally does.
When I heard (many years ago) that the hull was going to be built of aluminium and that engine was absurdly underpowered (and it was going to have to glide home every time) I dismissed the whole project as a “useless death trap” and I have (mostly) be proved wrong.
Paul, the films about breaking the sound barrier were made years after Yeager; the sound barrier was broken years before, by De Havilland(and sons), just not in level flight.
Interestingly, the Bell X1 was built after all the Miles M52 data was given to the Americans.
It was supposed to be a collaboration, but after the M52 was sold out, they decided not to collaborate.
The Bell X1 looked indentical; it was a rocket.
The M52 was a jet(with afterburner).
Attlee’s government cancelled the M52, claiming it was ‘too dangerous’.
This was when German ex-POWs were competing to volunteer to fly it, if no domestic pilot fancied the risk.
Six months after the X1 broke the sound barrier, an unmanned, 30% scale full working model of the M52
also broke the sound barrier in level flight.
It also had an all-moving tailplane(the American’s ‘big secret’) and while air-launched, the actual M52 would have taken off and landed conventionally, from a runway.
Yep.
Breaking the sound barrier first was a big deal.
A really big deal.
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