Project Orion

[John Clark]

Just a few hours ago very a interesting documentary about project Orion was posted on YouTube: 

Earth to Mars in 10 Days

I've been fascinated by this idea for years, back in 1998 I posted the following to the old Extropian list, the video contains some details that I didn't know then because they were still classified top-secret in 1998:

===

I've been reading a little about an incredible idea taken very seriously in the late 50's and early 60's but today is almost completely forgotten, it was called Project Orion. The idea was to make a spaceship big enough for 150 people and all the equipment they could ever want and blast it into space. They wanted to make it 135 feet in diameter and 160 feet high and they wanted most of that space to be usable by people not wasted on fuel. They figured weight would be no problem, if a crew member wanted to bring along his antique bowling ball collection and his own personal barber chair there would be no objection. The advocates of this approach were not interested in low Earth orbit or even the moon, they were certain they could be on Mars by 1965 and Saturn by 1970, the leader of the project was determined to visit Pluto. And they figured all this would cost less than 10% what the Apollo moon project did.

You might think that these people must have been a bunch of crackpots, but it's not so. Nobel Prize winners Niels Bohr, Hans Bethe and Harold Urey were all enthusiastic advocates of the idea. Freeman Dyson thought the idea was so brilliant that he took a one year leave of absence from the prestigious
Institute of Advanced Study so he could work full time on the project.

Yes, there is a catch, Project Orion needed nuclear energy, even worse it needed nuclear bombs. The Orion spacecraft would contain 2000 nuclear bombs, most in the 20 kiloton range, the size of the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki. A bomb in a tank of water would shoot out the back of the ship, when it was 100 feet away it would explode, the water would hit a carefully designed 75 ton pusher plate and accelerate the ship. Between the pusher plate and the ship were 50 foot long gas filled shock absorbers to even out the jerk. They wanted everything to be as cheap as possible, so they asked the Coca-Cola company for the blueprints of one of their vending machines, then they scaled it up a little and planned to use it as the mechanism to dispense the bombs.
               
The pusher plate was obviously the most important part of the design. If you explode a powerful bomb near a circular plate of constant thickness it will shatter because of the uneven stresses that build up, but it turns out that if you carefully taper the plate and make certain that the explosion is dead
center, the plate will be extraordinarily resistant to damage. A layer on the plate will be vaporized by the heat but if some heavy protective oil is sprayed on it before each use it would be good for 2000 blasts. This beast was tough, if it was properly oriented the Orion Spacecraft could survive a 16 megaton H bomb blast from only two thousand feet away, a fact of more than passing interest to the military. Orion needed lots of radiation shielding to protect the crew, but weight was never an issue so this was no problem.
 
Wernher von Braun thought all this was a dumb idea, then he saw a movie of the launch of a one meter working model of Orion that shot 6 carefully timed high explosives chemical bombs out the back of the model, it rose 300 feet into the air in stable controlled flight. Wernher von Braun became a vocal
supporter of project Orion.
 
They planned to launch Orion from atop eight 250 foot towers in Jackass Flats Nevada. The first bomb would be tiny, just .1 kiloton (100 tons of TNT) exploded 100 feet below the craft and 150 feet above the ground, then a new and slightly larger bomb would be spit out the back every second for 50 seconds, the last bomb would be the largest, 20 kilotons, and by then the craft would be out of the atmosphere, the total yield of the 50 bombs would be 200 kilotons. The launch would have been a spectacular sight, it'd make the Space Shuttle look like a bottle rocket.

Project Orion was led by Ted Taylor, a mediocre physicist but a good inventor. Taylor had one unique talent, he has been called by some the best nuclear weapon engineer on planet Earth and the Leonardo da Vinci of nuclear bomb design. Taylor is the man who figured out how a two foot long 200 pound bomb could be made as powerful as the 12 foot long 10 ton World War 2 Nagasaki bomb. The reason the Orion spaceship was so much bigger and faster than anything we have today is that pound for pound such bombs have about a million times as much energy as any chemical rocket fuel.

Orion wasn't the only thing Taylor was interested in, he found a way to make a new type of nuclear bomb, one that would produce a highly directional blast. He designed a little one kiloton bomb that could blast a 1000 foot tunnel straight through solid rock, he wanted to build a cheap tunnel between New York and San Francisco and have a supersonic subway 3000 miles long.  

Considering the big controversy we had last year when a deep space probe was launched with just a few pounds of non weapon grade Plutonium on it to power the electronics it may seem incredible and irresponsible that anyone would even consider something as environmentally unfriendly as Orion, but we live in a very different world. At the time Orion was under serious study the USA was blowing up one megaton bombs deep under the sea and 300 miles in space and the USSR was blowing up 57 megaton bombs in the atmosphere, Orion seemed and indeed was pretty benign compared to that.

It all came to nothing of course, in 1963 the test ban treaty was signed stopping all nuclear explosions in space or the atmosphere making Orion illegal. The project died, but to this day most say it would have worked technologically if not politically.
 
Idea for a science fiction novel: A huge nickel iron asteroid is heading for Earth, it would take a 8 gigaton bomb to divert it but no existing rocket is nearly powerful enough to deliver such a huge payload to the asteroid. The Earth seems doomed, then our hero remembers Project Orion.

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

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[Tomasz Rola]

On Sat, Sep 20, 2025 at 02:55:20PM -0400, John Clark wrote:
> *Just a few hours ago very a interesting documentary about project Orion
> was posted on YouTube: *
>
> *Earth to Mars in 10 Days*
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVwlTsa9oMM&t=1459s>
>
> *I've been fascinated by this idea for years, back in 1998 I posted the

> following to the old Extropian list, the video contains some details that I

> didn't know then because they were still classified top-secret in 1998:*
> *===*

There was also Project Daedalus [1].

Yeah, I believe I have read about them both while still very young,
maybe in middle 1980-ties? Not too many details, but enough to fire up
imagination.

[...]
> *Yes, there is a catch, Project Orion needed nuclear energy, even worse it

> needed nuclear bombs. The Orion spacecraft would contain 2000 nuclear
> bombs, most in the 20 kiloton range, the size of the bomb that destroyed
> Nagasaki. A bomb in a tank of water would shoot out the back of the ship,
> when it was 100 feet away it would explode, the water would hit a carefully
> designed 75 ton pusher plate and accelerate the ship. Between the pusher
> plate and the ship were 50 foot long gas filled shock absorbers to even out
> the jerk. They wanted everything to be as cheap as possible, so they asked
> the Coca-Cola company for the blueprints of one of their vending machines,
> then they scaled it up a little and planned to use it as the mechanism to

> dispense the bombs.*

Nuke dispenser made from scaled up coke dispenser. Uh-hum. Okay.

[...]
> *Orion wasn't the only thing Taylor was interested in, he found a way to

> make a new type of nuclear bomb, one that would produce a highly
> directional blast. He designed a little one kiloton bomb that could blast a
> 1000 foot tunnel straight through solid rock, he wanted to build a cheap
> tunnel between New York and San Francisco and have a supersonic subway 3000

> miles long. *

They were so cavalier about using atomic power...

--

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Daedalus

--
Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... **
** **
** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomas...@bigfoot.com **