Project Orion: Saturn by 1970
By George Dyson RETROSPECT
What if the 1950s had just kept on going?
Fifty years ago tail fins, not seat belts,
were standard equipment on American cars. Russia
was ahead in space, but America was ahead on the
road. Sputnik I, weighing 184 pounds, was launched
on Oct. 4, 1957, and circled the Earth every 90
minutes for the next three months. Sputnik II, weighing 1, 120 pounds, followed on Nov. 3 and included
Laika, the pioneer of spacefaring dogs. Earth’s third
artificial satellite was launched by a 32-ton Jupiter-C
rocket built by the Chrysler Corporation, on Jan. 31,
1958. Explorer I weighed 31 pounds.
The race for space had begun. In Washington,
D.C., the Advanced Research Projects Agency (now
DARPA) was given a small office in the Pentagon
and assigned the task of catching up. NASA would
not exist until July of 1958. All three armed services
had competing designs on space. “If it flies, that’s
our department,” claimed the Air Force. “But they’re
called spaceships,” replied the Navy. “OK, but the
Moon is high ground,” answered the Army, who had
already enlisted rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun.
ARPA’s mission was to consider all alternatives,
however far-fetched. One of the alternatives, code-named Project Orion, was an interplanetary spaceship
powered by nuclear bombs. Orion was the offspring
of an idea first proposed, as an unmanned vehicle, by
Los Alamos mathematician Stanislaw Ulam shortly
after the Trinity atomic bomb test at Alamogordo,
N.M., on July 16, 1945. It was typical of Ulam to be
thinking about using bombs to deliver missiles, while
everyone else was thinking about using missiles to
deliver bombs.
With Sputnik circling overhead, Los Alamos bomb
designer Theodore B. Taylor (see MAKE, Volume 07,
page 188), who had recently moved to the General
Atomic Division of General Dynamics, decided Ulam’s
deserved another shot. “I was up all night and then I
got alarmed that things were getting big,” he recalls.
“Energy divided by volume is giving pressure, so the
pressures were out of sight, unless it was very big.
It got easier as it got bigger.”
According to Taylor, it was Charles Loomis, a former
Los Alamos colleague working in the adjacent office,
who said, “Well, think big! If it isn’t big, it’s the wrong
concept.” Taylor’s perspective shifted. On Nov. 3,
1957, the day that Sputnik II (with Laika aboard) was
launched, General Atomic issued T. B. Taylor’s Note
on the Possibility of Nuclear Propulsion of a Very Large
Vehicle at Greater than Earth Escape Velocities.
His proposal, submitted to ARPA in early 1958,
envisioned a 4,000-ton vehicle, carrying 2,600
5-kiloton bombs. ARPA wrote a check for $999,750
to start things off. Suggested missions ranged from
the ability to deliver “a hydrogen warhead so large
that it would devastate a country one-third the
size of the United States” to a grand tour of the
solar system that Orion’s chief scientists envisioned
as an extension of Darwin’s voyage of the Beagle :
a four-year expedition to the moons of Saturn,
including a two-year stay on Mars.
Could you blow something up
without blowing it up? The answer
appeared to be yes.
“Saturn by 1970,” projected the physicists. “
Whoever controls Orion will control the world,” claimed
General Thomas Power, commander in chief of the
Strategic Air Command. An Air Force review of the
project concluded: “The uses for Orion appear as
limitless as space itself.”
At the center of General Atomic’s new 300-acre
campus in La Jolla, Calif., near Torrey Pines, was
a circular technical library, two stories high and
135 feet in diameter — exactly the diameter of the
4,000-ton Orion design. The library provided a
sense of scale. Ted Taylor would point to a car or a
delivery truck, the size of existing space vehicles,
and say, “This is the one for looking through the
keyhole.” Then he would point to the library and
say, “And this is the one for opening the door.”
Orion was to be a one-cylinder external combustion engine: a single piston reciprocating within the
combustion chamber of empty space. The ship,
egg-shaped and the height of a 20-story building,
is the piston, armored by a 1,000-ton pusher plate
attached by shock-absorbing legs. The first 200
explosions, fired at half-second intervals with a
total yield equivalent to some 100,000 tons of TNT,
would lift the ship from sea level to 125,000 feet.
Six hundred more explosions, gradually increasing
176 Make: Volume 12
