_RETROSPECT Project Orion: Deep Space Force _{By George Dyson}

The Moon was in; Saturn and Mars were out.

The first part of this article, “Project Orion: Saturn by 1970,” appeared in MAKE, Volume 12. It detailed the development in the late 1950s of Project Orion, an interplanetary spaceship to be powered by nuclear bombs. This portion of the article covers the envisioned deployment, closer to Earth, of a Deep Space Force. Orion was never built. Adapted from the book Project Orion, with new material.

“Although the ORION propulsion

device embraces a very interesting theoretical concept, it appears to suffer from such major research and development problems that it would not successfully compete for support,” wrote NASA administrator Richard Horner to ARPA director Herbert York in February 1960. The Moon was in; Mars and Saturn were out.

Following NASA’s rejection of Project Orion, a small group of officer-physicists at the Air Force Special Weapons Center in Albuquerque, N. M., kept the project team at General Atomic on life support. But continued Air Force funding, without a NASA mission, would require military applications that could justify advancing from a million-dollar feasibility study to the tens of millions it would take to begin development, starting with nuclear tests.

Possible military applications began with Freeman Dyson’s original suggestion that “to have an observation post on the Moon with a fair-sized telescope would be a rather important military advantage for the side which gets there first,” and grew more ambitious from there. “Space platforms should be examined also, as well as the movement of asteroids and the like,” suggested future Secretary of the Air Force Lew Allen in October of 1958.

“After NASA was formed, the Air Force had to justify supporting Orion on the grounds that it had military significance,” remembers Ted Taylor, one of the designers of Project Orion. “So I spent a lot of time thinking about that and really got carried away on crazy doomsday machines — things like exploding bombs deep under the Moon’s surface and blowing lunar rocks at the Soviet Union. There were versions of Orion in which the entire retaliatory ICBM force was in one vehicle, which was very hard, and any time anyone tried to fire at it, it would turn around and present its

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rear end at the bombs coming at it. We were doing something for the project that we didn’t want to do but had to, to keep it alive, we thought.”

A May 1959 Air Force briefing revealed some “possible military uses of the Orion Vehicle,” including reconnaissance and early warning, electronic countermeasures, anti-ICBM, and “ICBM, orbital, or deep space weapons.” Finally, there was “The Horrible weapon — 1,650-ton continent-buster hanging over the enemy’s head as a deterrent.”

The problem was how to distinguish the defensive from the offensive when deploying weapons in space. “Only delicate timing would determine whether satellite neutralizations were offensive or defensive,” explained a secret telex on “Global Integration of Space Surveillance, Tracking, and Related Facilities,” marked “For Eyes of the USAF Only,” from the commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command in Omaha, Neb., on May 31, 1959.

“There presently exist no military requirements beyond cis-lunar space,” a classified Air Force summary expounded. “However, one must note that one reason there are no military requirements for a deep space vehicle is simply that no one has ever before seriously considered sending a large, manned, useful payload to this area for military purposes.”

Was it crazy to imagine stationing

nuclear weapons 250,000 miles deep

in space? Or is it crazier to keep

them within minutes of their targets

here on Earth?

Air Force Capt. Donald M. Mixson stepped in to fill the gap. “He’d have been the first man on board,” says his partner, Col. Don Prickett. Mixson and Prickett saw Orion as a way to sustain the type of creative, fast-moving effort that the proliferation of peacetime bureaucracy was bringing to an end.

“Mixson and Prickett were fed up with the Air Force system and Orion was a way to put a burr under the Air Force saddle blanket,” explains Orion’s lead experimentalist, Brian Dunne. Mixson shuttled