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
180 Make: Volume 13
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
