Project OrionGeorge Dyson 2001
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Project Orion took place from 1957 to 1965 at General Atomic, a division of the General Dynamics Corporation established to develop peaceful uses for atomic energy, usually assumed to include everything nuclear except bombs. General Atomic was founded, in 1955, by Frederic de Hoffmann, a young physicist turned entrepreneur who sought to recapture the freewheeling spirit he had known at Los Alamos during the war. General Atomic attracted not only theoretical and experimental talent but the backing of politicians, financiers, and industrialists who, after the success of the Manhattan Project and its hydrogen-bomb successors, were eager to see what de Hoffmann’s colleagues might come up with next. There was a narrow window of opportunity between the launch of Sputnik and the commitment of the United States to an exclusively chemical approach to space. It was only a time like this and a place like General Atomic that gave a proposal as unorthodox as Orion a chance. Where else could a thirty-two-year-old physicist show up for work the day after Sputnik, start daydreaming about how many bombs it would take to put something the size of a nuclear submarine into orbit and spend the next seven years—with the support of General Dynamics, the AEC, the Air Force, and, to a small extent, even NASA—making a serious effort to get the idea off the ground?
De Hoffmann and Taylor secured a $5,000 study contract from the Albuquerque office of the Atomic Energy Commission, a formality that provided access to the classified information necessary to work on anything having to do with nuclear bombs. On November 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. The new project was named Orion—for no particular reason, says Taylor, who just picked the name out of the sky. Marshall Rosenbluth suggested the code name be spelled O’Ryan—to throw others off the trail.
By the beginning of 1958, plans to build Orion were taking form. Ted Taylor’s proposal, submitted to ARPA in early 1958, envisioned a 4,000-ton vehicle, carrying up to 2,600 bombs and capable of orbiting a payload of 1,600 tons. Dr. Taylor estimated that a fully completed spaceship could be achieved by 1963-1964 and would cost approximately $500,000,000, Second Lieutenant Ronald Prater, one of ARPA’s contract monitors, noted after a visit to General Atomic in November 1958. 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. Saturn by 1970, announced the physicists. Whoever controls Orion will control the world, claimed General Thomas Power, commander-in-chief of the Strategic Air Command.
In the early spring of 1958, General Atomic began moving from temporary quarters in the Barnard Street School in downtown San Diego to a spectacular facility on 300 acres of mesa above the beaches of La Jolla near Torrey Pines. The centerpiece 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, which included a cafeteria, 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.
Most technical references to Project Orion remain classified to this day. Even the titles of documents were often classified, leaving only occasional clues to their existence, for instance a reference to Ted Taylor and Marshall Rosenbluth’s original report on the possibility of Orion, identified in declassified Air Force correspondence only as GA-292, and by Air Force historians who note that it included all the necessary practical working features for a very large space vehicle... which was sent to ARPA and AFSWC early in 1958. Some of the reasons for this secrecy, such as Orion’s potential as a strategic deep-space weapons platform, are now obsolete. Other secrets, especially the details of how to build miniature, directed-energy nuclear explosives using very small amounts of plutonium, remain as sensitive as ever today.
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http://www2.ignatius.edu/faculty/decarlo/projectorion.htm Then again, you knew all that, Swamp Rat.