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General Atomic’s secret Project Orion
The amazing San Diego atomic put-put rocket
“I was not down on the Apollo mission as many Orion people were.”
Jackass Flats, Nevada, is a barren stretch of parched nothing near Yucca Flats and Frenchman’s Flats, a region that the Air Force once tagged, in its silly-sinister fashion, “The Valley Where the Giant Mushrooms Grow.” It is a nuclear test site.
In 1958. Dr. Brian Dunne traveled from San Diego with Theodore Taylor and Freeman Dyson to look the place over for General Atomic’s secret Project Orion. Dunne was an explosives expert from Pasadena; Taylor was fresh from Los Alamos and a genius with fission bombs; Dyson was from the institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, where Einstein spent his last year's. From this desert wasteland the three wanted to launch an, immense planet-probing spacecraft powered by atomic bombs.
Project Orion ran at General Atomic for seven years, then stopped abruptly. Dunne, formerly Orion’s experimental director, lives now with his family in La Jolla. He directs a software corporation, Ship Systems, Inc., in Sorrento Valley. Orion, he believes, is a concept whose time will come again.
His reasons for so believing are a blend of the technical and aesthetic, and they begin with the immense power of a single, small nuclear weapon.
Says Dunne, “There’s this little thing on a cradle, the size of a watermelon, and you can’t imagine the energy in it. I’m used to high explosives, and there’s a real lot of energy in a watermelon-sized bundle of high explosive; but when you see the effects of a nuclear explosion, it just astounds you. When even twenty kilotons go off, the towers are completely vaporized. Completely. Except at the base where you see a few melted and twisted girders.”
Ahead of the all-consuming fireball, though, races a wave of thrust that can propel a steel cannonball, as in one test, or a spaceship. And this momentum wave, this potential rush, is far, far more powerful than the rockets that blasted the men of Apollo to the moon.
In fact, what is surprising about Apollo, according to Dunne, is not the wonderful power of a rocket that could hurl men to the moon. It is rather the wonderful trickiness employed to do this with essentially inadequate technology.
“I was not down on the Apollo mission as many Orion people were,” he says. “They couldn’t conceive of that working because they did calculations and they couldn’t conceive of the landing being possible. But the calculations that some of the Orioners made were based on a faulty premise. They didn’t take into account the possibility of a lunar orbit and then going down with a very light-weight vehicle.”
Despite the misgivings of some Orioners, Apollo did work, and it worked in exactly that way, by first establishing an outpost in lunar orbit and then descending to the surface of the moon in a lunar module. The combined weight of the command module, service module, and lunar module of Apollo was just under fifty tons.
The Orion concept differed completely from that of Apollo. Orion was a brute-force proposition. The design that had been settled upon at the close of the project called for a single bullet-shaped stage, with the passenger and crew compartments in the tip of the bullet. Small atomic bombs would be ejected by gas pressure through the rocket’s base, and a string of blasts would act upon a pusher plate to provide push.
In theory, such rockets could be very powerful. “There is no question in my mind,” says Dunne, “that you can push pay-loads in the 100,000-ton range with vehicles of this kind.” The Apollo missions, Saturn V boosters and all, weighed just 3,000 tons.
To the scientists, Orion was a beautiful idea. It promised to bring the cost of transportation to the moon down from the projected hundreds of dollars per pound to a per-pound cost of perhaps ten dollars. All by itself, the development of an Orion spaceship could make possible voyages to the planets and beyond. Finally, Orion represented a way of using the new tool of atomic energy for something other than murder.
Theodore Taylor, who conceived and directed Project Orion, confesses in his biography The Curve of Binding Energy (by John McPhee) that he felt part of the guilt of Hiroshima. Doubtless, that guilt contributed to the logic and justification of Orion.
The project began simply, almost as a whim. Taylor and Dunne had been working on a new kind of reactor for General Atomic. Headquarters was a converted schoolhouse on Barnard Street. The year was 1957. In October, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik.
Dunne remembers, “I called Taylor on the phone that night, and I raved on and on about this thing. It was a Sunday, I remember. It impressed me because it was such a tour de force. Just at that point I think he started thinking about space and coupling nuclear energy to space.”
Taylor’s first idea was that Orion would be doughnut-shaped, with a diaphragm covering the hole, something like a fat frisbee. He asked Dunne to put together some notions about what could be done in the way of experiments. Dunne did this, drawing on work that had been done at Los Alamos earlier.
In the spring of 1958, Taylor went to see General Atomic’s director, Frederich de Hoffman, to propose using nuclear weapons, bombs, for space propulsion. He got a green light.
“At that time,” Dunne says, “nothing was too far out for General Atomic.”
Having been beaten into orbit by the Soviets, the Feds were only too glad to foot the bill for research, a modest few million dollars. Roy Johnson, chief of the Advanced Research Projects Agency in Washington, told Taylor, “Everyone is making plans to pile fuel on fuel on fuel to put a pea into orbit. But you seem to mean business.”
Famed physicist, philosopher, and maybe prophet, Freeman Dyson took a year’s leave of absence from Princeton to sign up for this Buck Rogers stuff that was coming true at General Atomic.
“Dyson and Taylor were primarily interested in exploring the planets, particularly Mars and the rings of Saturn,” Dunne says in his soft voice. “Dyson envisaged trips to the outer planets, very big expeditions with very, very big payloads. That was their immediate goal, and they would have liked to do it in their lifetimes.”
In time, the doughnut idea for Orion was abandoned and the bullet configuration took its place. Taylor thought of exploding atomic “bomblets” in the bullet-shaped spacecraft’s wake. The force would act on a pusher plate and be transmitted through gas-filled shock absorbers to the ship itself. Whole laboratory complexes and flying cities could be launched in this way. (Dyson toyed with the idea of sending Chicago to the far-off star Betelgeuse.)
Passengers and crew on an Orion flight would feel a series of mild pushes lasting several minutes. Then Orion would be on its way, either into orbit or into space. With its remaining fuel supply an Orion-class vehicle could travel the solar system almost at will.
Dunne’s moment of glory arrived in 1959 with a series of tests known facetiously as Project Put-Put. Several three-foot diameter, 300-pound scale models were built, with three-pound charges of high explosives in coffee cans simulating nuclear charges. The first two models broke up in flight, but the third one flew.
From its launch site on Point Loma, the Orion model rushed to a height of 100 feet on a column of red, black, and white smoke. A parachute opened. Orion came safely down. On film, it was enough to make Wernher von Braun, the space pioneer, snap straight in his chair- and ask for figures.
That made 1959 a very good year. Freeman Dyson remembered, “Mars was 1965, if all had gone well ... I said Saturn by 1970.”
But an ill wind was blowing in Washington. The 1963 test-ban pact proscribed atomic tests in space and in the atmosphere, and that snuffed the nuclear fires of Orion. The test ban made drawing-board dinosaurs of all the really high-powered ideas, and so Orion became the put-put rocket that never was.
Thirty years after Hiroshima, the missiles brood in their silos, MIRVed and ready. The sin of Hiroshima is not expiated as Taylor, Dunne, Dyson and the rest had hoped it would be. It was to that hope, presumably, that Dyson alluded when he wrote, “We have for the first time imagined a way to use the huge stockpiles- of our bombs for better purpose than for murdering people. My purpose, and my belief, is that bombs which killed and maimed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki shall one day open the skies to man.”
Here's something you might be interested in.
General Atomic’s secret Project Orion
The amazing San Diego atomic put-put rocket
General Atomic’s secret Project Orion
The amazing San Diego atomic put-put rocket
“I was not down on the Apollo mission as many Orion people were.”
Jackass Flats, Nevada, is a barren stretch of parched nothing near Yucca Flats and Frenchman’s Flats, a region that the Air Force once tagged, in its silly-sinister fashion, “The Valley Where the Giant Mushrooms Grow.” It is a nuclear test site.
In 1958. Dr. Brian Dunne traveled from San Diego with Theodore Taylor and Freeman Dyson to look the place over for General Atomic’s secret Project Orion. Dunne was an explosives expert from Pasadena; Taylor was fresh from Los Alamos and a genius with fission bombs; Dyson was from the institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, where Einstein spent his last year's. From this desert wasteland the three wanted to launch an, immense planet-probing spacecraft powered by atomic bombs.
Project Orion ran at General Atomic for seven years, then stopped abruptly. Dunne, formerly Orion’s experimental director, lives now with his family in La Jolla. He directs a software corporation, Ship Systems, Inc., in Sorrento Valley. Orion, he believes, is a concept whose time will come again.
His reasons for so believing are a blend of the technical and aesthetic, and they begin with the immense power of a single, small nuclear weapon.
Says Dunne, “There’s this little thing on a cradle, the size of a watermelon, and you can’t imagine the energy in it. I’m used to high explosives, and there’s a real lot of energy in a watermelon-sized bundle of high explosive; but when you see the effects of a nuclear explosion, it just astounds you. When even twenty kilotons go off, the towers are completely vaporized. Completely. Except at the base where you see a few melted and twisted girders.”
Ahead of the all-consuming fireball, though, races a wave of thrust that can propel a steel cannonball, as in one test, or a spaceship. And this momentum wave, this potential rush, is far, far more powerful than the rockets that blasted the men of Apollo to the moon.
In fact, what is surprising about Apollo, according to Dunne, is not the wonderful power of a rocket that could hurl men to the moon. It is rather the wonderful trickiness employed to do this with essentially inadequate technology.
“I was not down on the Apollo mission as many Orion people were,” he says. “They couldn’t conceive of that working because they did calculations and they couldn’t conceive of the landing being possible. But the calculations that some of the Orioners made were based on a faulty premise. They didn’t take into account the possibility of a lunar orbit and then going down with a very light-weight vehicle.”
Despite the misgivings of some Orioners, Apollo did work, and it worked in exactly that way, by first establishing an outpost in lunar orbit and then descending to the surface of the moon in a lunar module. The combined weight of the command module, service module, and lunar module of Apollo was just under fifty tons.
The Orion concept differed completely from that of Apollo. Orion was a brute-force proposition. The design that had been settled upon at the close of the project called for a single bullet-shaped stage, with the passenger and crew compartments in the tip of the bullet. Small atomic bombs would be ejected by gas pressure through the rocket’s base, and a string of blasts would act upon a pusher plate to provide push.
In theory, such rockets could be very powerful. “There is no question in my mind,” says Dunne, “that you can push pay-loads in the 100,000-ton range with vehicles of this kind.” The Apollo missions, Saturn V boosters and all, weighed just 3,000 tons.
To the scientists, Orion was a beautiful idea. It promised to bring the cost of transportation to the moon down from the projected hundreds of dollars per pound to a per-pound cost of perhaps ten dollars. All by itself, the development of an Orion spaceship could make possible voyages to the planets and beyond. Finally, Orion represented a way of using the new tool of atomic energy for something other than murder.
Theodore Taylor, who conceived and directed Project Orion, confesses in his biography The Curve of Binding Energy (by John McPhee) that he felt part of the guilt of Hiroshima. Doubtless, that guilt contributed to the logic and justification of Orion.
The project began simply, almost as a whim. Taylor and Dunne had been working on a new kind of reactor for General Atomic. Headquarters was a converted schoolhouse on Barnard Street. The year was 1957. In October, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik.
Dunne remembers, “I called Taylor on the phone that night, and I raved on and on about this thing. It was a Sunday, I remember. It impressed me because it was such a tour de force. Just at that point I think he started thinking about space and coupling nuclear energy to space.”
Taylor’s first idea was that Orion would be doughnut-shaped, with a diaphragm covering the hole, something like a fat frisbee. He asked Dunne to put together some notions about what could be done in the way of experiments. Dunne did this, drawing on work that had been done at Los Alamos earlier.
In the spring of 1958, Taylor went to see General Atomic’s director, Frederich de Hoffman, to propose using nuclear weapons, bombs, for space propulsion. He got a green light.
“At that time,” Dunne says, “nothing was too far out for General Atomic.”
Having been beaten into orbit by the Soviets, the Feds were only too glad to foot the bill for research, a modest few million dollars. Roy Johnson, chief of the Advanced Research Projects Agency in Washington, told Taylor, “Everyone is making plans to pile fuel on fuel on fuel to put a pea into orbit. But you seem to mean business.”
Famed physicist, philosopher, and maybe prophet, Freeman Dyson took a year’s leave of absence from Princeton to sign up for this Buck Rogers stuff that was coming true at General Atomic.
“Dyson and Taylor were primarily interested in exploring the planets, particularly Mars and the rings of Saturn,” Dunne says in his soft voice. “Dyson envisaged trips to the outer planets, very big expeditions with very, very big payloads. That was their immediate goal, and they would have liked to do it in their lifetimes.”
In time, the doughnut idea for Orion was abandoned and the bullet configuration took its place. Taylor thought of exploding atomic “bomblets” in the bullet-shaped spacecraft’s wake. The force would act on a pusher plate and be transmitted through gas-filled shock absorbers to the ship itself. Whole laboratory complexes and flying cities could be launched in this way. (Dyson toyed with the idea of sending Chicago to the far-off star Betelgeuse.)
Passengers and crew on an Orion flight would feel a series of mild pushes lasting several minutes. Then Orion would be on its way, either into orbit or into space. With its remaining fuel supply an Orion-class vehicle could travel the solar system almost at will.
Dunne’s moment of glory arrived in 1959 with a series of tests known facetiously as Project Put-Put. Several three-foot diameter, 300-pound scale models were built, with three-pound charges of high explosives in coffee cans simulating nuclear charges. The first two models broke up in flight, but the third one flew.
From its launch site on Point Loma, the Orion model rushed to a height of 100 feet on a column of red, black, and white smoke. A parachute opened. Orion came safely down. On film, it was enough to make Wernher von Braun, the space pioneer, snap straight in his chair- and ask for figures.
That made 1959 a very good year. Freeman Dyson remembered, “Mars was 1965, if all had gone well ... I said Saturn by 1970.”
But an ill wind was blowing in Washington. The 1963 test-ban pact proscribed atomic tests in space and in the atmosphere, and that snuffed the nuclear fires of Orion. The test ban made drawing-board dinosaurs of all the really high-powered ideas, and so Orion became the put-put rocket that never was.
Thirty years after Hiroshima, the missiles brood in their silos, MIRVed and ready. The sin of Hiroshima is not expiated as Taylor, Dunne, Dyson and the rest had hoped it would be. It was to that hope, presumably, that Dyson alluded when he wrote, “We have for the first time imagined a way to use the huge stockpiles- of our bombs for better purpose than for murdering people. My purpose, and my belief, is that bombs which killed and maimed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki shall one day open the skies to man.”
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