I was quite excited when this book arrived. It’s a bit old (early 2000s) and therefore a bit hard to find, so when Amazon randomly had a “new” copy I snapped it up. This copy is definitely unread, but yet still yellowed with time and the binding is a bit sad.
Project Orion is the story of America’s attempt to build interstellar space ships powered by small nuclear explosions in the early 1950s. The story is told through the lens of one of the children whose father was a principal researcher on the project and who has now interviewed a lot of the players as well as reading de-classified historical documents. It should be noted that much of the program is still classified — for example the exact minimum amount of plutonium you need to make a big explosion.
The 1950s seem to have been an interesting time for nuclear research, as the technology was seen as both generally hopeful in the sense of finding peaceful uses for this destructive capability, while also being terrifying with the prospect of mutually assured distruction.
This project started before NASA existed — at the time each major branch of the military was competing to “own” space as a combat domain, and huge amounts of nuclear R&D were occurring. Its important to remember that at the time of the project in the late 1950s and early 1960s nuclear fallout wasn’t considered a particular concern and hundreds of above ground nuclear tests were occuring. Ultimately, the test ban treaties of the late 1960s would end the project as the use of nuclear weapons in space would be outlawed.
The book asserts that the calculations at the time were that nuclear testing was causing about a thousand global deaths a year from fallout. With isotopes released within Earth’s magnetosphere eventually falling back to Earth, and that magnetosphere reaching half way to Mars, the estimate was that about ten people would die from radiation effects per return flight to Mars. That’s a lot of people when you think about it, but it also leaves me wondering how much of today’s high cancer rates are caused by historic effects of the over 2,000 nuclear tests which have occurred.
General Atomic sounds a lot like my recollection of Google, a hiring strategy of trying to cluster as many good people together as possible, with a relatively generous budget, and not always a clear plan for what to build as long as it was “interesting”. It’s sad that neither organization exists in that form any more, and I wonder if perhaps engineering utopias are perhaps somehow inherently unsustainable?
Ultimately Orion would never fly. It needed the support of NASA, who were wedded to chemical rockets and couldn’t get past the association of the project with weapons of mass destruction. That’s probably a moot point however, as public opinion about nuclear fallout had crystalized by the early 1960s.
Science
Macmillan
2003-04
372
"Project Orion describes one of the most awesome 'might have beens' (and may yet bes!) of the space age. This is essential reading for anyone interested in government bureaucracies and the military industrial complex." -Sir Arthur C. Clarke