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Posted on 01/22/2010 5:06:10 PM PST by KevinDavis
If you haven’t read George Dyson’s fascinating history of Project Orion, let me recommend it to you highly. Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship (Henry Holt, 2002) fires the imagination with the audacity of the project, a nuclear pulse rocket that would have exploded atomic bombs behind the vehicle, using the world’s ultimate shock absorbers to ride the wave to the outer planets. There was talk of going to Saturn (to Enceladus, no less) in the late 1960’s, but those dreams were quickly quashed by treaties forbidding nuclear testing.
(Excerpt) Read more at centauri-dreams.org ...
Wasn’t this on one of Scud Stud Arthur Kent’s “Histories Mysteries”?
Good luck getting that projected restarted.
Boom Town-
http://libertyfic.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=ongoingstory&action=display&thread=170
How are you going about joining this project?
Interesting!
Second, Orion could be assembled in orbit.
Third, Orion's propulsion would leave no "radioactice mess" in space which is filled radiation.
Fourth, a small Orion (10,000 metric ton payload) with a crew of 150 is big enough to never have to land anywhere using small 'conventionally' powered landers to ferry crew and materials to the surface.
Fifth, Orion could be build now, while the plused fusion idea has to wait until someone makes a working fusion reactor - decades or centuries from now.
The Orion concept is only dead in the US - China or Russia are free to recreate it should they choose.
But then the whole idea of manned space flight beyond low Earth orbit is pretty much dead in the US anyway.
Not to toll for hits but for those interested in more infomation on Orion, here is a collection of Orion videos and comments by Arthur Clarke and Freeman Dyson.
There’s no radiation with fusion - right? Wouldn’t that make it perfect for outerspace? No “wall” problem either...
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