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Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship, by George Dyson
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In 1957, a small group of scientists, supported by the U.S. government, launched an attempt to build a four-thousand-ton spaceship propelled by nuclear bombs. The initial plan called for missions to Mars by 1965 and Saturn by 1970. After seven years of work, political obstacles brought the effort to a halt.
The Orion team, led by the American bomb-designer Theodore B. Taylor, included the physicist Freeman Dyson, whose son George was five years old when the existence of the project was first announced. In Project Orion, George Dyson has synthesized hundreds of hours of interviews and thousands of pages of newly excavated documents, still only partially declassified, to piece together one of the most tantalizing "what if" stories of the twentieth century.
- Sales Rank: #701419 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Holt Paperbacks
- Published on: 2003-04-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.32" h x .97" w x 6.24" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 368 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Amazon.com Review
Like cheap, shiny space suits and bug-eyed rubber monsters, nuclear-powered spaceships today seem like little more than laughably naïve 1950s science fiction tropes. It might have been otherwise--and still could be. George Dyson, son of supergenius physicist Freeman Dyson, wrote Project Orion to share some of his father's amazing research with the world. Much had been kept secret for years, but Dyson's unique insider status permits great depth and breadth on this important tale. Conceived in the wake of Sputnik, Project Orion was a true vision of '50s engineering: a huge 40-person ship powered by hundreds of tiny atomic bombs, capable of much greater lift and efficiency than chemically driven rockets. Struggles between NASA, the military, Congress, and other parties doomed Orion, but Dyson has gathered hundreds of documents and interviewed most of the researchers and engineers who worked together, trying to reach "Saturn by 1970." His knack for storytelling makes the book a quick, delightful read; even the staunchest anti-nuke activist has to admit that lighting a cigarette off a parabolic mirror facing a bomb test is pretty cool. By the end of the 20th century, technology had caught up with the vision of Orion--it's considered one of our best bets for long-distance space transit. Whether or not that could ever happen politically, Project Orion is a compelling exploration of scientific imagination. --Rob Lightner
From Publishers Weekly
In the years after WWII and the Russian launch of two sputniks, Americans were searching for any technology that would give them dominance in the space race. In his latest, Dyson (Darwin Among the Machines) charts the history of the failed Project Orion, which called for a massive rocket to be built atop a nuclear-powered piston. The project's physicists and engineers, buoyed by the thrilling idea of traveling through space on "pulse technology," conducted a number of explosive experiments to ascertain the abilities of such a system (which reveals how little was actually known about the bombs being produced by the world's superpowers). Meanwhile, the project, started in 1957, ran headlong into detractors Kennedy and NASA included and eventually was canceled. Much of the technical information in the Orion files remains classified, but Dyson's explanations of the nuclear science behind the system are lucid. A great strength of Dyson's project is the interviews he conducted with surviving Orion team members among them his father, Freeman Dyson affording readers an intimate view of the story's central characters (and its government contractors) who helped shape Orion. At the same time, these compelling interviews drag on; the story's drama is diffused by the musings of its key players, who sometimes crowd out the dynamic background of the Cold War, Wernher Von Braun's chemical rocket program, atmospheric weapons test bans and presidential administrations vested in nuclear capacities only designed for destruction. Illus. and photos.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Shortly after the first Sputnik launch in 1957, an American scientific team proposed Project Orion, an enormous interplanetary spaceship propelled by exploding hundreds of nuclear bombs. The project commenced during the golden age of support for U.S. scientific research, but the team struggled to find ongoing funding. Civilian NASA found Orion unpalatable because of its inextricable link with nuclear weapons, while the military regarded the team's ultimate goal exploration of the solar system as peripheral to their own space research program. As public opposition to atmospheric nuclear testing grew, making even a small-scale test shot politically unfeasible, the project died for lack of support. Dyson, son of physicist Freeman Dyson (himself an Orion consultant), interviewed team members and tracked down scores of technical reports to compile this unique history. Unfortunately, some of the author's and interviewees' remarks about fallout and classified bomb research seem na‹ve, cavalier, or just plain insensitive in a post-September 11 context. For academic and larger public libraries. Nancy R. Curtis, Univ. of Maine Lib., Orono
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Essential for any space enthusiast.
By Nic Quattromani
This fascinating volume explores the origins and development of Project Orion, a 1950s proposal to propel interplanetary and even interstellar spacecraft by detonating nuclear weapons behind them. What's crazier than the idea itself is the fact that it probably would have worked. With an Orion drive, it would have been entirely possible to take off from the ground, fly to Mars or the moons of Saturn, and then return home with fuel to spare, a capability matched by no other engine design before or since. George Dyson explains in exhaustive detail how this propulsion system would have worked, and what difficulties its researchers faced in designing it. Included in the text are plenty of pictures, too, including photographs of the Orion team along with numerous original sketches.
This book does not limit itself strictly to the technical aspects of the project. It also gives biographical accounts of many of the engineers and physicists involved in it, allowing the reader to understand them as people rather than names on a page, and there is a detailed overview of the political environment in which Orion was born, struggled for survival, and ultimately died an obscure death. All of the text is well written and interesting. For anybody who wants to know about one of the most ambitious projects of the Cold War, or who has a passionate interest in the history of space exploration, this book is absolutely essential reading.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
More a social-political than a technological tale.
By W. Graney
Traveling through space on the fireballs of nuclear explosions! Now there's a techie's dream. Unfortunately, the book spends much more time on politics than on physics or engineering. Still, I suppose you've got to be quite a political animal to get money for this sort of thing.
Dyson excuses the lack of technical data by noting that much Orion information is still secret (like how to make a nuclear bomb with a golf ball-sized chunk of plutonium), but the deficit still cries out. There's just enough technical material to make you wish for more. Virtually all the graphics seem to be multi-generational copies of just a few original project drawings. There were no significant original graphics.
The character sketches and descriptions of fighting for funds are well done and tell us a lot about how government really works (slowly, wastefully, and on an old-boy network), but "The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship" is not an accurate title for this book.
I sold the book immediately on finishing it.
16 of 19 people found the following review helpful.
Great Idea, bad book
By Juan Suros
The idea of Project Orion will appeal to everyone. It is one of those great ideas that open new chapters in human achievement. There are serious risks involved with the technology that would have to be managed carefully if it is ever revisited, but it could be done.
With a year's warning, we could deflect the sort of asteroid/comet that ended the dinosaurs. We could build a city on the Moon or survey Mars. We could send manned expeditions around the solar system 10 years after we decide to do it, starting any time.
The idea Project Orion studied back in the 50's is wonderful. This book is not. You can get all of the story contained in this book by reading the first 9 chapters and studying all the illustrations carefully. All of the project's technical details of interest are classified and not included. The book suffers from a lack of any sort of useful timeline as to the events of Project Orion. The reader is left to piece together the story from a sprinkling of semi-random vignettes and personal reminiscences.
Most of this book is filler, with the details left to the reader's own mind to fill in. And yet, the idea is so Grand that I found myself staring off into space every so often as I ground my way through the turgid prose and confusing organization, imagining where we might be now if hopes had been realized 40 years ago.
Here are some tips that will help the reader get the most out of this book:
1) Ignore all mentions of Tungsten propellant that are sprinkled confusingly here and there. They belong to suboptimised designs, though this fact is hidden toward the back of the book.
2) Skim the personnel intros. They don't pay off.
3) Study the table toward the end of Chapter 6 for the best understanding of what Orion can do. Compare this to similar NASA Mars mission studies and you will find yourself grinding your teeth.
4) The politics of Orion are simple in outline but complicated in detail. NASA killed this program because it's own NERVA program was in competition with Orion. The book makes this point over 100 pages. If you look into what happened to NERVA you'll start grinding your teeth again.
5) There is a lot of teeth gnashing about atomic scientists feeling guilty about the bombs after they had made them. They acknowledge that Orion was a constructive use of that effort, but in their old age many of the scientists interviewed for this book are a little hypocritical in their disavowals. More grinding.
6) The mention of Tungsten in Chapter "Fallout" is another red herring. It was easy to detect in an unrelated bomb test. Orion designs did not use Tungsten propellent.
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