Project Orion as it was at first

Let me tell you something about Project Orion for the seven years that it first lasted from 1958 until 1965.  As I mentioned in the previous post which is the first post on this blog, Orion was originally designed to utilize a succession of nuclear explosion behind a pusher plate.

In 1958, General Atomic in my hometown of San Diego started development of a spacecraft to explore our entire solar system and even the nearby stars.  it is from the ultimate objective of going to the stars that they got the name Orion after the famous constellation of a man in the sky called Orion the Hunter.  The motto at the time was "Saturn by 1970".  Orion was kept top secret at the time of its first life because of its intended use of nuclear explosives as a propulsion and fuel.  Theodore Taylor was the original head of Project Orion and another key participant was a physicist Freeman Dyson.  In its first life and to this day, no actual spacecraft has ever emerged from Project Orion yet, but there were several small unmanned flight test vehicles many of which were damaged and destroyed.  But in late 1959, the first successful test of one of those flight test vehicles took place and was followed by another flight test shortly after in celebration.  This successful flight test vehicle was named "Putt-putt" or "Hot Rod".  All of the flight test vehicles used chemical explosives.  In 1960 Project Orion began to lose momentum and support in Congress and the United States government.  And there was competition from chemical and conventional nuclear rockets.  A video of Project Orion was shown to Werner Von Braun but it was too little too late since NASA likes to be as open as possible and Orion at the time was too secretive.  A bigger problem than just the secrecy was the radiation that would have resulted from the nuclear weapons explosions propelling the spacecraft.  In 1963, John F Kennedy wrote the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty which was signed by the Untied States, Great Britain, and Soviet Russia. The 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty forbids nuclear weapons explosions in space and thus sealed Orion's fate.  Project Orion eventually died in 1965 as a result of this treaty.  Freeman Dyson said that this was the first time in history when such advancements in technology have been suppressed for political reasons and he was right.

There were several spacecraft designs for Project Orion such as the bullet shape which varied in size, a design featured in Carl Sagan's Cosmos drawn by Rick Sternbeck and the Orion design shown above and below this paragraph form which I borrow for my Project Daedalus/Icarus-style fusion pulse propelled variant.  I will talk about Daedalus and Icarus in the next post since they are two concepts that I borrow from in rejuvenating Orion.

Despite its demise, there has been talk of possible rebirth of Project Orion which as far as I know all but what I say is about bringing it back with the same propulsion system it was originally intended to use.  I take it one whole refit further and change the propulsion to a safer and more efficient propulsion system.