What if there was a technology that could bridge the gap between the stars?

Would we foster that technology? Would the human race hail that technology as a revolutionary achievement, on par with the invention of the airplane? Would we race to bring that technology to maturity as quickly as we possibly could?

Or would we instead undermine that technology, subvert the intentions of its creators, turn its potential to the cause of violence and ultimately abandon it out of fear and short-sightedness?

This question has already been answered - the test has already been taken - and I'm sorry to report that the human race has failed.

Thankfully, the failure need not be permanent.

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Project Orion

In 1958, two scientists, Ted Taylor and Freeman Dyson, took the lead on a new venture in space propulsion at General Atomic, at the time a private company. The research was referred to as Project Orion.

The fundamental premise of Project Orion, at first glance, sounds absolutely insane. In fact, it is the apparent lunacy of the whole idea which proved a constant barrier to progress and arguably resulted in the project's failure.

Project Orion was a research initiative to test the feasibility of, and eventually build, a space ship propelled by an ongoing chain of uncontained, exploding nuclear bombs.

Let's drive that home, shall we?

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Project Orion Would Be A Space Ship That Ran, Literally, On Nuclear Explosions

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Yes. That kind of nuclear explosion, just smaller.

There's no metaphor or hyperbole here, nor is there an alternative scientific definition of "nuclear bomb" at play. The plan was to build a space ship that carried hundreds or thousands of small nuclear bombs and, every couple of seconds, dropped one of the bombs out the back of the ship.

When the bomb exploded, much of the force would be captured by a "pusher plate," which would literally be a slab of metal, covered in a thin layer of oil, and connected to a series of shock absorbers. The goal would be to collect as much of the energy from each nuclear explosion as possible, collecting that energy to propel the ship forward. The shock absorbers would keep the ship's acceleration limited to the one or two g's that a human body can comfortably endure.

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10% Of The Speed Of Light

It sounds insane, but it actually isn't. Taylor, Dyson and their team of physicists and engineers worked out the math on Project Orion and in theory, this crazy idea, is capable of achieving incredible speeds at incredible efficiencies. One estimate, using efficient, formed nuclear charges and restraining acceleration to human-tolerated levels, indicated the Orion could realistically achieve .1c in speed. That's 10% of the speed of light.

If you go back and read our post on the speed of light, you'll be reminded that 10% of the speed of light is ABSOLUTELY BONKERS. Nothing humanity has made has ever gone anywhere near that fast, not even close. A space ship that could go that fast would reach Alpha Centauri in under 50 years, even accounting for safe accelleration and decelleration.

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Technologically Achievable In The 1960s.

This is worm holes and warp drives all over again, right? Pie in the sky theoretical technology that has no basis in reality and is thousands of years away from even a prototype.

Wrong again. Dyson and Taylor were convinced that Project Orion was not just theoretically sound, but was feasible to build, fully at scale, in the mid 1960s! Moreover, just in case the opinion of Freeman Dyson isn't compelling enough for you, Taylor and Dyson also convinced Werner Von Braun - the father of modern rocketry and therefore modern space exploration - that Project Orion was worth pursuing concurrently with the Saturn rocket program.

This was no pie in the sky operation: three of the greatest scientific and engineering minds of the 20th century all agreed Project Orion wouldn't just work, but could actually be built, three decades before cell phones were invented.

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We Could Have Already Had A Probe At Alpha Centauri

Project Orion would have revolutionized space travel completely. It had support from the major players in space propulsion research and all tests and mathematics pointed to a viable, realistic, efficient and incredibly fast propulsion technology, unlike anything else seen before or since.

And yet, we have not sent a probe to Alpha Centauri - nor do we ride nuclear bomb powered ships between the planets of our solar system.

What the hell happened?

Over the next few posts we are going to dive deep into Project Orion:

1. We'll begin by learning about the two lead scientists on the team - Taylor and Dyson.
2. Then we'll move on to understanding the "fuel" - i.e. Nuclear Bombs
3. Next we'll discuss the physics of how you safely turn an explosion, and specifically a nuclear blast, into propulsive force.
4. Then we'll go through some very specific technical challenges faced by Project Orion - like, you know, vaporization - and how these problems were overcome.
5. And finally, we'll learn about Project Orion's final fate and its future potential.

By the time we're through talking about Project Orion, you will have an excellent understanding of what the project was about, why it failed, and why we should bring it back to life.

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Next Time On Piqued - Ted Taylor and Freeman Dyson

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Information Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)
http://www.islandone.org/Propulsion/ProjectOrion.html
http://www.businessinsider.com/project-orion-nuclear-bomb-propelled-spaceships-2015-6
https://www.space.com/28009-project-orion-nuclear-propulsion-1950s-tests-unclassified-video.html

Photo Sources:

[1By NASA http://mix.msfc.nasa.gov/abstracts.php?p=704 Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
[2]By United States Department of Energy Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
[3]By Paolo Neo Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
[4]Skatebiker at English Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

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