Portal:Spaceflight/Selected article/Week 14 2009

Project Orion was the first engineering design study of a spacecraft powered by nuclear pulse propulsion, an idea first proposed by Stanisław Ulam in 1947. The project, initiated in 1958, envisioned the explosion of atomic bombs behind the craft and was led by Ted Taylor at General Atomics and physicist Freeman Dyson, who at Taylor's request took a year away from the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study to work on the project. The first such think-tank of its kind since the Manhattan Project, Project Orion is recalled by many of its team as representing the best years of their lives. By using energetic nuclear power, Orion offered both high thrust and high specific impulse — the holy grail of spacecraft propulsion. It offered performance greater than the most advanced conventional or nuclear rocket engines now under study. Cheap interplanetary travel was the goal of the Project Orion. Its supporters felt that it had great potential for space travel, but it lost political approval because of concerns with fallout from its propulsion. This concern could be partially addressed by building it in orbit. The Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 is generally acknowledged to have ended the project. (more...)