Project Orion

[Dimlee]

Thanks to the links posted by contributors to the thread about Freeman Dyson I found this article about the project Orion.
To the stars by atom bomb: The incredible tale of the top secret Orion Project

Fascinating reading. It's like going through the old sci-fi novel, except that the project was real. In the times when grass was greener and the sky was the limit...
I looked at the sketch and decided to read The Martian Chronicles by Bradbury again.

 

[swampyankee]

Even the coldest warriors blanched at the idea of using nuclear weapons to launch space craft from the Earth's surface, if for no other reason it would depress real estate values in Florida

Freeman Dyson was a fascinating and brilliant man. His son has a great Ted Talk about Project Orion.

 

[OldGeezer]

John McPhee's "The Curve of Binding Energy" contains a great many details about Orion. In that connection, I'm glad that the article you linked gives credit where it's due, to Ted Taylor, for thinking up the whole thing. The section in McPhee's book gives fascinating insights into how the idea was sold, including the first meeting with Dyson, and it's well worth reading. It's available for both Nook and Kindle e-readers.

 

[maxmwill]

Thanks to the links posted by contributors to the thread about Freeman Dyson I found this article about the project Orion.
To the stars by atom bomb: The incredible tale of the top secret Orion Project

Fascinating reading. It's like going through the old sci-fi novel, except that the project was real. In the times when grass was greener and the sky was the limit...
I looked at the sketch and decided to read The Martian Chronicles by Bradbury again.

If you want to get an idea as to what life inside an Orion type ship, look for the novel Footfall, by Larry Liven and Jerry Pournelle. It is an old story, published sometime in the 80s, and is an alien invasion story. The invaders were small elephant type aliens.
In order to defeat the Fithp, US authorities decided to build an Orion ship, equipped with gamma lasers.
It was built and launched from Bellingham Wa. There wasn't a description what a nuclear bomb detonation fast repeatedly, but there is a line that describes the launch from inside: God's knocking at the door. God wants in BAD

 

[OldGeezer]

The basic idea for Orion, pulsed explosives pushing something along, actually appears in a 1936 cartoon, "Our Boarding House" as one of Major Hoople's wacky inventions.

 

[maxmwill]

I thought the inspiration for Orión dates from fue Manhattan Project. One of the scientists there was playing with exploding dynamite under steel plates.

 

[Gnomey]

 

[OldGeezer]

Stanislaw Ulam appears to have been the originator of the concept of using nuclear explosions in sequence to drive a vehicle, and he did in fact work on the Manhattan Project. In the John McPhee bio of Ted Taylor, who started the actual Orion project idea in 1958 (he was too young to have worked on the original A-bombs), he says that the idea came to him from the workings of a soda vending machine. But Major Hoople's contribution has never, to my knowledge, been made a part of the background history of the pulsed-explosion propulsion concept. As far as I can tell, the true beginnings of that concept were independently developed by a Russian and a German way back in the late 19th Century (conventional explosives, of course.)