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Project Orion: The Atomic Spaceship, 1957-1965
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
350 pages, ebook
First published April 16, 2002
26 people are currently reading
1760 people want to read
About the author
George Dyson
102 books133 followersGeorge Dyson is a scientific historian, the son of Freeman Dyson, brother of Esther Dyson, and the grandson of Sir George Dyson. When he was sixteen he went to live in British Columbia in Canada to pursue his interest in kayaking and escape his father's shadow. While there he lived in a treehouse at a height of 30 metres. He is the author of Project Orion: The Atomic Spaceship 1957-1965 and Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence, in which he expanded upon the premise of Samuel Butler's 1863 article of the same name and suggested coherently that the internet is a living, sentient being. He is the subject of Kenneth Brower's book The Starship and the Canoe. Dyson was the founder of Dyson, Baidarka & Company, a designer of Aleut-style skin kayaks, and he is credited with the revival of the baidarka style of kayak. (from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 57 reviews
July 31, 2015
Do not be fooled by the awesome concept behind this book. Yes, top-secret Cold War atomic spaceship designs that were scientifically sound but too far ahead of their time to ever see the light of day are totally sweet. However, I found to my chagrin that despite the promising premise, this book is strictly for hardcore math and science nerds, and is not to be touched by humanities and other garden-variety nerds such as yours truly. Anyone expecting an Arthur C. Clarke-ian level of scientific approachability will be sorely disappointed, as it's basically a 300-page litany of advanced physics and engineering principles being discussed in the abstract, Cold War-era US Air Force budgetary procurement procedures, and rosters of what physicists worked at which lab in what year. Oh, how I wanted to like this book... and oh, how I loathe abandoning any book unfinished... but this one was so unbearably dry that I had to slam it shut after only 100 pages. Gack.
If you really know your math and sciences and think spaceships are cool, this is probably the book for you. But if you're like me and are just a regular old nerd who thinks spaceships are cool, you are S.O.L.
Abort mission... abort mission...
If you really know your math and sciences and think spaceships are cool, this is probably the book for you. But if you're like me and are just a regular old nerd who thinks spaceships are cool, you are S.O.L.
Abort mission... abort mission...
May 4, 2012
From the late '50s to the mid '60s a group of scientists and engineers, never numbering more than 50, and spending barely $10 million over seven years, developed what remains the only efficient method of putting large cargoes into space or of sending large scale missions to explore other planets. Their method? Explode nuclear bombs a short distance from the spacecraft and ride the shockwave like a surfboard.
The science & engineering behind it were never shot down, and in fact consistently cited as sound.
The fact that it used nuclear explosions, however, meant that it was both highly classified and politically impractical to use.
The author of this book, George Dyson, is the son of one of the group's founding minds, physicist Freeman Dyson, and some 40 years after his father left the project, George Dyson went about systematically reconstructing how the project began, developed, and died, conducting hundreds of interviews of the surviving scientists & engineers, as well as combing archives and journals for those details which have been declassified (with the amusing result that when NASA reopened studies on the concept in 1999, they asked the younger Dyson for nearly 1,800 pages of Project Orion reports which they could not find in Government vaults).
Project Orion was founded by many of the scientists who were heavily involved in the nuclear arms race following WWII, the big brains at Los Alamos & Livermore who tried to create ever more powerful, efficient, and smaller nuclear warheads. Eventually, they wanted to use them for something other than destruction, and quickly realized that they would make an extremely efficient propulsion source for a spacecraft. A 4,000-ton Orion-style spacecraft was expected to place well over 1,000 tons of payload into Earth Orbit.
These giants of science were no doubt naive in their idealism and optimism, but nevertheless managed to hit upon a vastly more efficient means of leaving Earth's gravity well than all the billions spent leading up to Apollo -- which they correctly prophesied would become a technological dead-end where space development was concerned. If ideas of sending a manned mission to Saturn in the mid-60s or even mid-70s seem far-fetched today, at the time many people were riding the post-WWII high when anything imaginable seemed possible...a state of mind which seems quite foreign to people today.
This book is not terribly technical; no major math is required, and only a very basic understanding of science. It is much more about the power of a few bright individuals left to develop an idea in a nurturing environment and then about the unthinking power of a bureaucracy to stifle something for which it has no immediate use...even if there may be a use for it in the future.
The science & engineering behind it were never shot down, and in fact consistently cited as sound.
The fact that it used nuclear explosions, however, meant that it was both highly classified and politically impractical to use.
The author of this book, George Dyson, is the son of one of the group's founding minds, physicist Freeman Dyson, and some 40 years after his father left the project, George Dyson went about systematically reconstructing how the project began, developed, and died, conducting hundreds of interviews of the surviving scientists & engineers, as well as combing archives and journals for those details which have been declassified (with the amusing result that when NASA reopened studies on the concept in 1999, they asked the younger Dyson for nearly 1,800 pages of Project Orion reports which they could not find in Government vaults).
Project Orion was founded by many of the scientists who were heavily involved in the nuclear arms race following WWII, the big brains at Los Alamos & Livermore who tried to create ever more powerful, efficient, and smaller nuclear warheads. Eventually, they wanted to use them for something other than destruction, and quickly realized that they would make an extremely efficient propulsion source for a spacecraft. A 4,000-ton Orion-style spacecraft was expected to place well over 1,000 tons of payload into Earth Orbit.
These giants of science were no doubt naive in their idealism and optimism, but nevertheless managed to hit upon a vastly more efficient means of leaving Earth's gravity well than all the billions spent leading up to Apollo -- which they correctly prophesied would become a technological dead-end where space development was concerned. If ideas of sending a manned mission to Saturn in the mid-60s or even mid-70s seem far-fetched today, at the time many people were riding the post-WWII high when anything imaginable seemed possible...a state of mind which seems quite foreign to people today.
This book is not terribly technical; no major math is required, and only a very basic understanding of science. It is much more about the power of a few bright individuals left to develop an idea in a nurturing environment and then about the unthinking power of a bureaucracy to stifle something for which it has no immediate use...even if there may be a use for it in the future.
December 30, 2011
The more I read about nuclear weapons and the culture surrounding them in the 1950s and 1960s, the more I feel it's a miracle that I'm here to read and write and think about them at all. Without even getting into Mutual Assured Destruction, here are some ideas for ridiculous uses of nuclear bombs other than (directly) using them as weapons which were recounted in this book:
- melting oil out of the Alberta tar sands
- digging a sea-level Panama Canal
- mass-producing tritium to build even more nuclear bombs
- lighting a cigarette (by using a parabolic mirror to focus energy from the fireball of a nuclear explosion 12 miles away)*
- exploding a whole bunch in rapid succession as sort of a "nyah-nyah, you can't tell us what to do" gesture*
- throwing them off the back of a spaceship and exploding them to provide propulsion
(* = idea was actually carried out)
The last, of course, is the center of the story. It's more than a little unsettling to read about the starry-eyed optimism of this group of physicists, and the way they threw themselves into drawing spring-and-damper diagrams to solve problems like designing shock absorbers for their 4,000-ton spacecraft while largely ignoring "minor" issues like fallout. (Freeman Dyson estimated that radiation would kill about 10 people for each Orion mission launched, but that the existing bomb tests in the 50s and 60s were probably killing about 1000 people per year. Even Orion crew members wouldn't have been safe - even if they had plenty of shielding on the back end of the spaceship between them and the bombs, nuclear explosions in atmosphere would cause the air to side-scatter radiation into the ship, which would also be engulfed by the fireballs produced. Minor details, minor details.)
All that said, though, it is kind of interesting to wonder whether Orion might represent a viable method of protecting the Earth from a catastrophic collision with an asteroid or comet. Instead of using nuclear bombs to try and blow the thing up, you could just steer it off to a new course instead. And if you could use regular chemical rockets to launch the bombs and get them to intercept the target far enough from the Earth, you might avoid the worst of the side effects. There really aren't that many high-thrust, high-specific-impulse propulsion solutions out there. But I do think it would take the threat of planetwide apocalypse to make the idea reasonable.
Man, humanity scares me sometimes.
- melting oil out of the Alberta tar sands
- digging a sea-level Panama Canal
- mass-producing tritium to build even more nuclear bombs
- lighting a cigarette (by using a parabolic mirror to focus energy from the fireball of a nuclear explosion 12 miles away)*
- exploding a whole bunch in rapid succession as sort of a "nyah-nyah, you can't tell us what to do" gesture*
- throwing them off the back of a spaceship and exploding them to provide propulsion
(* = idea was actually carried out)
The last, of course, is the center of the story. It's more than a little unsettling to read about the starry-eyed optimism of this group of physicists, and the way they threw themselves into drawing spring-and-damper diagrams to solve problems like designing shock absorbers for their 4,000-ton spacecraft while largely ignoring "minor" issues like fallout. (Freeman Dyson estimated that radiation would kill about 10 people for each Orion mission launched, but that the existing bomb tests in the 50s and 60s were probably killing about 1000 people per year. Even Orion crew members wouldn't have been safe - even if they had plenty of shielding on the back end of the spaceship between them and the bombs, nuclear explosions in atmosphere would cause the air to side-scatter radiation into the ship, which would also be engulfed by the fireballs produced. Minor details, minor details.)
All that said, though, it is kind of interesting to wonder whether Orion might represent a viable method of protecting the Earth from a catastrophic collision with an asteroid or comet. Instead of using nuclear bombs to try and blow the thing up, you could just steer it off to a new course instead. And if you could use regular chemical rockets to launch the bombs and get them to intercept the target far enough from the Earth, you might avoid the worst of the side effects. There really aren't that many high-thrust, high-specific-impulse propulsion solutions out there. But I do think it would take the threat of planetwide apocalypse to make the idea reasonable.
Man, humanity scares me sometimes.
February 2, 2025
A fascinating and unfortunate story of what could have been. A few different decisions and we could have people on the surface of Mars or even Jovian moons right now. The telling thereof was a bit disjointed and jumped around chronologically too much to form a cohesive narrative, there was a lack of a through-line to really hold attention.
May 4, 2021
A highly detailed account of the Orion project. Consisting primarily of letters and interviews from the scientists directly George Dyson stitches them together to create a fascinating read.
March 7, 2023
Orion was the offspring of an idea first proposed by Los Alamos mathematician Stanislaw Ulam shortly after the Trinity atomic bomb test at Alamogordo, New Mexico. The idea was to have a spaceship propelled by a succession of nuclear explosions detonated behind the craft, propelling it forward. Each cycle would involve ejecting slow-moving propellant, igniting the bomb, and then bouncing some of the resulting fast-moving propellant off the bottom of the ship. For about one three-thousandth of a second the plasma stagnates against the pusher plate at a temperature of about 120,000 degrees. The time is too short for heat to penetrate the pusher, so the ship is able to survive an extended series of pulses.
Conceptually, the first two hundred explosions, fired at half-second intervals, with a total yield equivalent to some 100,000 tons of TNT, would lift the ship from sea level to 125,000 feet. Six hundred more explosions, gradually increasing in yield to 5 kilotons each, would loft the ship into a 300-mile orbit around the earth.
Stanislaw Ulam is on record as the principal inventor of space propulsion by nuclear bombs. The bombs would be detonated at a distance of some 50 meters from the base. Synchronized with this, disk-shaped masses of propellant would be ejected in such a way that the rocket-propellant distance would be about 10 meters at the instant the bomb blast hits it. The propellant is raised to high temperature and expands, transmitting momentum to the vehicle. With accelerations of the order of 10,000 g, it was recognized that the they would just crush a person into a blot.
Ulam considered the possibility that spacecraft could utilize gravitational energy for free in passing planetary bodies. However, it was felt that the computations required to plan changes in the trajectory would be of prohibitive length and complication with the computers available at that time.
General Atomics was founded in 1955 "for harnessing the power of nuclear technologies for the benefit of mankind". Physicists Edward Teller and Freeman Dyson were major players. One of the projects they looked at was controlled fusion, classified under the code name "Project Sherwood", which the author notes appeared closer in 1955 than it does today.
It was Edward Teller, according to Ted Taylor, who stood up and said: "What the world needs is a safe reactor." Not only idiot-proof, but Ph.D.-proof. Inherent safety "must be guaranteed by the laws of nature and not merely by the details of its engineering," Freeman explained. This resulted in the TRIGA (Training, Research, Isotopes, General Atomic) design, which is the only nuclear reactor design that has consistently turned a profit for forty years. To make TRIGA inherently safe required a prompt negative temperature coefficient, meaning that as soon as the reactor core starts heating up, the rate of fission immediately drops. This was done by incorporating hydrogen within the fuel, in the form of zirconium hydride.
Ted Taylor worked at General Atomic, focusing on making small fission bombs. He was able to design a fission bomb that you could hold in one hand that was about six inches in diameter. When Orion raised the possibility of using low-yield bombs for constructive purposes, it was a long-awaited opportunity for Ted.
In Quantum Electrodynamics (QED), Tomonaga, Schwinger, and Feynman had each arrived at the same physics but had taken different mathematical approaches. Freeman demonstrated the mathematical equivalence of the theories and presented a simpler method of applying the theory to specific problems. Freeman explained in 1953. "Some 10 or 20 qualitatively different quantum fields exist. Each fills the whole of space and has its own particular properties. There is nothing else except these fields; the whole of the material universe is built of them...". Freeman's methodology was key to analyzing the rearrangement of nuclei in the first few microseconds of the bomb's explosion.
Freeman: "In the early days of the project we were all amateurs. Everybody did a little of everything. There was no division of the staff into physicists and engineers. The ethos of engineering is very different from that of physics. A good physicist is a man with original ideas. A good engineer is a man who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible."
For the entire seven years of its existence, the project was plagued, politically, by the features that made it so appealing to people like Freeman and Ted. "Our military space program was unable to wholeheartedly adopt a project aimed at peacefully exploring the solar system. Our nonmilitary space program was unable to wholeheartedly adopt a project driven by bombs."
General Atomics headquarters included a 135 ft. fluted, toroidal library. There arose a realization that the Orion spacecraft would be about the size of the library. Taylor: "To me, the library always was Orion, ready to take off."
Testing of the concept took place at Point Loma, where a three-foot-diameter model of the device was flown. It weighed 270 pounds and used 2.3
lb charges. The main challenge was how to eject the bombs. In these tests, a series of high-explosive charges — grapefruit-sized balls of C-4, shaped by hand and cushioned by polystyrene foam inside coffee-can-sized canisters — were ejected through the middle of the pusher plate at quarter-second intervals from a central stack.
It was the need for 1,000 tons of pusher plate, as much as the desire for a 1,000-ton payload, that set the 4,000-ton benchmark for Orion's initial design.
Landing the mother ship on larger objects such as Mars or Ganymede, against gravity that was even one-third or one-sixth of Earth's, was risky, both because of the danger of crashing the ship and because the landing site would be contaminated by the last few bombs. While the compelling reason to land on a satellite would be to pick up propellant, the official mission at the beginning was just Mars. Departing Earth during a favorable outbound period, and then waiting on Mars for a favorable return, the numbers worked out as follows: Earth to Mars, 258 days; then a 454-day wait; Mars to Earth, 258 days; for a total of 970 days or 32 months.
For the Orion system, working at an effective exhaust velocity of 50 km/sec, these trips need mass ratios of 3.3 and 5.0 respectively. The mass ratio for an Apollo return trip to the Moon is about 600 to 1.
ARPA's sponsorship of Orion assigned interim management to the Air Force, while reserving a seat at the head of the table for NASA, expected to step in and take the lead once its mandate from Congress was defined. When NASA support for Orion failed to materialize, the Air Force assumed responsibility by default. Orion thoroughly examined for its military potential.
The shadow of atmospheric fallout had loomed over Orion from the start. Fallout had become a hot political topic in 1954. While boosting Orion vehicles above the atmosphere with chemical rockets reduces the immediate fallout, a significant fraction of fission products released anywhere in Earth's magnetosphere — not just within Earth's atmosphere — will slowly spiral in along magnetic field lines and eventually reach the ground. If you spread this radioactivity over the earth more or less uniformly and use a number of 10,000 person-rads per death, it worked out something like ten people would be killed per mission from Orion. For Freeman, that was a fatal flaw. The nuclear test ban treaty was the end of Orion.
The use of Orion technology to deflect an asteroid expected to hit the earth was examined. A "typical" chondritic asteroid 100 meters in diameter, weighing 14 million tons, with a closing speed of 25 km/sec, would threaten us with an impact yield of 1,000 megatons. The interceptor would be launched when the assailant is at a distance of 15 million km, or one week from impact, and would attempt to cause a deflection of 10,000 km to safely miss the earth. The time from launch to intercept is about five hours.
At the time of the publication of the book - 2002 - NASA had started reconsidering the Orion concept under the name External Pulsed Plasma Propulsion.
Conceptually, the first two hundred explosions, fired at half-second intervals, with a total yield equivalent to some 100,000 tons of TNT, would lift the ship from sea level to 125,000 feet. Six hundred more explosions, gradually increasing in yield to 5 kilotons each, would loft the ship into a 300-mile orbit around the earth.
Stanislaw Ulam is on record as the principal inventor of space propulsion by nuclear bombs. The bombs would be detonated at a distance of some 50 meters from the base. Synchronized with this, disk-shaped masses of propellant would be ejected in such a way that the rocket-propellant distance would be about 10 meters at the instant the bomb blast hits it. The propellant is raised to high temperature and expands, transmitting momentum to the vehicle. With accelerations of the order of 10,000 g, it was recognized that the they would just crush a person into a blot.
Ulam considered the possibility that spacecraft could utilize gravitational energy for free in passing planetary bodies. However, it was felt that the computations required to plan changes in the trajectory would be of prohibitive length and complication with the computers available at that time.
General Atomics was founded in 1955 "for harnessing the power of nuclear technologies for the benefit of mankind". Physicists Edward Teller and Freeman Dyson were major players. One of the projects they looked at was controlled fusion, classified under the code name "Project Sherwood", which the author notes appeared closer in 1955 than it does today.
It was Edward Teller, according to Ted Taylor, who stood up and said: "What the world needs is a safe reactor." Not only idiot-proof, but Ph.D.-proof. Inherent safety "must be guaranteed by the laws of nature and not merely by the details of its engineering," Freeman explained. This resulted in the TRIGA (Training, Research, Isotopes, General Atomic) design, which is the only nuclear reactor design that has consistently turned a profit for forty years. To make TRIGA inherently safe required a prompt negative temperature coefficient, meaning that as soon as the reactor core starts heating up, the rate of fission immediately drops. This was done by incorporating hydrogen within the fuel, in the form of zirconium hydride.
Ted Taylor worked at General Atomic, focusing on making small fission bombs. He was able to design a fission bomb that you could hold in one hand that was about six inches in diameter. When Orion raised the possibility of using low-yield bombs for constructive purposes, it was a long-awaited opportunity for Ted.
In Quantum Electrodynamics (QED), Tomonaga, Schwinger, and Feynman had each arrived at the same physics but had taken different mathematical approaches. Freeman demonstrated the mathematical equivalence of the theories and presented a simpler method of applying the theory to specific problems. Freeman explained in 1953. "Some 10 or 20 qualitatively different quantum fields exist. Each fills the whole of space and has its own particular properties. There is nothing else except these fields; the whole of the material universe is built of them...". Freeman's methodology was key to analyzing the rearrangement of nuclei in the first few microseconds of the bomb's explosion.
Freeman: "In the early days of the project we were all amateurs. Everybody did a little of everything. There was no division of the staff into physicists and engineers. The ethos of engineering is very different from that of physics. A good physicist is a man with original ideas. A good engineer is a man who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible."
For the entire seven years of its existence, the project was plagued, politically, by the features that made it so appealing to people like Freeman and Ted. "Our military space program was unable to wholeheartedly adopt a project aimed at peacefully exploring the solar system. Our nonmilitary space program was unable to wholeheartedly adopt a project driven by bombs."
General Atomics headquarters included a 135 ft. fluted, toroidal library. There arose a realization that the Orion spacecraft would be about the size of the library. Taylor: "To me, the library always was Orion, ready to take off."
Testing of the concept took place at Point Loma, where a three-foot-diameter model of the device was flown. It weighed 270 pounds and used 2.3
lb charges. The main challenge was how to eject the bombs. In these tests, a series of high-explosive charges — grapefruit-sized balls of C-4, shaped by hand and cushioned by polystyrene foam inside coffee-can-sized canisters — were ejected through the middle of the pusher plate at quarter-second intervals from a central stack.
It was the need for 1,000 tons of pusher plate, as much as the desire for a 1,000-ton payload, that set the 4,000-ton benchmark for Orion's initial design.
Landing the mother ship on larger objects such as Mars or Ganymede, against gravity that was even one-third or one-sixth of Earth's, was risky, both because of the danger of crashing the ship and because the landing site would be contaminated by the last few bombs. While the compelling reason to land on a satellite would be to pick up propellant, the official mission at the beginning was just Mars. Departing Earth during a favorable outbound period, and then waiting on Mars for a favorable return, the numbers worked out as follows: Earth to Mars, 258 days; then a 454-day wait; Mars to Earth, 258 days; for a total of 970 days or 32 months.
For the Orion system, working at an effective exhaust velocity of 50 km/sec, these trips need mass ratios of 3.3 and 5.0 respectively. The mass ratio for an Apollo return trip to the Moon is about 600 to 1.
ARPA's sponsorship of Orion assigned interim management to the Air Force, while reserving a seat at the head of the table for NASA, expected to step in and take the lead once its mandate from Congress was defined. When NASA support for Orion failed to materialize, the Air Force assumed responsibility by default. Orion thoroughly examined for its military potential.
The shadow of atmospheric fallout had loomed over Orion from the start. Fallout had become a hot political topic in 1954. While boosting Orion vehicles above the atmosphere with chemical rockets reduces the immediate fallout, a significant fraction of fission products released anywhere in Earth's magnetosphere — not just within Earth's atmosphere — will slowly spiral in along magnetic field lines and eventually reach the ground. If you spread this radioactivity over the earth more or less uniformly and use a number of 10,000 person-rads per death, it worked out something like ten people would be killed per mission from Orion. For Freeman, that was a fatal flaw. The nuclear test ban treaty was the end of Orion.
The use of Orion technology to deflect an asteroid expected to hit the earth was examined. A "typical" chondritic asteroid 100 meters in diameter, weighing 14 million tons, with a closing speed of 25 km/sec, would threaten us with an impact yield of 1,000 megatons. The interceptor would be launched when the assailant is at a distance of 15 million km, or one week from impact, and would attempt to cause a deflection of 10,000 km to safely miss the earth. The time from launch to intercept is about five hours.
At the time of the publication of the book - 2002 - NASA had started reconsidering the Orion concept under the name External Pulsed Plasma Propulsion.
April 15, 2025
Letterlijk ongelofelijk verhaal over het enthousiasme in de jaren ‘50 en ook het naïeve geloof in de inzetbaarheid van nucleaire bommen, in dit geval als aandrijving om met ruimteschepen naar Saturnus te gaan. Tot in groot detail (voor sommigen vast té veel detail, de afkortingen van de Amerikaanse organisaties vliegen je om de oren) gedocumenteerd vanuit eerste hand, dankzij de betrokkenheid van een jonge Freeman Dyson. Bijzonder stuk culturele geschiedschrijving ten tijde van de start van de koude oorlog.
October 15, 2007
A detailed history of a fascinating and little known subject, the long-since-abandoned nuclear pulse propulsion project, which would use the kinetic shockwave generated by hydrogen fusion (read: thermonuclear bombs) to "push" spacecraft at speeds of up to 0.12c.
This is not science fiction -- it is and was all well within the technological / industrial capability of the USA since the late 1950s.
The author, Dyson the younger, grew up hearing about this from his famous father, Freeman, and has lots of intriguing anecdotes and insidery access of the ideas and men behind the idea. However, his historiographical acumen doesn't quite match his enthusiasm, making for a stunted read of a wildly compelling topic. Perhaps someday a better writer will take Dyson's work as a primary source for a literary retelling of Project Orion -- therein lies a bestseller.
This is not science fiction -- it is and was all well within the technological / industrial capability of the USA since the late 1950s.
The author, Dyson the younger, grew up hearing about this from his famous father, Freeman, and has lots of intriguing anecdotes and insidery access of the ideas and men behind the idea. However, his historiographical acumen doesn't quite match his enthusiasm, making for a stunted read of a wildly compelling topic. Perhaps someday a better writer will take Dyson's work as a primary source for a literary retelling of Project Orion -- therein lies a bestseller.
March 12, 2023
"These were days when we thought big. Now, whether it made economic sense to tour around the solar system and bring back asteroids, or pieces of asteroids, that I never thought made economic sense. But that wasn't the purpose of it. At that time we were a rich nation with unrestricted ambitions, so we thought of doing all these wonderful things. We're an even richer nation now, but with much restricted ambitions. "Orion was a grand concept, which a rich nation with great vision and great opportunity could embrace."
August 29, 2012
If you're not well-versed in science, this is by no means light reading. However, if you have the knowledge to appreciate the ideas and concepts introduced throughout this book, you're in for a real treat, it's your chance to sail through the minds of some of the greatest scientists and engineers that ever lived, and each of them has his own set ideas that will leave you positively stunned.
July 26, 2021
After WWII the geniuses that had gathered in the Manhattan project didn't know what to do. Some of them were restless and wanted to continue the R&D into nuclear physics and associated engineering disciplines, in the same freewheeling, (and free-spending) way of the Manhattan project, but if possible without blowing up the earth.
Frederic de Hoffmann, who had been a young physicist in the Manhattan project managed to pull a large number of strings, and founded General Atomic as an offshoot of General Dynamics. The stated purpose was to explore peaceful developments of nuclear technology, and one early product was the TRIGA reactor, which was sold to numerous universities around the world, as part of the Atoms for Peace project.
One stated goal was to pursue oddball ideas in a seriously scientific way, and one of the more oddball ideas was to use nuclear bombs for interplanetary propulsion. It turned out that there were no real scientific or engineering obstacles, that couldn't be overcome with the current state-of-art of the 1950s! They proposed several designs, and the most serious one was for a 4000 ton(!) ship that would be able to travel to the moons of Saturn. (That's 1000 times heavier than the Apollo Lunar Module!) There's a reason they called this a 'spaceship' rather than a 'capsule'. A lot of the hull engineering came from the Electric Boat division of General Dynamics, which made the nuclear submarines.
Some of the characters were larger than life, and viewed the entire nuclear bomb project as a big adventure. One vignette shows how Ted Taylor, one of the bomb designers, lights a cigarette with a parabolic mirror, using the energy from a nuclear bomb exploding 20km away.
Orion would have used ~1000 small (~1kton) fission bombs, which had been modified to provide most of their explosive force in the direction towards the ship. There the plasma wave would be intercepted by a thick (and heavy) 'pusher plate' - coupled to the rest of the ship with springs and dampers.
The project could probably have lasted longer, if it wasn't for internal bickering between the Air Force and NASA.
The book was written in 2001 by George Dyson, the son of Freeman Dyson, who was deeply involved in the project during most of its life. The most interesting is probably the éast chapter, where it's hinted that a revival of the basic ideas behind Orion may not be doomed to oblivion. (Personally, I would have thought that it would make more sense to use pulsed fusion, instead of fission, though.)
Frederic de Hoffmann, who had been a young physicist in the Manhattan project managed to pull a large number of strings, and founded General Atomic as an offshoot of General Dynamics. The stated purpose was to explore peaceful developments of nuclear technology, and one early product was the TRIGA reactor, which was sold to numerous universities around the world, as part of the Atoms for Peace project.
One stated goal was to pursue oddball ideas in a seriously scientific way, and one of the more oddball ideas was to use nuclear bombs for interplanetary propulsion. It turned out that there were no real scientific or engineering obstacles, that couldn't be overcome with the current state-of-art of the 1950s! They proposed several designs, and the most serious one was for a 4000 ton(!) ship that would be able to travel to the moons of Saturn. (That's 1000 times heavier than the Apollo Lunar Module!) There's a reason they called this a 'spaceship' rather than a 'capsule'. A lot of the hull engineering came from the Electric Boat division of General Dynamics, which made the nuclear submarines.
Some of the characters were larger than life, and viewed the entire nuclear bomb project as a big adventure. One vignette shows how Ted Taylor, one of the bomb designers, lights a cigarette with a parabolic mirror, using the energy from a nuclear bomb exploding 20km away.
Orion would have used ~1000 small (~1kton) fission bombs, which had been modified to provide most of their explosive force in the direction towards the ship. There the plasma wave would be intercepted by a thick (and heavy) 'pusher plate' - coupled to the rest of the ship with springs and dampers.
The project could probably have lasted longer, if it wasn't for internal bickering between the Air Force and NASA.
The book was written in 2001 by George Dyson, the son of Freeman Dyson, who was deeply involved in the project during most of its life. The most interesting is probably the éast chapter, where it's hinted that a revival of the basic ideas behind Orion may not be doomed to oblivion. (Personally, I would have thought that it would make more sense to use pulsed fusion, instead of fission, though.)
June 2, 2023
There was a serious proposal, starting in 1945, for the US to build a gigantic nuclear-powered spaceship. Top scientists worked on the plan for secret in years, but it was eventually abandoned. This book is the story of that project, and what could have been. The solar system would have been our lake, decades ago. From the book:
"To visualize Orion, imagine an enormous one-cylinder external combustion engine, a single piston reciprocating within the combustion chamber of empty space. The ship itself, egg-shaped and the height of a twenty-story building, is the piston, armored by a 1,000-ton pusher plate, attached by shock-absorbing legs. The first hundred explosions, fired at half-second intervals, with a total yield equivalent to some 100,000 tons of TNT, would lift the ship from sea level to 125,000 feet."
What a missed opportunity. There's a little documentary footage on Youtube about this project now too, if you're curious.
The book is by George Dyson, the son of Freeman Dyson, one of the researchers who worked on the project. It's a well-written, fascinating account of where we might have gone by now.
"To visualize Orion, imagine an enormous one-cylinder external combustion engine, a single piston reciprocating within the combustion chamber of empty space. The ship itself, egg-shaped and the height of a twenty-story building, is the piston, armored by a 1,000-ton pusher plate, attached by shock-absorbing legs. The first hundred explosions, fired at half-second intervals, with a total yield equivalent to some 100,000 tons of TNT, would lift the ship from sea level to 125,000 feet."
What a missed opportunity. There's a little documentary footage on Youtube about this project now too, if you're curious.
The book is by George Dyson, the son of Freeman Dyson, one of the researchers who worked on the project. It's a well-written, fascinating account of where we might have gone by now.
February 6, 2021
Truly one of the greatest "what if?" stories of all time. Manned missions to Jupiter and Saturn in 1970s were once thought reasonable and achievable. Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship by George Dyson is the story about the amazing project that almost was. Doomed by politics and nuclear proliferation fears, the world may yet come around to the undeniable technical benefits that Orion represents. Until then, we have books like this and our dreams.
October 29, 2024
Not an easy read - even if you have an understanding of the physics/concepts behind this crazy plan to get massive spaceships into orbit and beyond by exploding numerous nuclear bombs behind them. I was really looking forward to reading this book (because there aren’t many on project Orion), but the book gets lost in the level of detail and can’t hide the fact that the project only ever got to theoretical models and small scale trials before it was abandoned.
August 15, 2025
This is a very technical look at the idea of launching a ship into space using atomic bombs - a crazy idea that apparently would have worked.
There's a great story here, but it's buried under a lot of technical details about physics and engineering, about escape velocity and maximum payload, about ablation rates and kiloton yields. And numbers, lots of numbers.
The writer is the son of one of the key players, a physicist who drove the project. His insights, and those of others in Project Orion, inform the book, but it loses something in the formulas.
Still, interesting for the story you can pull from among the numbers.
There's a great story here, but it's buried under a lot of technical details about physics and engineering, about escape velocity and maximum payload, about ablation rates and kiloton yields. And numbers, lots of numbers.
The writer is the son of one of the key players, a physicist who drove the project. His insights, and those of others in Project Orion, inform the book, but it loses something in the formulas.
Still, interesting for the story you can pull from among the numbers.
February 17, 2025
This book was ok. I’m mainly reading it as research for a thing I’m writing, so I got lots of notes. I can’t say I really enjoyed the reading style too much I found it kind of a slog to get through. Overall an interesting look at an interesting project.
September 3, 2018
Could have been written better
October 29, 2021
Fascinating history of Project Orion - some parts of which are still classified. Who knows what sort of a world we might live in if it had gone ahead!
November 9, 2025
Knowing the author is the son of the legendary scientist dr.Freeman Dyson, I knew the book would be filled with details and anecdotes, for he had access to the very source who was heavily involved in the project for a period of time.
The details and the prospects of the spacecraft ensured a page-turning experience, so did the description of the politics, egos, and Cold War madness. The book is equal parts history, adventure, and “what if?”—a reminder that humanity’s boldest dreams often die in a committee.
The details and the prospects of the spacecraft ensured a page-turning experience, so did the description of the politics, egos, and Cold War madness. The book is equal parts history, adventure, and “what if?”—a reminder that humanity’s boldest dreams often die in a committee.
February 24, 2014
This book details, in fascinating and human fashion, one of the great "what ifs" of the space age. For several years, in the 1950's and into the early 1960's, a group of nuclear scientists and engineers pursued the very real possibility of launching spacecraft the size of naval vessels using nuclear weapons, and then using more nuclear weapons to propel them around the solar system. This technology, which as far as we know is perfectly feasible, would have allowed ships large enough for a hundred or more scientists to cruise with quite cushy accommodations among the moons of Saturn by 1970.
Unfortunately (from the perspective of the author), various treaties banning the detonation of nuclear weapons in space, combined with concerns about health risks posed to the people of Earth caused by the fallout from the bombs, killed the project.
The author, George Dyson, is the son of one of the key brains behind the project, the brilliant and influential physicist, Freeman Dyson (ever heard of a "Dyson Sphere? It's even mentioned in a Star Trek TNG episode). His perspective on the project is not entirely objective, but the reader will forgive that as the clear storytelling allows the reader to share the enthusiasm of the project scientists who believed that they quite literally held in their hands the key to opening up the solar system to human exploration.
This could have been a dry, technical exposition of the physics and engineering problems posed by the concept and how they were worked through one by one. It is not. And, it could have been an emotion-charged tale that began with cheer leading for the exciting project and then whining about the narrow-minded bureaucrats who killed it. It is not that, either.
Rather, this book--in clear but detailed language--shows the reader an exciting vista of what could have been, tells the fascinating story of the brilliant scientists who worked to open up that vista, and then tells the frustrating but entirely logical story of why that vista was never explored.
I enjoyed the book very much--so much that I have read it twice and will probably read it again when I get my own third book finished. This book is a must for anyone interested in space exploration.
Unfortunately (from the perspective of the author), various treaties banning the detonation of nuclear weapons in space, combined with concerns about health risks posed to the people of Earth caused by the fallout from the bombs, killed the project.
The author, George Dyson, is the son of one of the key brains behind the project, the brilliant and influential physicist, Freeman Dyson (ever heard of a "Dyson Sphere? It's even mentioned in a Star Trek TNG episode). His perspective on the project is not entirely objective, but the reader will forgive that as the clear storytelling allows the reader to share the enthusiasm of the project scientists who believed that they quite literally held in their hands the key to opening up the solar system to human exploration.
This could have been a dry, technical exposition of the physics and engineering problems posed by the concept and how they were worked through one by one. It is not. And, it could have been an emotion-charged tale that began with cheer leading for the exciting project and then whining about the narrow-minded bureaucrats who killed it. It is not that, either.
Rather, this book--in clear but detailed language--shows the reader an exciting vista of what could have been, tells the fascinating story of the brilliant scientists who worked to open up that vista, and then tells the frustrating but entirely logical story of why that vista was never explored.
I enjoyed the book very much--so much that I have read it twice and will probably read it again when I get my own third book finished. This book is a must for anyone interested in space exploration.
April 5, 2007
What would you say to the idea of a spacecraft pushed along by bombs exploding behind it? What if you were told that with atomic bombs the spacecraft could be the size and weight of an oceangoing battleship?
Project Orion is a history written by the son of noted Physicist Freeman Dyson. His father was on the research team at General Atomics in the early 1960s that showed such a spacecraft could very likely be built. A filmed test with conventional explosives showed a model vehicle popping upwards. They even held talks with the Coca Cola company to see if very reliable soda can dispenser mechanisms could be adapted to eject microbombs. In the end, the problems of fallout, nuclear proliferation due to the manufacture of thousands of tiny atomic bomblets and the signing of the atmospheric test ban treaty killed the full scale concept.
In recent years the idea has occasionally been revived for a mission to Mars, where the nuclear pusher engine would only be used outside of earth's atmosphere.
Project Orion is a history written by the son of noted Physicist Freeman Dyson. His father was on the research team at General Atomics in the early 1960s that showed such a spacecraft could very likely be built. A filmed test with conventional explosives showed a model vehicle popping upwards. They even held talks with the Coca Cola company to see if very reliable soda can dispenser mechanisms could be adapted to eject microbombs. In the end, the problems of fallout, nuclear proliferation due to the manufacture of thousands of tiny atomic bomblets and the signing of the atmospheric test ban treaty killed the full scale concept.
In recent years the idea has occasionally been revived for a mission to Mars, where the nuclear pusher engine would only be used outside of earth's atmosphere.
August 31, 2014
My father had taken me outdoors, in the late evening. The year was 1957. He pointed to the sky and asked if I could see the flashing light of the recently launched Russian satellite. The fascination with space, that I felt, has never left me.
Project Orion delves in a delightful way into the people, engineering and physics that covered a span of 6 years. And what a project it was: a spaceship powered by atomic bombs surpassing Jules Verne's "From Earth to the Moon"! Dyson's father, Freeman Dyson, an imminent physicist, was among those scientists. They came from Los Alamos to the beaches of Southern California, to Point Loma, to Torrey Pines and to La Jolla.
The project, initiated in 1958, a time when the only space traveler was a dog named Laika, proposed a vehicle weighing 4000 tons that could travel to all the planets in our solar system in a high degree of comfort. Dyson brings an insider's view into the goings on and shares their dreams of space with us, the children of Sputnik.
Project Orion delves in a delightful way into the people, engineering and physics that covered a span of 6 years. And what a project it was: a spaceship powered by atomic bombs surpassing Jules Verne's "From Earth to the Moon"! Dyson's father, Freeman Dyson, an imminent physicist, was among those scientists. They came from Los Alamos to the beaches of Southern California, to Point Loma, to Torrey Pines and to La Jolla.
The project, initiated in 1958, a time when the only space traveler was a dog named Laika, proposed a vehicle weighing 4000 tons that could travel to all the planets in our solar system in a high degree of comfort. Dyson brings an insider's view into the goings on and shares their dreams of space with us, the children of Sputnik.
October 19, 2012
What an insane idea: create a gigantic spaceship powered by nuclear explosions. Insane enough it just might have worked, were it not that public sentiment turned against all things nuclear, especially exploding bombs in the atmosphere.
I found the book a fascinating read and a good look into the "nuclear culture" of the late 50s and early 60s, where exploding nuclear devices in the atmosphere was no big deal, and atomic power had limitless possibilities.
Another reviewer mentioned that the book was only for nerds who knew their math and physics, and a liberal arts person would have great trouble reading it. I'm FAR from a math whiz—math is the reason I went into Fine Arts—and I found the book easy to read and understand. I'm writing this review about a week after returning the book to the library, and as I recall, there were no equations at all in the text.
A wildly crazy idea, yes, and one that might be resurrected in the near future.
I found the book a fascinating read and a good look into the "nuclear culture" of the late 50s and early 60s, where exploding nuclear devices in the atmosphere was no big deal, and atomic power had limitless possibilities.
Another reviewer mentioned that the book was only for nerds who knew their math and physics, and a liberal arts person would have great trouble reading it. I'm FAR from a math whiz—math is the reason I went into Fine Arts—and I found the book easy to read and understand. I'm writing this review about a week after returning the book to the library, and as I recall, there were no equations at all in the text.
A wildly crazy idea, yes, and one that might be resurrected in the near future.
October 26, 2014
It is an amazing thing that a group of first-rate physicists and engineers once took seriously the idea of a capsule the size of a yacht being lofted into space by hundreds of atomic bombs, but they did. A lot of them never quit taking it seriously.
My impressions:
1. Fallout is a showstopper for the ground-launched version.
2. Launching hundreds of nuclear bombs into space from earth, by whatever means, seems pretty dangerous. Politically it would never fly, and I agree with the public on this one.
3. It's still the only plausible way of sending people to the outer solar system, if we ever decide we need to do that.
The book was interesting but it didn't sparkle. If you want to know about the Orion project then it's indispensible, but I wanted it to be a book I could enjoy more.
My impressions:
1. Fallout is a showstopper for the ground-launched version.
2. Launching hundreds of nuclear bombs into space from earth, by whatever means, seems pretty dangerous. Politically it would never fly, and I agree with the public on this one.
3. It's still the only plausible way of sending people to the outer solar system, if we ever decide we need to do that.
The book was interesting but it didn't sparkle. If you want to know about the Orion project then it's indispensible, but I wanted it to be a book I could enjoy more.
June 4, 2012
Fascinating stuff. Construct a 4,000 tonne spaceship which is propelled by hundreds of small nuclear bombs? In the late 1950s, this was close to being a reality. Eye-opening stuff, this book is full of tech detail, but it's the people invovled who are the most interesting - full of boundless thinking, wide horizons and intelligence, not only able to think outside the box but able to kick the box aside and leap for the stars. Most of them gradually had the 'Hold on a second' epiphany and re-evaluated their work and the possible proliferation of nukes, but they still retain a wistful image of an early 21st century world where ORION is taking us to the outer planets, supporting a large moon base and pointing the way to the universe.
October 12, 2012
This is a story about something that really happened. That means it is true. The government paid scientists to think about and design a spacecraft that would use thousands of atomic bombs for propulsion. On the chalkboard it looks something like...let's go visit saturn's rings in a gigantic spaceship and come back real quick. Seriously. Be book focuses a bit more on the science, engineering, and mathematical problems and solutions of the endeavor than your average reader wants to get into...but then again, your average reader isn't picking up this book. The most detailed account of Project Orion you can get without high level government security clearance. Quite technical though, made me want to read a novel instead.
October 22, 2012
Difficult to put down. Methodical yet gripping in unfolding the personal and technical story of as unlikely a project as you'll ever see: propelling an ocean-liner sized spacecraft with nuclear bombs.
The best character, by far, is Jerry Astl, in the chapter "C-4". A former resistance fighter, aeronautical engineer and explosives expert, his stories from World War 2 add spice to the stories of testing Project Orion. And he's a hoot.
The most affecting part to me was Freeman Dyson's narrative of having to choose between Orion and the Partial Test Ban Treaty, both of which he thought could be the savior of humanity on different timescales.
Well worth reading.
The best character, by far, is Jerry Astl, in the chapter "C-4". A former resistance fighter, aeronautical engineer and explosives expert, his stories from World War 2 add spice to the stories of testing Project Orion. And he's a hoot.
The most affecting part to me was Freeman Dyson's narrative of having to choose between Orion and the Partial Test Ban Treaty, both of which he thought could be the savior of humanity on different timescales.
Well worth reading.
August 13, 2010
This book tells the story of a strange, fascinating, crazy, uber-cool engineering project.The first chapters are each built around of one the key players in the project, detailing their background, motivation and contribution to the project. The later chapters present the evolution of the project: from a an idea on a blackboard to a serious project that gets killed by not only technical issues but also political ones. George Dyson wrote a book that can help us understand how things worked in the midst of the cold war.
October 7, 2012
Although Project Orion is quite interesting, this book is not. The book is poorly written, focusing overlymuch on personal anecdotes and lots of unnecessary background details about the scientists who worked on this project. While an examination of the genesis and development of the project makes sense given its still classified nature, the achronological writing style ruins this. Unfortunately, I have little choice but to abandon this book rather than try to wade through it, as I doubt I will learn anything new or interesting about the project itself.
November 19, 2012
This is a thorough history of the "Project Orion" spacecraft project, familiar to SF fans through the works of Niven and Pournelle and more recently Stephenson. Dyson has a personal interest in the subject since his father, Freeman Dyson, was involved in the work. George Dyson explains the technical details of this audacious idea in a clear and entertaining fashion, and provides a view into the giddy super-science days of the early post-war era, when all sorts of atomic projects were conceived.
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