The spaceship that never got off the ground (Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship - George Dyson)

Member Name: markos9

Product:	Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship - George Dyson
Date:	08/11/09 (64 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fascinating story, well written.

Disadvantages: May be of limited interest to people not interested in space.

The year is 1957. The Nuclear Age is in full swing and the Space Race has just begun with the challenging launch of Sputnik 1 by the Russians. In the United States, the Ultra Top Secret project 'Orion' seeks to combine elements of both nuclear and space technology and eclipse the Russian achievement, proclaiming American superiority in space for ever.

This was the most ambitious space project ever conceived. Orion was to be a 4,000 tonne manned spaceship capable of travelling to Saturn and beyond. The power for the enormous thrust required to move such a large craft was, incredibly, nuclear bombs.

Imagine an egg shaped spaceship with a large plate attached to the rear. Hydrogen bombs were fired from the back of the ship which then detonated when at a suitable distance from the vessel. Thrust from the bombs was absorbed by the plate (with a huge amount of dampening built in to avoid turning the astronauts to paste), propelling the ship forward.

The team of scientists were led by bomb designer Theodore B. Taylor and included British physicist Freeman Dyson. This book is written by Dyson's son George. With access to hundreds of hours of recently declassified material, together with conversations with his father and interviews with the team, George Dyson is well placed to tell the story of the nuclear bomb powered Orion.

The author takes the reader from the start of the project; it's inception as an idea from physicist Stanislaw Ulam, through the minefield of official approval by government officials, on to the assembly of a brilliant group of scientists working with theoretical, untested physics.

This is a story of human ingenuity, of power politics at the height of the cold war, and of extreme physics. To combine these aspects in a tale worth reading is a challenge for an author, but Dyson has produced a readable book.

The author's style gives even the less interesting aspects of the project real interest and his quotes from conversations during the project make fascinating reading.

Amazingly, the scientists had no idea if Orion would even work. The author recounts that much of the worry arose from the pusher plate; would it simply evaporate under the impact of the debris from hundreds of hydrogen bombs at a temperature of 100,000 degrees centigrade?

What is perhaps most surprising about the Orion spaceship is that it was designed to launch from the surface of Earth. Two hundred hydrogen bombs would be exploded, in our atmosphere, before the ship escaped our planet's gravity. The fallout would have been extensive, but the author reminds us that this was in the days when atmospheric nuclear tests were everyday occurrences.

Much of the preliminary work on Orion was completed during the eight years the project was live and Dyson recounts some of the fascinating experiments that were completed. The author's humorous writing style surfaces in some of the tales he tells of his father, and in the wry way he describes some of the practices of the day (that would be impossible to even contemplate now).

He describes Taylor as the only man ever to have lit a cigarette with a nuclear bomb (Taylor used a mirror to concentrate the light from a nuclear explosion 12 miles away to light his cigarette)!

Obviously, Orion never got off the ground, but it was not because the physics behind it were unsound, rather the political climate that resulted in a ban on nuclear testing prevented any further development of nuclear powered spacecraft.

Despite the project's untimely demise, designs for Orion spaceships have continued to be proposed. Clearly, these should never be launched from Earth, but in the vastness of radiation filled space, fallout would not be an issue. Maybe one day, an Orion spaceship will take humans to the outer reaches of the solar system. If so, that future craft will owe its existence to a small group of men who dared to ask whether such a design was possible over fifty years ago.

Dyson has written a readable, fascinating, thought provoking book. Project Orion is a wonderful account of an attempt of humans to reach for the stars and an excellent tribute to his father, one of the most eminent scientists this country has ever produced.

The book is available from Amazon for £11.99.

Summary: An excellent account of an amazing project.