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Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship
The chief advantage of an Orion-style spaceship can be explained in terms of specific impulse, which is the time during which a mass of fuel will produce enough mass x g thrust. Conventional chemical rockets, constrained by exhaust temperature, can produce specific impulses of about 430 seconds. Orion-style engines promised a specific impulse that was an order of magnitude higher than that--"2000 to 3000 seconds for first-generation designs, 4000 to 6000 for larger vehicles using existing bombs." The combination of long specific impulse and high thrust was unique to Orion, and would have allowed for the sustained high-acceleration maneuvers necessary for long-range manned space flight. And, like nuclear bombs in general, Orion scaled up more easily than it scaled down. The original Orion reference design massed 4,000 tons, and unlike the Apollo missions, which sent 600 lbs into space for every pound that came home, more than half of Orion's launch weight would have returned to Earth from a voyage to Saturn. Had it fulfilled its promises, Orion would have enabled manned space travel on a grand scale, with thousands of tons of payload and year-plus mission durations. It would have let us go into deep space in spaceships instead of mere disposable, unmanned spacecraft.
From 1958 to 1965, a team of physicists and engineers at General Atomic in California pursued the Orion dream. Project Orion tells their story ably. Dyson explores high-minded science and baroque bureaucracies in short, manageable, anecdote-loaded chapters. It's a terrifically easy read; with just freshman physics and a passing knowledge of 1950's America, I was able to follow along with no problems. The book begins by explaining the basics of Orion, the 1950's atomic establishment, the dot-com-like culture at General Atomic, the experiments that gave rise to the Orion idea, and the seed funding from ARPA. Dyson moves on to introduce us to some of Orion's chief characters, notably Stanislaw Ulam, who originally patented the atomic-pulse-drive idea, Ted Taylor, the Orion project leader and namer (he "just picked a name out of the sky," says the book) and Freeman Dyson, the celebrated scientist who was on board for the first two years -- and, who, not coincidentally, is George Dyson's father.
From there, it's on to the fun parts, beginning with the chapters detailing the engineering problems that Orion's designers faced. Most obviously, how do you design a pusher plate that won't shake itself apart or ablate under repeated impacts of nuclear plasma? (answer: with a thin coat of oil, reapplied between each atomic pulse.) How do you cushion the crew from the hundred-g shock of the pulse-unit explosions? (answer: with two-stage shock absorbers.) How do you shape the expansion of the propellant plasma so that you hit the pusher plate right? (answer: you take advantage of directed-energy weapons research to shape your atomic charges.) How do you eject your atomic charges from around the rim and orient them so that they explode correctly? (answer: you talk to Coca-Cola about bottling plant design.) And how do you cope with a pulse-unit misfire that sprays your pusher plate with jagged shrapnel instead of friendly plasma? (no answer given.)
Since GA's Orion program was a small shop that wasn't straightjacketed by job descriptions, the physicists were free to envision operational details and space missions for their baby. After concluding its engineering coverage, Project Orion looks at some of these missions. Freeman Dyson proposed a mission that would have landed on the moon, orbited Venus, Earth, and Mars, and then gone out to to Enceladus, Saturn's second-innermost satellite. The mission would have made clever use of tricks like planetary gravity boosts, in-atmosphere decelerations, and propellant harvesting to stretch its range. The senior Dyson was vexed by the problem of atomic contamination, though; even if it used the cleanest bombs available in the late fifties, an Orion launch would still introduce considerable amounts of toxic fission products into the Earth's magnetosphere. Dyson estimated that about ten people would die from atomic contamination for every Orion launch. This was about one percent of the estimated fatalities attributed to the atomic tests of the day. Instead of waiting for cleaner bombs to solve this problem, GA collaborated with friendly factions inside NASA--including rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun, who was an enthusiastic supporter of Orion--to discuss rocket-boosted Orion models. Proposals were made to either loft Orion into orbit wholesale or to boost it in pieces and conduct final assembly in orbit. Rocket-powered auxiliaries were also discussed; these would serve as landing craft and inter-Orion taxis.
In the end, of course, all of this work amounted to nothing. For various reasons -- nuclear test bans, lack of funding, and indifferent brass -- the Orion project was never permitted to conduct any of the nuclear test shots necessary to advance its work. The Orion staff made only a single successful test flight during the entire duration of the project, and this was conducted with 1m-diameter model powered by C4 charges. By 1959, Freeman Dyson had left the effort; he had seen that NASA wasn't going to budge away from Von Braun's giant rockets, and he knew that NASA was the only agency that would be able to support Orion. The project staggered on for four more years under Air Force funding, but the Air Force wasn't the right fit for Orion; no one could figure out a clear and present military use for all that lifting power. The USAF repeatedly approached NASA for money, but NASA was interested only in the conservatively incrementing known technologies, not in wholesale revolution. Orion was orphaned by 1965, its knowledge scattered through hundreds of classified documents and dozens of scientist's brains.
The book ends on a fascinating note, with modern-day retrospectives from various Orion staff. Some of them--including Ted Taylor--have renounced the idea of atomic weapons entirely. Some of them are convinced that Orion could never be made to work safely and reliably. Others believe that Orion is an idea whose time will come. NASA agrees with them, in some small measure; they're looking at Orion again as a space-exploration and asteroid-intercept technology. They're having a tough time finding details and data from the General Atomic project, though -- much of Orion's data is still classified. Dyson has had more success in hunting down those documents than NASA. When he contacted them in the course of his research, they begged him for copies!
I greatly enjoyed reading Project Orion. The only disappointment it held for me was its heavy reliance on Freeman Dyson's recollections, and the consequent weighting of the book towards Dyson's year of involvement. I suspect there's a lot of interesting detail missing from the latter six years of the project. That aside, Project Orion is an excellent high-level introduction to the characters, engineering, culture, and future of the Orion project, and an ideal jumpoff point to other readings about the atomic age.
You can purchase Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
I wonder if thats a good idea.
It seems that blowing stuff up under you could be painful.
Deep Impact also used Orion.
Nice to see a book on Ol' Bang Bang.
The Crazy Finn
"You've got an invalid haircut" -Warren Zevon - Life'll Kill Ya
I read this book a few months ago and I agree with the reviewer that this is an excellent book. However, it tends to concentrate a great deal more on the politics surrounding Project Orion than the science much to my chagrin. Much of the information surrounding Project Orion is still classified so I don't necessarily blame the author for this, but those intending on reading the book should qualify their expectations.
I did get a great appreciation for the sheer size and magnitude of truly difficult engineering problems and the organizations and minds assigned to solving them.
All in all, it's a quick and easy interesting read that engineers and NASA junkies will likely enjoy.
No way. Niven and Pournelle (especially Pournelle) have been coasting on their reputations since "A Mote in God's Eye."
I'm not a physicist, but I would think that the majority of the energy from the explosion would not propel the spaceship but would be emitted in perpendicular directions, escecially as the blast grew in size (let's not forget the sudden G forces involved here). Wouldn't using the resulting hot gasses/radiation from a nuclear reactor provide a smoother, more efficient burn?
A Spaceship that lights its own farts???
IN TEH FUCHAR, LITERSY WLIL EB OPSHANAL!!!!!111
If you are ever in Idaho, you should visit EBR-1, the world's first breeder reactor. It is decommissioned, cold, and open for tourists during the summer season. Outside, they have some prototype nuclear jet engines - devices that took in air, heated it with a fission reactor, and expelled it for thrust. Neat stuff - would have been nasty as hell had it ever gone into service, but neat none the less.
EBR-1 is about 4 hours drive from the west entrance of Yellowstone National Park, and about 45 minute from Craters of the Moon National Park, so there's plenty of other stuff to do in the area.
www.eFax.com are spammers
man won't advance till all of the useless eaters have been removed from the planet
maybe we had better wait for hordes of invading baby elephants before taking off in an old banger...
I've heard of the Orion concept before and quite frankly I can't understand how you build something to withstand an atomic explosion for propulsion purposes and not have it blow itself to smithereens. I DO realize that we're not talking about megaton sized explosions here. :) However I'm still fuzzy on how a very low power explosion could keep the damage to the craft down while still providing an effective means of propulsion. Or is this similar to the impulse engines of star trek (the greatest scientific precursor ever, *snicker*), where the nuclear reaction is fed constantly by small amounts of reactive mass?
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
Another good book that bears on this subject is Robert Zubrin's Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization. He discusses the atomic bomb drive as well as other postulated ideas for interstellar craft, such as solar wings and some trick with laser and mirrors (IIRC).
Even better, for slashdot folks, is that Zubrin takes this stuff seriously in a scientific sense. He discusses the energy needs and expected capabilities of the various craft, and in general covers a lot of "practical" ground. This is the same guy who is behind The Mars Society, which actively works to enable and encourage mannned missions to Mars.
Slashdot has covered Zubrin and Mars Society before; see this and that. He also has a mars-specific book titled The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must. I recommend both his books to anyone who thinks we need to get off this rock.
Use a hemispherical plate, explode them at teh focus, enough of the energy pushes on the plate to make this worthwile. The key here is BIG OVERKILL not efficient.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Feasable nuclear engineering: 500 billion
Buncha rocket scientists: 10 millon
Building the engine: 1 billion
Putting Manhattan into orbit:Priceless.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
From Footfall:
THOOM
THOOM
THOOM
God was knocking,
and he wanted in...
BAD--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
The shielding burns up, but at a predicted rate, and it lasts long enough to get the craft on the ground. Shuttle shielding is the opposite, it's a ceramic that simply "holds" the heat (vast simplification there, but well).
And it's ablation again with Orion. Sure, the explosions ablate part of the shielding, but it lasts long enough to get the craft where you want it to be.
And to answer your other question, the idea is like the engine of a car. If you can hear the individual pistons firing, then you've probably got a problem! But they do fire individually. Same thing with Orion (or similar) - the bombs are chucked out the back at a pretty rapid rate. At least in the designs I remember - I haven't read the book but I will based on the review. It sounds fascinating!
This is a design by Robert Zubrin for a rocket that produces a continous atomic blast using water with a high concentration of Uranium or Plutonium salts.
Nuke Your Way to the Stars
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
You can find more info about advanced propulsion techniques (like the Orion-project) and other interesting space-science stuff at Warp Drive When?.
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
Those things go 25 years without needing to be refilled, or whatever.
Dissolved uranium salts in water ejected by a magnetohydrodynamic drive (think linear accelerator for saltwater) with a neutron emitter to initiate fission at the egress point: that's the way to go. Any comments?
Hope out to particleadventure.com to read up real quick on the physics behind anti-matter. With an anti-matter drive, where the matter is anihalated into pure energy (momentarly) why both at this point dealing with nuclear? Yes I know AM is somewhat rare but jeez you think the leftist,socialist, posing as demoncrate fool tree-huggers are going to allow a nuclear drive?
... Gasp! ... couch... hack.... weeze....
/. Post" thank you all!
Anti-matter is pollution free (provided that the nightmare casacade scenario doesn't happen [Where an anti-matter matter interaction creates equal amounts of matter and anti-matter causing an eternal explosion, which as far as solid science is impossible...] it was from an old 70's comic book btw but some of those nuts in left, and the right, as both extremes have problems with reality actually quote from time to time fiction, versus reality. Reagardless I digress and apologize. Regardless of propulsion systems there is still a problem that MUST BE RESOLVED before we worry about propulsion. Regardless of if we can get there (whereever there is) we must resolve the sustainable habitiate issues (food and what not) gravity fatigue (time to go find the ever absent graviton so we can create non-spin artifical gravity), and physical atriculation (current space suits are not suited for extended phsyical activities, we need low profile exoskeleton systems, mmmm ACK! GUYVER!! Errr what was I talking about (Why was there a scottish guard in the guyver anime in TOKYO?) Again I digress it's time to end this post ACk... gurgle.... Et tu, Brute?
-Later that night at the academy awards-
Me- Thank you all and thank you to slashdot for giving me the opportunity to win the award for "Best Death in a
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
You can also read about Project Orion in John McPhee's book The Curve of Binding Energy . This book is mostly a long conversation between McPhee and Ted Taylor, (more) a physicist and ex- nuclear weopons engineer. In the early 70's Taylor becomes worried about how easy it is to build a fission bomb. Taylor and McPhee drive around and survey the security of nuclear materials while Taylor talks bomb theory and practice. The title comes from the curve on this page.
The only question I would have about using Nuclear power for space launch woudl be not only be residual radiation at the launch site, but the weight of the craft itself. Too much weight and it won't lift, too little and you cook the occupants. Even a minimal craft woudl have to be very heavy. I would think re-entry would be very problematic. How do you retard you downward velocity enough not to destroy yourself landing. Make a blast chamber that stayed in space or burned up in atmosphere? Would be a great way to lauch heavy componants to a large space station thouhg.
Also if you had an interuption in the blast progression, what would keep you from falling like the giant lead weight the craft would be? To use the Footfall reference again, wasn't that their major concern after the first one when off; keeping them going at the correct rate? Too little you fall, to fast and you either pulp your occupants or start to damage the "bomb guns". I guess now that part would be safer to test due to computer modeling. You wouldn't have to convert hundreds of tons of Nevada's sand into glass.
Now, if you used it as a space based propulsion, that would be great. It would also help get rid of all those old Russian and American nukes that have been removed due to Anti-Balistic Missle treaties. Also any background radiation would disapate failry quickly.
I'm not a physicist, so feel free to pick holes in this.
"To Do Is To Be" - Socrates, "To Be Is To Do" - Sartre, "Do Be Do Be Do" - Sinatra
Cool hack if ever I have seen one! Build-your-own Mars Base in one of the most Mars-Like places on Earth, and do real research on how to operate said base when (not if) we get to Mars.
If you keep up with the web traffic on this project, NASA's position seems to be basically "Great work guys!" and "Can we send our best people?" to which request the Mars Society seems to graciously and intelligently accede.
Keep in mind that all controlled, sustained nuclear reactions we have engineered to date are fission reactions. An inefficiently converted but uncontrolled fusion reaction (aka Hydrogen bomb) will still give more "bang for the buck," literally and figuratively.
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
It's been done. Short story, in the 1950's they were still testing nuclear weapons. They put one at the bottom of a long mine shaft and put a heavy metal plate on top to partially contain the explosion. The plate was last seen moving at about six times escape velocity.
On the other hand, it probably vaporized before leaving the atmosphere, see Operation Plumbob for more information.
All of the best engineers come from the planet New Scotland, and most starship captains accept the notion that they intentionally speak with such a heavy accent that they are nearly unintelligable.
I do not have enough of a memory to quote it directly, but that is almost it.
___ I don't respond to Anonymous Cowards, and I Never Mod them UP.
The air bursts (when the blast doesn't actually touch the ground) wouldn't have been that bad except for the initial EMP and radiation burst. Air bursts don't create fallout and are thus much cleaner then surface bursts (but I still wouldn't want to be around one).
Oh, really? Hiroshima was an air burst (around 2000 feet; no crater was created). Are you really saying there was no fallout at Hiroshima? I know there is less fallout than there is with ground bursts, but none?
For more on Ted Taylor -- his work on fission bombs, his participation in Project Orion, his speculations on how small a nuclear bomb could topple the World Trade Center towers (decades ago), and his concerns about nuclear proliferation -- I strongly recommend John McPhee's The Curve of Binding Energy (BN). McPhee (BN) is an excellent writer, and this is one of his books I enjoyed the most.
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
http://search.npr.org/cf/cmn/segment_display.cfm?s egID=145345
The interview is great for conveying the commitment and enthusiasm Freeman felt for the Orion Project. They really believed that the ship would be build and flown to Mars last century. With NASA's new administrator Sean O'Keefe talking about alternative propulsion systems (including nuclear), who knows maybe Dyson's ideas will actually see the light of day.
yea i stole your sig- whats the big deal, it sucked anyway.
That's because it IS ludicrous, at least the "ascend into orbit" part. It has been a while since I read anything about Project Orion, but I'm pretty confident that this propulsion technique was intended for use only in space. The spacecraft would most likely have been assembled in orbit, or possibly launched from Earth by one mother of a big chemical rocket.
First, like many people here, I don't understand how a nuclear explosion won't destroy the ship it is trying to move through Space at "warp speed". This seems pretty dangerous to me. Good luck finding anyone to fly that thing!
... do we really want to destroy the places we are trying to explore?
Second, haven't scientists just discovered how to have the same piece of matter in two locations at one time? In theory, this means that we might be able to "beam" things, rather than blow them up while trying to move them.
I seriously think we need to consider non-tradional methods of relocating ourselves rather than blowing ourselves up.
Besides, what would happen if a large nuclear powered space craft had a mishap and crashed into the earth? (or Mars??)
C'mon karma points!!
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
if the Rocket Guy would be interested in something like this?
Who is John Galt?
I remember reading an interview with Freeman Dyson a couple years ago in wired. He mentioned a week he visited his Daughter, Esther, at Harvard. During the time, she never attended a single class.
When he asked her about it, she said something like "you don't go to Harvard to study, you go to meet people."
It's interesting that she was one of the fist heads of ICANN.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
This is one of the books you should read if you are interested in research, both with weapons and peaceful purposes, that was done with nuclear weapons. Theodore B. Taylor was one of the most interesting and ingeninous nuclear researchers ever, and had many ideas for using directed charge nuclear devices for everything from rockets to digging subways that would span the entire continent. He also discusses how easily nuclear devices can be made, and a lot of the current state-of-the-art in devices. A definite good read. More info about the book can be found on amazon here.
I hope I'm not the only one reminded of Metroid and the bomb-climbing trick.
Remember the 'Dyson Sphere' episode of ST:TNG where Scotty had been trapped in a regenerative transporter cycle for 75 years in his ship, stuck on the sphere?
Well, Freeman Dyson is that Dyson.
See the Dyson Sphere FAQ for details.
Way I see it there are three approaches to nuclear propulsion: 1) Orion -- putty-putty bang-bang, 2) NERVA -- high power density reactor which heats up hydrogen that squirts out a conventional rocket nozzle, and 3) VASIMIR (Variable specific impulse magnetic rocket) -- use the nuclear reactor for an electric power station and accelerate hydrogen or other gas with a magnetic rocket nozzle (there is also ion drive, but VASIMIR is popular these days because it offers the greatest thrust of all the electric schemes). The book, in talking the politics, indicated that NASA Huntsville though that Orion was pie-in-the-sky before doing something like NERVA first. VASIMIR is a more recent proposal and was not under consideration in that era. My understanding is that NERVA would be a replacement 3rd stage to a Saturn V -- that way the reactor would not be turned on until you got into space. One thing about NERVA is that its propellant is stores as liquid hydrogen, which is one of the bulkiest, least dense liquids around. The NERVA stage would have been huge, essentially the same diameter as the S-IC and S-II rocket stages below it, making the nuclear Saturn V one continuous cylinder until you got to the payload fairing. Given the weight of the reactor and given the bulk of the hydrogen tank, I am wondering if the 800-second specific impulse compared to the 430-second specific impulse of the regular Saturn S-IVB upper stage would have been a wash. Orion had a bulk problem too. If it was ground launched, if could have had a much bigger diameter pusher plate to capture more of the nuclear explosion and be more efficient (or perhaps less inefficient). Its efficiency came from the ultra-high temps of a nuclear blast compared to a sustained nuclear reactor and its inefficiency came from most of that efficiency being wasted apart from the little bit captured by the pusher plate, and the bigger the pusher plate the better. I thought they said a ground launch Orion could be in the 10000-second specific impulse range while the Orion launched as a third stage of a Saturn V was reduced to about 2000-second specific impulse because of the smaller pusher plate -- you start getting into the is it worth the bother range. I actually think that the Orion approach would be by far the easiest from the engineering standpoint, given how much work and testing went into bomb making. The only holdup is the idea of polluting even space let alone the Earth with that much fission fragments.
If we were to develop a ship that accelerated at 9.8 m*m for the first half of a trip, and then slowed at the same rate for the second half of a trip, would that be sufficient for artificial gravity?
Andy
Trusting software vendors is no smarter than trus
The idea is that you would have a tank of water with uranium salt in solution along with enough boron so the thing would go off at once. You piped this salt water into a reactor chamber where you somehow extracted the boron so that you would get a nuclear chain reaction inside the chamber and then the super heated salt water would squirt out the back.
As somewhat less crazy idea is that you would entrain uranium hexafluoride gas in a vortex in a reactor and pump hydrogen through it -- kind of a look-Ma-no-walls version of NERVA.
planet. AT 3:am GMT today the governments of most of the nations of earth received a formal declaration of war from an alien race who claims we fired the first shot. After many hours of discussion it was determined that this "first shot" was a large steel plate intended to dampen the effects of a nuclear explosion test performed by the United States many years ago. The steel plate propelled by the explosion escaped the earth's gravity at a heading that led it on a collision course with an unsuspecting race of aliens, almost wiping them out to the last being. The American government has made plans to compensate the few surviving members of the afflicted race by granting them naturalized citizen status and homes in Los Angeles where their outer worldly looks and nature is unlikely to be noticed.
However, it seems logical that by shaping the initial portions of an nuclear explosion, just as you would with conventional explosives, you should be able to achieve SOME degree of directional channelling of the energies. Mind you, what I know of nuclear weapons design can be written in VERY large letters on a VERY small piece of paper. . . but as I recall, the SciAm article made it seem plausible, even suggested engineering uses for shaped nukes. . ..
Traveling through space on the fireballs of nuclear explosions! Unfortunately, the book spends much more time on politics than on physics or engineering. Still, I suppose you've got to be quite a political animal to get money for this sort of thing.
Dyson excuses the lack of technical data by noting that much Orion information is still secret (like how to make a nuclear bomb with a golf ball-sized chunk of plutonium), but the deficit still cries out. There's just enough technical material to make you wish for more. Virtually all the graphics seem to be multi-generational copies of just a few original project drawings. There were no significant original graphics.
The character sketches and descriptions of fighting for funds are well done and tell us a lot about how government really works (slowly, wastefully, and on an old-boy network), but "The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship" is not an accurate title for this book.
I sold the book immediately on finishing it.
I once worked for a researcher who had done some time at GA. He had some crazy ideas for research projects. I vowed that I would never be in the same building as the experiment when it finally got running. And, when it caught on fire, I was not going to be in there in my asbestos suit shoveling burning liquid sodium; I was going to be looking for a new job.
Actually it was the Orion launch description which almost alone made Footfall worth the read (though I agree many scenes and characters, especially Harry were remixes of LH). "~ An atom bomb went off under Harry's ass... ~".
Just briefly I had the opportunity to meet George Dyson (a really nice down to earth guy). If the name sounds at all familiar, his sister is Ester Dyson (used to be chairperson of ICANN) and father is Freeman Dyson (a well known theoretical physicist). From what I've heard, George was always the odd one out in the family taking his own path. He used to live in a great looking tree house on the north end of Vancouver Island and then went on to research and build baidarkas (an Aleut Kayak).He has a great book on the kayaks called "Baidarka" which in the first half covers the history of the their development and Aleuts interaction with Russian traders and then moves on to cover the vessels themselves and his work.
He then went on to research and write a book on A.I. titled "Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence". In addition to the original theories about using nuclear explosions to propel space ships, his father had the concept of building a huge structure around a star that people would live on the inside of and the star would provide the energy. You may remember this from a Star Trek Next Generation where they brought back Scotty, it was the Dyson Sphere. A final interesting tidbit is that George Dyson's grandfather Sir George Dyson was an English composer and founder of the National Federation of Music Societies.
Overall, it's an interesting family with some incredible minds in it. The BBC has a short piece on his AI book and on the left hand column is a real audio interview with George. There are also plenty of other links on google if you plug in his name.
is "The Starship and the Canoe" by Kenneth Brower. It's actually about Freeman Dyson (the "starship" refers to the Orion project) and George Dyson (who at the time was living in the Alaska wilderness). It's not really a techie book about specific impulses or engineering history, but a good read about these two very interesting people.
I feel compelled to plug Freeman Dyson's semi-autobiographical Disturbing the Universe:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465016774/
I like the very earliest review. Mine's the one after.
Dyson's books are as interesting as science fiction, but without the cranky politics and cluelessness about the human condition that pervades much of the genre. Imagined Worlds is a sort of lite version of Disturbing the Universe; Weapons and Hope is a still-relevant book about arms control from the mid eighties.
Dont forget the hangliders.
-Ed
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A book by John A. McPhee, written in 1979, called The Curve Of Binding Energy gives an excellent account of this project, including an inverview with one of it's cheif designers. It's a fabulous book, and it's short, so you could read it in a night (a long night, but hey :>) Check it out at borders.
From none other than the man that dreamed it all up:
"Disturbing the Universe" By Freeman Dyson
It's a wonderful book that adds a human element to the early years of the cold war.
-johnny
You just described the whole reason for the tech bubble.
People like her. And that guy who published the "Whole Earth Catalog". I think he started some flashy magazine where he hyped the new "digital economy" where "all the old rules don't apply".
gotcher nose!
Actually, they were worried about the second bomb going off. If the first one fails, no problem, but if the second one fails, your high enough to cause major damage if you fall. Presumeably by the time the third one goes off, youve got a little more time to allow for mechanical difficulties.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
After half a century of building big rockets, we now know that they don't work very well. Half a century ago, they were use-once-and-throw-away devices, and they still are. Payloads are still tiny compared to the launch weight, even for the Shuttle. Compare the figures for jet aircraft, which can be half payload.
Reliability is still lousy, too. This is because so much weight reduction is required just to get the things off the ground that they don't have adequate safety margins. About 10-20% of satellite launches still fail, almost half a century after the first one. That number isn't improving, either; in fact, it was a little better in the 1970s. There have only been a few hundred Shuttle flights, and it's blown up once. Commercial aircraft flights, by comparison, fail a few times per year, out of millions of flights.
Half a century in aviation took us from the Wright Brothers Flyer to the B-52. Half a century in rocketry took us from the Atlas I to the Atlas V. There's been little progress in launch vehicles since the 1960s. All the major launch systems were created decades ago.
So chemical fuels just don't have the power-to-weight ratio for useful space travel. People knew this in the Orion days; it's a straightforward calculation. It's unfortunate that an Orion wasn't launched once or twice, just to demonstrate that nuclear propulsion is possible.
He gives credit for the concept of a star-swaddling energy collector to a book he found in a London subway stop book stall: the quasi-novel Star Maker by SF writer and philosopher Olaf Stapledon:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0486 219623/
Freeman Dyson is best known to SF fans because of the "Sphere" concept and the Orion drive. But please check out the guy's actual writing. There's a lot more to him than this eye-candy.
Of course, times have changed, and I doubt anything like this will be ever be used in the atmosphere except in dire circumstances (Footfall, Deep Impact).
They said in Deep Impact that the Orion ship was assembled in orbit (although it looked like a close enough orbit to create hell with EMP, at least).
They also didn't talk about Orion propulsion at all, which was just horribly disappointing. Yes, it was a long movie, but couldn't they have spared 60 seconds to show us the astronaut's reactions to riding a nuclear arsenal? It could have been made part of the plot, too: "We've used up all our bombs that we tried to destroy the comet with, but we still have a ton of bombs that were intended to decelerate us when we returned to Earth..."
Either in "The Making of 2001" (author unknown) or Arthur C. Clarke's "The Lost Worlds of 2001", it was mentioned that the (appropriately named) shuttle "Orion" that Heywood Floyd rode from the Space Station to the Moon was originally planned to be nuclear-powered.
In the final script, Kubrick and Clarke dropped the idea, perhaps for the same reason they toned down other nuke references: too reminiscent of "Dr. Strangelove".
and an atomic rocket then we'll be in business people! It will finally be here--we'll finally have an interplanetary civilization! This is what we need to aspire to. This is our destiny. Let's make it happen people. Go! Go! Go!
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
Here at ORNL, we still have what is left of a research project to investigate the feasibility of a nuclear-powered airplane; the idea being to fly around the earth for extended periods without refueling. There also is present research, some of which is done at ORNL, in the area of nuclear-powered space ships; in the nuclear world called "space reactors".
One of the episodes of Carl Sagan's Cosmos series dealt with long distance space travel and showed examples of proposed starship design and the Orion was one of them. He, of course, had to insert one of his typical comments about how that would be a much better use for nuclear technology than bombs, but the episode is worth watching anyhow.
It seems ludicrous to imagine that a spaceship could ascend into orbit and beyond by riding the impulses produced by a series of external atomic explosions.
I wish that submitters would really refrain from inserting their own editorial comments and judgements in the stories they submit. Cosmos was aired over two decades ago. So the idea for Orion did not seem ludicrous to me. Couldn't this guy just comment on the book instead of making a guess as to how knowledgable the entire slashdot community is on starship design?
GMD
watch this
Ok..
.. yup you guessed it.. another friggin flying dude bent on world domination. AND superman goes all evil!! Well I have another theory that "Little" Superman took over for a while so he could tag some fine ass!
Lets look at the simple facts.
Superman II:
Superman stops a nuke by throwing it into space. then what happens you ask? Three more friggin flying people come down to earth and try to distroy it along with superman in a quest for world domination.
Superman IV: The quest for peace
Superman takes a bunch of nukes and throws them into the sun, BUT since there is some genitic tissue in the damn things it makes
So let me stress here.. WE SHOULD NOT DETONATE NUKES IN SPACE!! unless we want to see more of the same.
If I were only smart enough to accomplish the things I dream about.. Or maybe too dumb to care.
Hope out to particleadventure.com to read up real quick on the physics behind anti-matter. With an anti-matter drive, where the matter is anihalated into pure energy (momentarly) why both at this point dealing with nuclear? Yes I know AM is somewhat rare but jeez you think the leftist,socialist, posing as demoncrate fool tree-huggers are going to allow a nuclear drive?
Eventualy all of those afraid of nukes will die off. There's no rational reason to be afraid of them.
Anyway, antimatter is a bit more then 'rare' a single atom of antihydrogen costs something like $100,000 to produce. A billion dolars gets you just ten thousand atoms worth. that's about 1.5*10^(-10) jouls of energy.
In other words, not a lot. Even if it just cost $1 to produce a single hydrogen atom of antimater, it would require $7.2 billion to get as much energy as a watch battery. But it dosn't, it costs ~ $100,000.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Dyson estimated that about ten people would die from atomic contamination for every Orion launch.
10 deaths per launch: collateral damage
Under the NEPA (Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft) Project, the US Air Force had a contract with Fairchild to develop a nuclear-powered bomber. Part of the problem was that the project was split in two: the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was responsible for the reactor, and Fairchild/USAF was responsible for everything else (including a converted Convair B-36H).
Well, that wasn't really the biggest problem. There was the small detail: where do you crash-land a nuclear-powered bomber?
Class? The answer is: you don't.
There's a good write-up available about Project NEPA.
I have to say that I only partially agree with him. I'm sure that if pressed he'd have to acknowledge the strong correleation between mastery of a field and granted degrees.
So basically, they want to propel a ship by blowing up nuke... Has someone been rocket-jumping in quake too much? or maybe thats grenade jumping... Either way, you end up getting damaged :)
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Since, with the current state of nuclear weapons, this would leave a lot of radiation at the lauch pad (and that would be a Bad(tm) thing), it pretty much puts it out of a terrestrial lauch.
However, if we use a small rocket to get the craft up to a sufficient velocity, throw on a scramjet to lift it into orbit (i know i know, you need at least mach8 to leave the atmosphere, but we're still on the preliminay tests, right?).
Then all we need to do is throw one of these Orion engines on the craft as well for propulsion in the vaccuum of space, and we're good to go, right?
I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed up.... but no more than ten to twenty million killed.... ah, depending on the breaks.
Introduction to The Ringworld Engineers (Larry Niven)
Per my rule above, I try to read these "should reads" before I read the books I really look forward to.
Generally, it works out. I've often surprised myself. The Immense Journey by Loren Eiseley was on my "should read" list, and it turned out to be a gas; a really deep and portenteous nature book.
And then there's Understanding Comics. That was on my "should read" list too. I hated and despised most comic books, but enough people recommended McCloud's book that I thought I should give it a try. DAMN! What a book. I buy a lot of way freaky comics, now.
Or: Marketing Mishaps. I found this slim paperback in a Goodwill store. It is literally a textbook; case studies on companies gone wrong. I thought it would be a good "medicine" read, for understanding why products and companies fail. It was a gas! Now I know why A.C. Gilbert, highly respected maker of Erector Sets and Chemistry Sets, is now longer around.
Clear enough?
Stefan
Why don't they use a nuclear reactor and a bank of, say 10+ ion propulsion engines for thrust and away they go. Yes, you would need a way to create the electricity out of the reactor, but it could be done. Hell we do it on submarines...
"Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all," Hypatia
I re-read the end of Football on a semi-annual basis to get pumped up.
I did not enjoy the whole book... The end made up for it though - it has a great payoff.
The reporter gets what he deserves in this book - that almost never happens...
Orion is interesting history, but not particularly compelling technology as is. These days ion engines perform as well as the Orion specs. They are also much cleaner and have been successfully tested in space:
Most significantly, the DS1 engine achieved a specific impulse of 3100 seconds, which is comparable to Orion specifications and much better than chemical rockets. (The specific impulse indicates how efficient an engine is at converting propellant mass into forward momentum.)
The one thing that ion engines aren't good for is producing a lot of thrust, so in particular you could never launch yourself off the ground with one. Presumably the Orion technology also wouldn't be used for this purpose.
I'd like to suggest the following: BUILD an Orion ship in the middle of the desert over a period of years. Whenever a big piece of military hardware is decommissioned, install it somewhere on this Orion ship. Sidewinders, old A-10 guns that fire depleted uranium, hell, even ICBMs.
Why? Just in case.
Let's say an asteroid or comet threatens civilization: You'd have a solution that, as messy as it would be, would at least be superior to millions of people getting killed.
What if aliens threaten us? We'd have SOME sort of defense.
What if some unforseeable natural disaster takes place in space and only a big old spaceship will solve it? I'd rather we be prepared then not.
Store is unfueled, keep the nukes where they are now. This way, it's no real threat to anyone. Keep the warheads off the ICBMs it has onboard, all this stuff could be installed in a day or so, if we were properly motivated.
Have schools and colleges build simple re-entry capsules that don't have to be super lightweight.
Put one or two submarine reactors onboard along with a big resevoir of water. Like Niven-Pournelle's Archangel, you could use water for attitude control. For 'precision' maneuvering, you could fire off an ICBM (properly aligned, of course).
This would be neat, and it could be done a LOT cheaper then when you use purpose built components.
I think I remember reading in the forward to LH that they *were* going to write about an invasion with the attackers bombarding us with asteroids (Footfall), but N&P were so taken by the idea of asteroid (or comet) impact, that they wrote LH instead.
I guess that explains some of the scene/character similarities.
It could fly for years without refueling and it would set things on fire if it flew too close to the ground.
Is chapter 17, entitled Coca Cola. It seems that the system they designed that would store bombs en-masse and reliably deliver them to the detonation point was partially inspired by the mechanism used in Coca-Cola vending machines to handle bottles.
The name and concept of the "Dyson Sphere" was well known in SciFi circles long before even the first two pilot episodes of ST were written.
Freeman Dyson ackowledges that he didn't orginate the concept... it's just named after him because he popularized it.
And I always thought that "Nuke 'em to the moon" was just an expression.
Remember Rotary Rocket, with their commercial SSTO vehicle They're dead. Just a little bit of weight growth in the engine, and the design became unable to make it to orbit.
Raggh! Collateral damage! You want collateral damage!? I'll show you collateral damage!!
That's what fuel intermix ratios are about.
DCMonkey
I went to the AIAA Joint Propulsion Conference and Nuclear Propulsion in space is still alive and well. One of the ideas I remember is the idea to ignite a small complicated speck of nuclear fuel with anti-protons and compressing it with ion beams to make a small explosion that would propel the ship. I personally would believe that nuclear reactor powered plasma engine like the VASMIR engine would be the best. The field of study is soo great I just wish they would fund it more!
Isn't this the same guy who proposed the space exploration probe astrochicken? The Astrochicken would be part machine, part animal, using advanced bioengineering techniques. It would 'eat' ice and hydrocarbons as fuel and be able to reproduce itself, travelling from planet to planet to gather food. On its way, it could also send back scientific information to Earth about the places it visited.
also, It is not so well known that Freeman Dyson, among his many other ideas, also suggested a device to store vacuum energy (Casimir Force) known (IIRC) as Dyson-Plates.
His biggest contribution (AFAIK) is the Dyson Interaction picture of QM and QFT, on which Feynman diagrams are built. (they were friends and coworkers, BTW).
personal note: for me it was significant to know about a person in the context of a Sci-Fi writer, and then study some of his (considerable) contributions to other fields
Working for necessity's mother.
why ? verification.
:) ):
It's the oldest engineering axiom, but it seems to need to be stressed out more (in bold font, even
if it is not tested, it doesn't work !!!
and verifying orion means you need many test flights (for statistical confidence).
So your attitude of "build it just in case, but don't fly it." although a nice idea, is impractical. to build it requires that you test it.
Working for necessity's mother.
What's so ludicrous about that? I thought of something similar when I was a kid (13ish, IIRC), albeit using conventional explosives instead of nuclear blasts.
The only way the typical /.er can pick up a chick is with a forklift. -- AC
Wake-up good people! This type of space travel has already been accomplished but it is "extreamly dangerious" and is highly unpredictable. So far we have not been able to effecively stablize such a means of travel where it is both safe with perdictable results. I really doubt that this will ever be accomplished in a safe and a reliable mannor. I myself will not again venture into such an undertaking.
I've read George Dyson's Bydarka book - is he still making them?
For the erst of us, a Bydarka is an ilutian kayak made of whale bones and seal skins. george made (makes?) them from aircraft grade aluminum and coated cotton burlap. You have to see the book in order to understand how beautiful they are.
There's also pictures in the book of his tree house - about 80 feet above the ground!
Personally its not God I dislike, its his fan club I cant stand (bash.org)
There's a reason to not go hemispherical. You want to capture as much forward-component of moving explosion product as you can, yes, but you also don't want to have to push around too much pusher plate. That being said, you could do the math to determine what size of circular flat plate is optimal. I get the feeling that the actual shape of the plate wouldn't matter a whole lot (hemishpere, cone, paraboloid, etc.) - you'd just be adding useless mass.
I've heard of the Orion ship for years and I've always found the notion very intriguing, but the notion of a ground-based launch using actual Orion propulsion just makes me laugh, regardless of how well it might work!
Prior to reading this /. review, I had heard that it was in fact the Cavalier Corporation and not Coca-Cola who was consulted for their experience inautomatically handling and dispensing cylindrical objects.