perfidy

Brickmuppet informed me - oh, jeez, last week or so - of his post on the new Orion research. I've been meaning to throw a link up, but I am a slacker. But not completely so, and here it is.

Orion, for those not in the know, was a program in the late fifties intended to produce a working spaceship powered by atomic bombs. On the face of it, this sounds like a rather spectacular sort of lunacy. But the eggheads in charge were the real deal, and they had it all scoped out. By inventing on the spot a sort of nuclear shaped charge, they were able to focus the energy of the blast where it would do the most good, propulsion-wise. They envisioned a massive steel pusher plate that was to be connected to the ship by the largest shock absorbers you can imagine. And they scaled up a coke vending machine to colossal size to eject the bombs from their magazine.

All the theoretical stuff was worked out. They exploded bombs, and got the results they expected. They built a scale model, named "Putt-Putt" that was propelled my ordinary chemical explosives. On its first flight, it went miles into the air. Everything was on track for the construction of a spaceship that would loft payloads the size of a WWII US Navy cruiser straight into orbit. Travel times to nearby planets would be in weeks. The outer system would take only months. And no screwing around with tiny, tiny robot probes that always point their antennae toward Sirius - just fire up an Orion, and you'd have a full crew of scientists in orbit around your holiday destination of choice.

And this, mind you, would have been in the sixties. The scientists on the project were saying, screw the moon, we can be to Saturn by the end of the decade.

Ignorance and the prejudices of others brought an untimely end to this project. But now, people are looking at the idea all over again. This time, it won't be actual bombs, but rather - well, hear it from the Brickmuppet:

The new system has several improvements over the original version as it disposes of the actual atom bombs in favor of using a magnetic system to pinch the fuel into critical mass....this allows far more controlability!. This is much closer to the classic science fiction view of a spaceship engine. It also doesn't require having lots of atom bombs lying around for your spaceship (and what space entrepanuer wants the ATF hassles THAT would bring?)

Check out the homepage for the researchers, here. As BM says, this would actually give us a reason for the proposed heavy lift vehicle. But, as is typical with space policy issues, we run into the chicken egg problem. Without heavy lift (and a lot of research) the Orion isn't feasible. Without Orion (or some other program requiring the kind of payload only a big dumb booster can provide) there's no reason to develop it.

There is no reason to expect that NASA or the government will do anything even faintly resembling smart. But the likelihood of private space gaining a toehold is getting better by the day. And once they have that toehold, they can begin to ratchet their way to ever larger capabilities, fueled at each stage by incremental growth in both flight envelope and profitability.