Project Orion

[B777LR]

 
Orion was a 1950's Project to study the posibility of a spacecraft powered by nuclear pulse propulsion. The design would have worked by ejecting nuclear weapons from the rear of a vehicle, detonating them, and catching the blast with a shock absorber equipped pusher plate. This sequence would be repeated thousands of times, in effect an atomic pogo stick. The project was scrapped in 1965 amid fear about fallout both political and radialogical. Footage shown is of scale testing done using conventional explosives.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OncU3sMTug

[John Howling Mouse]

How were any occupants of such a vessel expected to withstand the shock from each detonation?

[RLBH]

Very large, twin-stage, shock absorbers. And sheer mass: the 4,000 ton ship would've had peak accelerations between 2g and 4g; the later 100 ton ship for Saturn V launch would've been rather harsher. Don't think in terms of aerospace engineering, but rather marine engineering and nuclear engineering. I've got a very good history on the project, but unfortunately it's about 200 miles away.

The 4,000 ton ship would've had a 1-ton barber's chair on it, purely because they could...

[rallymodeller]

Huge-assed shock absorbers. Seriously.

The SF novel Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle has a great description of what being in one would be like.

[jcf]

Read 'Project Orion' by George Dyson and buy Scott Lowther's 'Aerospace Projects Review V1N3 & V1N4' which feature parts one and two of his series on Orion.

Jon

[simmie]

the BBc did an excellent documentry on the project.

It included an  interview with Freeman Dyson, the man behind it all and his son.

Part of the project are still classsified, such as the make up of the actual nuc charges, they had more concentional bang than nuc thus easier to be biult by bad arab types.

[jcf]

the BBc did an excellent documentry on the project.

It included an  interview with Freeman Dyson, the man behind it all and his son.

Part of the project are still classsified, such as the make up of the actual nuc charges, they had more concentional bang than nuc thus easier to be biult by bad arab types.

Freeman Dyson was one of many who worked on the project, however the concept was not his, that honor goes to Stanislaw Ulam and Ted Taylor.

Actually if you read the book 'Project Orion' and other works that deal with nuclear weapons, it becomes plain that making small devices that worked was extremely difficult and the among hardest of the technical problems faced by the atomic charge designers. The Orion work on miniaturization of charges was directly applied to US military devices, thus the continued classification.
The "simple to build using minuscule amounts of nuclear material Terrorist Suitcase-Nuke" is a myth.

Jon