Product Description

The race to the moon dominated space flight during the decade of the 1960s. Yet, during the late 1950s and early 1960s, the US government sponsored a project that could possibly have sent 150 people on expeditions to Mars or Saturn. The codename of the project was "Orion", and it centered upon the effort to develop a 40,000-ton, fast, manoeuvrable, nuclear-powered space vehicle for long-range voyages in space. Strictly classified, Project Orion ultimately failed. In this book, George Dyson, son of physicist Freeman Dyson, one of the original project team, tells his father's story.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #495924 in Books
• Published on: 2002-06-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Like cheap, shiny space suits and bug-eyed rubber monsters, nuclear-powered spaceships such as described in Project Orion today seem like little more than laughably naive 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

Review
In 1957 a small group of scientists launched Project Orion - a serious attempt to build an interplanetary spaceship propelled by nuclear bombs. This was the period when Atlas missiles loaded with thermonuclear warheads could deliver a force of a hundred times that of the Hiroshima bomb to a target 5,000 miles away. In complete secrecy a plan was hatched which would load a group of civilians into one of the missiles, and use the power of the bombs to deliver them to Mars, Jupiter or Saturn (what they might actually do when they got there was a low priority consideration - no one knew for certain what they might find). It all sounds ludicrously farcical now, half-a-century away, but then was taken very seriously indeed, and was top secret. The story should be a fascinating one - and in a sense, it is; the problem for the lay readers is that much of the drama was involved with technical problems which were no doubt rivetingly exciting to the scientists concerned, but which leave the non-technical reader cool, if not cold: how inflamed can one now get by the revelatory discovery that a certain kind of oil could shed a transpiration layer from the surface of a rocket, thus protecting it from ablation? And this is true, alas, of most of the ups and downs of scientific fortune that ran through the scheme, which eventually fizzled out like a failed take-off at Cape Canaveral, but happily less dangerously. Only the aficionado of genuine science-fact will find this book, with its many Heath-Robinson-esque illustrations, really exciting. (Kirkus UK)

Dyson, son of the distinguished British-born physicist Freeman Dyson, unveils a wealth of formerly classified information covering the attempt of a group of US scientists, beginning in 1957, to develop and launch a space vehicle powered solely by serial explosions of nuclear devices. The elder Dyson, who lends extensive personal perspectives here, was involved with the effort (sponsored by the Defense Department's hush-hush Advanced Research Projects Agency) from its inception; the list of its proponents reads like a roster of Nobel candidates, including one winner-the world-renowned atomic scientist Edward Teller. So it's made immediately clear that, as hard as it may be to accept, detonating nuclear bombs right behind a huge, bullet-shaped spaceship was, and still is, by some, considered not only a practical avenue of technical pursuit but one offering far more promise for extending man's horizon into the Solar System than those wimpy "chemical" rockets-the Atlases, Titans, etc.-that Wernher von Braun was simultaneously developing. (Briefed on Orion several years into the project, in fact, von Braun readily endorsed the concept.) Dyson's myriad interviews nicely capture the sweep of a grandiose technical scheme, but also the rapturous initial state of Orion scientists whose coup, as they see it, has them turning nuclear weapons into plowshares under the auspices-not to mention watchful eyes-of the same generals who want to back down the Soviet Union at any cost. However, political obstacles would become even more daunting than the considerable technical challenges, as small, fission-based devices (like those intended to boost Orion) came to be viewed in some circles as even more dangerous than megaton-yielding H-bombs (since military commanders might actually be tempted to use one). Ultimately, creeping realization that the potential effects of radioactive fallout had been dangerously understated for years undermined what support remained, and so Orion's budget was axed in 1964. An intimate look at an amazing concept some still believe offers the best hope for fending off-literally-an errant asteroid or comet that could wipe humankind from Earth. (Kirkus Reviews)

Customer Reviews

Project Orion
The life of this US military research program on nuclear propulsion rockets is well documented in this book. The author is the son of the physicist Freeman Dyson, one of the main guys involed in the project. The book has clearly been a labour of love for the author, containing many interviews with his father's former colleagues and carefully referencing many of the their research papers.

My criticism of the book lies with the editing. The structure of the book is not very logical for the reader. As a historical account, it is certainly not chronological. It jumps around, following the topics as brought up by the interviewed scientists. So there's a lot of repitition of the core material and the book could have been shorter. Also, the 'techie' language remains in the book in all its glory. Some of it is eloquent, some quite crude.

But I forgive the book for all this. It's not a text book on the subject, nor yet another diluted popular science book. Instead it's scientists reminiscing about their lost work on an ambitious space exploration project which was terminated before its dreams could be realised.

Fascinating, but flawed
Project Orion sounds like something from science fiction - after all, how could a spaceship be propelled by nuclear explosions? The Orion concept was proposed by reputable scientists and every single one of their experiments showed that it was a perfectly feasible method of exploring the solar system.

Orion is one of the great 'might-have-beens' of the Cold War, had it gone ahead, Man could have landed on Mars in the early 1970s and we would have lived in a World more like that of '2001' than that of 'Full Metal Jacket'. In the end, the project died a death; unloved by the government it was finally condemned by the nuclear test ban treaty.

The book is concisely written, but it fails to convey the excitement of such a huge and ambitious project. There is very little sense of the awe it must have invoked, which can make it somewhat dry reading.

I also knock a point off for the lamentable illustrations. There are no glossy plates which means that none of the pictures are terribly sharp, and some pictures are very poor indeed. There are a number of declassified diagrams from the 1950s with little or no explanation, whilst others lack any context whatsoever. This type of book would really have benefited from high quality graphics.

I recommend this wholeheartedly if you are interested in space travel; you probably will never have a better history of the Orion project. Casual readers might find it a little hard going.

A jaw dropping account of what could've been
As the Russians sent sputnik up orbit Earth, US scientists worked on a project to send a several thousand tonne 'ship' to the farthest corners of our solar system. This is an account of how some of the worlds leading scientists worked towards designing a giant space rocket be powered by nuclear explosions, and how politics, with science, led to the projects demise. All in all, this is a book in two halves. The book starts off at a breathtaking pace, describing where the concepts arrived from and the history of the scientists working on the project. Towards the end, the tempo drops dramatically as the realisation of the environmental effects are discovered, and corporate/global politics gradually take centre stage. All in all, even if the description is only raises a slight interest, this book is something you should consider investing in.