The rocket powered by nuclear bombs
It was a crazy and ultra-secretive plan to colonise space. Now it’s inspired a major TV series
Apretty girl wanders off from an anniversary party and heads to the beach for a late-night swim. Shortly afterwards, the girl is found dead — apparently murdered. So begins a new tV mini-series, Ascension, which starts on British television tonight. the plot is not, however, quite as formulaic as it sounds. the party and even the beach, it soon emerges, are on board a vast spaceship.
As for the milestone being celebrated, it is the 51st anniversary of the original 600-man U.S. crew blasting off from earth in a rocket powered by nuclear bombs. they are halfway through a 100-year journey to colonise a planet so secret its existence was kept hidden from the public.
this may all sound like a variation on Star trek, if it weren’t for the astonishing fact that Ascension is based on a real U.S. defence project, codenamed Orion, the details of which are so sensitive that many remain classified even now more than half a century later.
In what must be one of the most incredible chapters of the space race, American, British and european scientists drew up plans in the late Fifties and Sixties for the U.S. Defence Department to send a rocket the size of an ocean liner to other planets. It would get there by exploding thousands of small atomic bombs.
project Orion might now sound like the stuff of Dan Dare — only infinitely more dangerous — but it was based on solid technical research and attracted some of the finest scientists of their generation, headed by a British physics and mathematics genius named Freeman Dyson.
Back in 1957, when the Soviets launched the first satellite, Sputnik 1, into space, the U.S. was plunged into panic. president Dwight eisenhower was ready to say yes to just about any proposal that might give the Americans a lead in the space race.
project Orion was certainly the boldest. the plan originated from General Atomics, a cutting-edge technology company and defence contractor near San Diego, California.
the idea of using atomic explosions to provide a rocket with thrust had been put forward a decade earlier by one of the architects of America’s atom bomb project. the founders of project Orion argued that it could propel the U.S. far ahead of the russians.
the original plan envisaged sending a 50-strong crew as far as Mars, but to get the multi-million- dollar government backing required, the project needed a scientist of international fame. they approached Dyson.
A maths prodigy who would calculate the number of atoms in the Sun when he was four, Dyson was later involved in strategic planning for the rAF’s wartime bombing of Germany. He’d been given a job for life at princeton University when he was asked to join Orion.
DySOn needed little persuasion: since childhood he had dreamed of travelling into space. He did a few calculations before announcing that, yes, he thought it could be done, and he and ted taylor, Orion’s project leader, recruited a 50-strong team of scientists.
Many of them had worked on developing the bombs that had devastated Hiroshima and nagasaki. Like Dyson, they were driven by a high-minded hope that nuclear bombs could now be harnessed for good rather than destruction.
What was special on paper about the Orion concept was that it not only provided a rocket with enormous thrust, but also the fuel was very efficient.
Conventionally powered rockets wasted so much fuel just to get into orbit, and travelled so slowly, relatively speaking, that they couldn’t get anywhere useful in space in their crews’ lifetime — even if they had room for the necessary fuel.
Its disciples argued that nuclear pulse propulsion, as it was called, was the only known technology that provided the thrust and speed to get to other planets and back in a matter of years.
even in those days of starry-eyed enthusiasm for atomic energy’s potential, the scientists knew they had to overcome a forbidding array of technical challenges.
the spaceship would be propelled by a series of explosions from highly directed nuclear bombs dropped out of the back of the bullet-shaped rocket, each instantly generating temperatures many times hotter than the Sun.
Wouldn’t the explosions simply vaporise the rocket? Apparently not. tests with high-explosive fuel showed it could propel a scaleddown rocket up i nto the sky without destroying it.
Obviously, an atomic bomb would create a far more powerful explosion than tnt. the bombs would drop out of the rocket in their thousands, one after the other, exploding some 20 metres behind it.
One of Dyson’s most taxing problems was getting a level of acceleration that would be tolerable for humans. Consequently, the Orion would be protected by a 1,000-ton and immensely thick steel ‘pusher plate’, bolstered by shock absorbers, that would absorb the brunt of the explosion while propelling the rocket forwards.
the scientists calculated it would take nearly 1,000 nuclear explosions to get into space, and thousands more bombs to accelerate it to its cruising speed of 50,000 mph. Simply lining up and ejecting the bombs correctly would be tricky. Looking for inspiration, the Orion teams consulted the Coca- Cola company for insights on its Coke bottle production lines.
As for the rocket’s living quarters, the enormous power of its fuel source meant the spaceship could be as big and heavy as its designers liked. Various Orions were envisaged, their size depending on the length of their intended journey.
the original design was one weighing 4,000 tons and as tall as a ten- storey building. However, a ‘Super Orion’ that might get even further than Saturn had a diameter of 400 metres and weighed eight million tons. It had enough room for thousands of passengers.
even on the smaller spaceships, the interior and fittings would include reading rooms, kitchens and l ounger chairs f or t he astronauts to relax in comfort. everything would be built from steel, and drawings show the interior looking more like a rather s pacious s ubmarine t han a conventional cramped rocket.
even then, there were concerns about radiation, although Orion’s leaders claimed that fallout could be reduced to nothing if advanced nuclear fusion technology was used (where two or more atoms are fused into a larger one) rather than the conventional fission (when one atom is split). the intention was to launch at least the smaller Orion rockets from huge barges far out at sea.
today, surviving Orion scientists still go misty-eyed as they describe what a launch would have looked like — the mother of all firework displays as the huge rocket soared into the sky thanks to a series of progressively bigger explosions.
BUt where was it going to go? ‘ Mars by 1965, and Saturn by 1970 was the slogan we went by,’ said Dyson, now 91 and living in the U.S. the team envisaged a four-year return trip to one of Saturn’s colonisable moons, where the itinerary would include time to explore the surface, try to grow some crops and then return to earth.
Dyson later unveiled two concepts for an even vaster nuclear-powered spaceship that he believed could reach Alpha Centauri, 4.37 light years away and the nearest star system to the Sun.
Dyson’s rocket would take as little as 133 years to get there, but would cost $ 3.67 trillion — or America’s annual gross national product in the late Sixties. the premise of tV’s Ascension is that the interstellar expedition is never revealed to the public.
In reality, we can be fairly certain Orion never happened. It was, to some extent, a victim of its own success. Orion’s pentagon paymasters realised its enormous military implications. the generals ordered plans for a floating fortress rather like the Death Star in Star Wars, bristling with nuclear weapons and orbiting above russia.
the blueprints were presented to president Kennedy, who was reportedly appalled by the thought of a new space weapons race.
the last straw was the 1963 treaty signed by the U.S., the UK and the Soviet Union, which banned all but underground nuclear tests.
By then, even Freeman Dyson was getting cold feet, after calculating that as many as ten people would die from the atomic fallout every time a rocket was launched. the project was quietly killed off at the beginning of 1965.
Dyson still looks back fondly on what he insists would have been a major leap forward for human technology. ‘We were a bunch of crazies in a way,’ he said of the Orion team. ‘And it was an unusual time, when crazy people were given a chance to do their stuff.’
Ascension, a three-part mini series, starts on sky 1 at 9pm tonight.