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May. 26th, 2004 01:30 pmIn 1865, Jules Verne wrote From the Earth to the Moon and a Trip Around It. The characters traveled to the moon in a projectile shot out of a 2 mile-long cannon.
In the late 1950s, when nuclear energy seemed to be as potentially useful to society as the Internet is today, a group of nuclear scientists and engineers were developing a spaceship that would blast itself to and through space using exploding atomic bombs. The name of the project was Orion.
I'm reading a book: Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship, by George Dyson (son of physicist Freeman Dyson, who was on the project). I knew the theory behind Orion, but I never knew how involved the project was.
Imagine a spaceship the size of a modern cruise ship. The back of the ship is a flat plate on shock absorbers. Behind this plate, toss a nuclear bomb. The bomb goes off, presses the plate, and the ship goes forward.
And weirdly, the thing would have actually worked -- with 1950s technology, no less. Imagine Earth to Mars in a couple months, not years, carrying a few hundred passengers. The only thing that would be different in a modern version would be the necessity of building it in space -- the scientists at the time just thought they'd launch it from the ground, and that it would only take several hundred "small" nuclear bombs (less than one kiloton warheads) to get into orbit.
The project was finally canceled in the 1960s when the US and many other countries signed nuclear treaties prohibiting the explosion of nuclear devices on the ground, in the air, under water, or in space.
The book is fascinating. Not just the project itself, which is really interesting -- it's hard to imagine a more peaceful use of nuclear weapons. But the ideas and mindsets of the scientists and engineers show how much science has changed...and how much it is still the same.
Freeman Dyson: The sin of the physicists at Los Alamos did not lie in their having built a lethal weapon. They did not just build the bomb. They enjoyed building it. They had the best time of their lives building it. That, I believe, is what Oppenheimer had in mind when he said they had sinned.
These nuclear scientists were looking for a project of the same intensity, but one for peaceful purposes, leveraging the same technology they had invented in their sin.
In the late 1950s, when nuclear energy seemed to be as potentially useful to society as the Internet is today, a group of nuclear scientists and engineers were developing a spaceship that would blast itself to and through space using exploding atomic bombs. The name of the project was Orion.
I'm reading a book: Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship, by George Dyson (son of physicist Freeman Dyson, who was on the project). I knew the theory behind Orion, but I never knew how involved the project was.
Imagine a spaceship the size of a modern cruise ship. The back of the ship is a flat plate on shock absorbers. Behind this plate, toss a nuclear bomb. The bomb goes off, presses the plate, and the ship goes forward.
And weirdly, the thing would have actually worked -- with 1950s technology, no less. Imagine Earth to Mars in a couple months, not years, carrying a few hundred passengers. The only thing that would be different in a modern version would be the necessity of building it in space -- the scientists at the time just thought they'd launch it from the ground, and that it would only take several hundred "small" nuclear bombs (less than one kiloton warheads) to get into orbit.
The project was finally canceled in the 1960s when the US and many other countries signed nuclear treaties prohibiting the explosion of nuclear devices on the ground, in the air, under water, or in space.
The book is fascinating. Not just the project itself, which is really interesting -- it's hard to imagine a more peaceful use of nuclear weapons. But the ideas and mindsets of the scientists and engineers show how much science has changed...and how much it is still the same.
Freeman Dyson: The sin of the physicists at Los Alamos did not lie in their having built a lethal weapon. They did not just build the bomb. They enjoyed building it. They had the best time of their lives building it. That, I believe, is what Oppenheimer had in mind when he said they had sinned.
These nuclear scientists were looking for a project of the same intensity, but one for peaceful purposes, leveraging the same technology they had invented in their sin.
