Customer Reviews

Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship

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For those of us who dream of visiting the outer planets, seeing Saturn's rings up close without intermediation of telescopes or charge-coupled devices, well, we pretty much *have* to read "Project Orion." In 1958, some of the world's smartest people, including famous physicist Freeman Dyson (the author's father), expected to visit the outer planets in "Orion," a nuclear-bomb propelled ship big enough and powerful enough to seat its passengers in lazy-boy recliners. They expected to start their grand tour by 1970. This was not pie-in-the-sky optimism; they had strong technical reasons for believing they could do it.

To pull this book together, George Dyson did an astonishing amount of research into this still largely classified project. And, maybe because he's connected to Orion through his father, the author captures the strong emotion of the project and the team. Highly recommended.

Project Orion is a remarkable story of a handful of dedicated scientists who devised a plan to put people on other planets--decades ago. Not science fiction, but science fact: government funds were allocated, concept drawings and bills of materials devised, propulsion tests carried out--all in top secret.

Decades later, the Project is still shrouded in mystery and would have stayed that way if it weren't for the dogged efforts of George Dyson to carefully research the events and piece the story back together; a daunting task, since top secret information is inaccessible and some Project Orion documents may have disappeared forever.

Like Dyson's previous book "Darwin Among the Machines," Orion is provocative on many levels: in additonal to being an important historical testimony, it makes the reader wonder how many significant projects have been shelved and where space exploration would be today if Orion had gone forward. Incredibly, Orion scientists didn't have the luxury of microcomputer technology, yet they dared to dream big and translate those dreams into action.

Read this book and you may find yourself asking, in the words of Wordsworth, "Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?"

Imagine a spaceship 135 feet in diameter, and 10 stories tall. Imagine it weighing 4000 tons. Bet that doesn't sound too impressive. If this were a normal chemical rocket, only about 10 tons of this would make it into space. Now just imagine for a moment that there was a way to allow over 3500 tons of this ship to make it to orbit. This is possible, if a ship were to launch nuclear bombs as fuel. This is known as Project Orion.


George Dyson's new book is the source for information on Project Orion. Unless you are willing to undergo extensive primary research, a total of 6000 pages worth, or you have connections among the staff of the former Project Orion staff, then you can't find a better source.


The book starts with the Day Sputnik was launched. This was an inspiration to a great many Americans, not the least of whom was Ted Taylor. From that day onward, Ted became fascinated with finding a way to build a space ship of his own. This path would lead him to probably the most controversial design for a spacecraft ever, and probably one of the greatest "What If" statements of all time, his path led him to Project Orion.


George Dyson does a great job of bringing the key points of the history of Project Orion together in one place. He covers virtually ever aspect, including nearly a dozen different designs for Orion, information on it's design to the best degree publicly available, and interviews with most of the living former Orion staff. He also covers many of the potential problems, including the shock absorbers, fallout, and many more.


I would recommend this book to anyone who has looked at the stars and wanted to be there. It is also great for people who want to study physics, anything nuclear, space travel, or even a bureaucracy. But perhaps most of all, I recommend this book to any who have ever wondered "What if".


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George Dyson has turned in a suprisingly literate and interesting history of a forgotten part of space history. Some of the technical issues he describes (opacity, abalation, computational codes) have more than likely never been covered in a mass market text, due to their complexity and security classification. He makes it all readable.

The idea of Project Orion will appeal to everyone. It is one of those great ideas that open new chapters in human achievement. There are serious risks involved with the technology that would have to be managed carefully if it is ever revisited, but it could be done.

With a year's warning, we could deflect the sort of asteroid/comet that ended the dinosaurs. We could build a city on the Moon or survey Mars. We could send manned expeditions around the solar system 10 years after we decide to do it, starting any time.

The idea Project Orion studied back in the 50's is wonderful. This book is not. You can get all of the story contained in this book by reading the first 9 chapters and studying all the illustrations carefully. All of the project's technical details of interest are classified and not included. The book suffers from a lack of any sort of useful timeline as to the events of Project Orion. The reader is left to piece together the story from a sprinkling of semi-random vignettes and personal reminiscences.

Most of this book is filler, with the details left to the reader's own mind to fill in. And yet, the idea is so Grand that I found myself staring off into space every so often as I ground my way through the turgid prose and confusing organization, imagining where we might be now if hopes had been realized 40 years ago.

Here are some tips that will help the reader get the most out of this book:

1) Ignore all mentions of Tungsten propellant that are sprinkled confusingly here and there. They belong to suboptimised designs, though this fact is hidden toward the back of the book.

2) Skim the personnel intros. They don't pay off.

3) Study the table toward the end of Chapter 6 for the best understanding of what Orion can do. Compare this to similar NASA Mars mission studies and you will find yourself grinding your teeth.

4) The politics of Orion are simple in outline but complicated in detail. NASA killed this program because it's own NERVA program was in competition with Orion. The book makes this point over 100 pages. If you look into what happened to NERVA you'll start grinding your teeth again.

5) There is a lot of teeth gnashing about atomic scientists feeling guilty about the bombs after they had made them. They acknowledge that Orion was a constructive use of that effort, but in their old age many of the scientists interviewed for this book are a little hypocritical in their disavowals. More grinding.

6) The mention of Tungsten in Chapter "Fallout" is another red herring. It was easy to detect in an unrelated bomb test. Orion designs did not use Tungsten propellent.

If you're like me (and if you're reading this, there's a good chance you are), you are a sucker for space history, particularly the history of odd and obscure programs, and of classified or "black" projects. This book puts together a great deal of information about the Orion program, its goals, and chances for success. Most of this information had previously been unavailable, or scattered, or bandied about on bizarre X-Files-ish web sites. But this is the real deal, the definitive history of the program that was once shrouded in mystery and aerospace legend.

While a bit clunky and awkward in places, "Project Orion" held my attention, and generally maintained a cohesive narrative. There are quite a few drawings and photos in this book, which really help to the sense of adventure and excitement of Orion.

Several reviewers mention that many of the details remain classified. That's certainly true. But having said that, I am amazed at the things we learn in this book that actually were declassified (e.g., the survivability of materials in close proximity to a nuclear explosion). I have a degree in engineering, and this book got technical enough to satisfy my technical curiosity, but not so technical as to bore me.

I started reading this book thinking that I would chuckle at the naivete of scientists who thought they could blow up a few nukes to drive a spacecraft. I finished it thinking that it might actually work. Who knows--perhaps we'll all get a chance for a Grand Tour of the solar system before we die.

George's father Freeman was one of the scientists on the Orion project (first publicized in Freeman's 1979 "Disturbing The Universe"), so you know his information is pretty good. The project itself sounds pretty wacky, using atomic bombs dropped out the bottom of a spaceship to propel it, but these were the days right after Sputnik (1957-1959) and the U.S. was desperate to get in the space race any way we could. To everyone's amazement, the assembled team of young, talented Manhattan Project scientists worked out a feasible design, and if it hadn't been for certain political considerations, it might have been built. But the military didn't want their bombs used for space travel, and a Test Ban Treaty was signed, and anyway people got kinda nervous about exploding lots of A-bombs in the atmosphere.

What's interesting about the design is the size of the ship. Whereas conventional chemical rockets require 1000 tons of propellant for every ton of payload, the Orion was just the opposite. The bombs would be very compact, and because the nuclear explosions would ablate (wear away) the pusher plate and the ship had to absorb the impacts within livable limits, the ship had to be huge. A crew of a thousand in a ship the size of an office building was envisioned. How different our space program would have been if exploring the outer planets were easier than visiting the moon!

As with his previous book "Darwin Among The Machines," George Dyson writes fluidly, making highly-technical concepts seem almost within grasp (a trait he inherited). We'll never know, I guess, how close Orion came to being built since most of the work on it is still classified under the Stategic Defense Initiative directed-energy weapons research.

What was/is amazing about the Orion project is the fact that as far as we can tell it would have worked. By worked, I mean it would have made our current space shuttle and space station projects look like covered wagons in the age of autos. If history had taken just a slightly different direction, we could have had several building size bases on the moon by the early seventies, probably sent manned expeditions to Mars and even beyond by the 80's.

But this book is not a great treatment of the subject. There is a lot of technical discussion but little organization. Characters come and go, various memos are written, and people write techical papers on building two story high shock asorbers. All well and good but what is missing is the real story and a unifying analysis of the project to propel a spaceship by riding atomic detonations.

The author has done a valuable service by bringing this fascination program to our attention. In addition, it is very clear that chemical rockets have serious limitations. Mankind is unlikely to make much movement away from the earth without a revitalized Project Orion.

A well-written book that is fun to read. It makes you marvel at the real possibilities that once were considered. The author did his homework and from an insider's perspective, he is intriguingly accurate on a very sensitive subject! Read it now before it gets pulled from the shelves and reclassified!

I really enjoyed the book, from both a historical perspective as well as what "might have been".

However it can't have been too "secret" at the time. The 1960 book "Dynamic America" (a history of General Dynamics; parent of General Atomic) says (p 376): "...thousand-ton space platforms propelled by controlled nuclear blasts. But at the Laboratory the possible development of such a vehicle is under serious consideration. Project Orion - whose ultimate purpose is to put any weight anywhere in our solar system - was conceived by General Atomic scientists and is being financed, as a feasibility study, by the Air Research and Development Command of the United States Air Force.