Very interesting/cool Project Orion video

[Dambuster]

I just found this on YouTube, thought some of you might like it:

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OncU3sMTug"]YouTube - Project Orion - To Saturn by Nuclear bomb[/ame]

Dambuster

 

[RisingFury]

Thankfully this never went beyond testing stage...

 

[Andy44]

Thankfully this never went beyond testing stage...

This was the closest we ever came to traveling around the solar system. Of course, you can fly it in Orbiter, with no political, environmental, or security implications:

[ame="http://www.orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=838"]Orion 1.2[/ame]

Thanks to sputnik for an awesome addon.


-----Posted Added-----


BTW, Dambuster, that is a cool video, I didn't know any of that footage existed. Really cool to see the model in action!

 

[Quick_Nick]

Isn't it a waste of useful energy to drop the explosives out rather than contain them? If you just drop it, a lot of energy goes out and doesn't actually push the spacecraft. If you contain it, you should get more thrust. The problem is of course finding material that can contain a nuclear bomb without being destroyed, but if you could find the right material, wouldn't it be a better idea? After all, nuclear weapons are expensive.

Pretty awesome project, though! I've GOT to try out that addon!

 

[ryan]

Isn't it a waste of useful energy to drop the explosives out rather than contain them? If you just drop it, a lot of energy goes out and doesn't actually push the spacecraft. If you contain it, you should get more thrust. The problem is of course finding material that can contain a nuclear bomb without being destroyed, but if you could find the right material, wouldn't it be a better idea? After all, nuclear weapons are expensive.

Pretty awesome project, though! I've GOT to try out that addon!

And if anything goes wrong we can all say goodbye to the entire South-East area of the United States

 

[Andy44]

Isn't it a waste of useful energy to drop the explosives out rather than contain them? If you just drop it, a lot of energy goes out and doesn't actually push the spacecraft. If you contain it, you should get more thrust. The problem is of course finding material that can contain a nuclear bomb without being destroyed, but if you could find the right material, wouldn't it be a better idea? After all, nuclear weapons are expensive.

Pretty awesome project, though! I've GOT to try out that addon!

Basically, the answer is yes, you are wasting energy, but in terms of energy per unit mass, it is way more efficient than any chemical rocket. The effective specific impulse of a nuclear pulse propulsion drive is an order of magnitude higher than the best chemical rockets, and the best thing about it is that the bigger you make the ship, the better the specific impulse, since a bigger ship means a bigger blast shield plate, which contains more of the blast energy, plus you get to use larger yield thermonuclear bombs, which have more energy per unit mass.

Yes, if you could find the right material, it would be better, but no such material exists. If it did, we would be building things with it right now to defend against nuclear weapons! Such material is called "unobtanium" in the sci fi world; the Orion was a real project and might actually have worked.

For a rundown of possible, but exotic propulsion systems, check out this website:

http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/index.html

See you in a few hours after you've spent them browsing that awesome site.


-----Posted Added-----

And if anything goes wrong we can all say goodbye to the entire South-East area of the United States

Not so. The only thing that would get nuked is the launch site. If the vehicle crashed, it would be because the bombs didn't work. In that case, you'd just pick it all up with a buldozer and a big truck.

Later (smaller) versions of Orion were designed to be launched from the surface using conventional rockets, such as SRBs, a Saturn V, or similar vehicles, and the nuclear blast drive would only be used in space. This would reduce the fallout problem, but there would still be technical problems to overcome, such as:

1. Dud charges. Bombs which fail to ignite would fall to earth and be almost impossible to recover. Steps would have to be taken to mitigate this, by timing drive use to ensure dud charges will probably fall into ocean, or to increase quality control to eliminate duds.

2. Eyesight damage to ground observers. People looking up at the sky during drive system use stand a risk of getting eye damage from the nuclear flashes.

These problems all go away once the ship leaves Earth, of course.


-----Posted Added-----


BTW, folks, there's a great book called Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship by George Dyson, son of the famous Freeman Dyson, who actually worked on the project. It's a fascinating story, and in the end what really killed it is that the nuclear bomb designers are afraid to build such small fusion bombs. They know they can do it, but they don't want to make thousands of them and risk losing track of any or letting bad guys figure it out.

[ame="http://www.amazon.com/Project-Orion-Story-Atomic-Spaceship/dp/0805072845"]Amazon.com: Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship: George Dyson: Books[/ame]

 

[Quick_Nick]

...in terms of energy per unit mass, it is way more efficient than any chemical rocket.

Does anyone have the numbers of energy per unit currency? :lol:
I think I might actually enjoy seeing this project become a reality. Too bad it won't. I guess I'll just have to sit in the corner and play Orbiter. :lol:
EDIT: How much WOULD it cost? I could be way off in my ideas of cost.

 

[Zatnikitelman]

Nukes detonated all the way up there would cause eye damage? Seriously?

 

[Eagle]

Nukes detonated all the way up there would cause eye damage? Seriously?

Staring at the Sun, stadium lights, or even your 40W bulb can cause eye damage.

 

[Andy44]

I think it's not just visible light, but X-rays and gamma rays as well. LEO is about 100 miles up, if you were staring at multiple fusion flashes without eye protection at that distance, you might be asking for trouble. (That's why I always wear my sunglasses, even in the rain)

Dyson's book goes through the bean-counting that General Atomic Inc.'s (the company that designed the system) scientists went through to figure out what the probability of people on the ground would be killed or injured by flying one of these things. The probability was very low, but not zero. One of the things they studied was eye damage to observers.

 

[Belisarius]

Here's a "Re-imagining" video by a fellow called Rhys Taylor who tries to construct what an Orion would look like today, including SRBs from the Shuttle to launch.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avsbVBy-shc"]YouTube - Project Orion: a re-imagining by Rhys Taylor[/ame]

The Orion would never be acceptable politically. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty makes it totally illegal to put nukes in space. Peaceful nuclear reactors are OK, but nuclear bombs exploding in LEO - totally out.

BTW, Sputnik's addon is a GAS - I love blasting around the Solar System leaving a trail of nukes in my wake. It's especially fun to take two Orions to Mars, as was originally planned.
Update please, Sputnik!

 

[Andy44]

LOL I like the buildings with skylights and cars in the parking lot next to the launchpad...what's wrong with that picture?

Otherwise pretty cool vid.

Although I wonder how much propellant would be needed for a chemical landing and takeoff from Mars. The gravity's low, but it's not that low, and an Orion vehicle is by definition a brick of lead with a hatch and a painted flag on the side.

 

[Artlav]

HARP and Orion - the two dreams killed by politics and democracy (the one based on word "demon", not the "demos" one).
We could have been on our way to the stars, literally, by now.

It's weird to read a hard sci-fi novel set around year 2010, and compare what could have been done with that madhouse we actually made.

 

[Belisarius]

You could consider that it's the price we paid for demilitarising space, which is probably a very good idea, especially in the Cold War.

Apart from the strategic considerations there is also the health and safety issue. They calculated that every Orion launch with nukes in LEO would add enough radioactive contanimation to kill around 10-100 people on Earth. Apart from the eye damage mentioned earlier, which I'd never heard of before.

But with an International Space Station as a construction platform, and an international agreement to waive the OST for this purpose, an Orion Project could be reinitiated today. The Orion could be pushed out to GEO or beyond with IUS type propulsion units and insert to Mars from there.
It might even be a good way of using up all those surplus nukes lying around waiting to be decomissioned.

 

[Andy44]

Yes, restricting its use to very high altitudes may make it politically acceptable, but the higher you have to push this thing before you can start using the main drive, the smaller the benefit of having the drive, of course, since you have to lift all that chemical propellant along with it. Can't be helped, I guess.

As for using up surplus nukes, they'd all have to be dismantled, re-processed, and remanufactured into shaped charges of the correct size and shape, of course. In addition to the concern of the bomb designers, this would undoubtedly be the most expensive spaceship "fuel" ever! It would also have a shelf life, since plutonium decays at a relatively rapid rate, meaning you'd have to use up the charges within a certain number of years or risk duds and loss of Isp. How many of these vehicles would really be feasible to build, given those constraints?

The General Atomic scientists were actually designing starships, gigantic Orion-drive vehicles which would reach the nearest stars within a few decades. They would be so big that they would essentially be flying cities. I wonder if they would manufacture their own nuclear charges aboard ship from raw material carried from Earth?

One thing is for sure, those guys knew how to think big. To imagine that we were developing real starships in the 1960s, using current technology, is just fantastic. I hope we can avoid giving up on those dreams completely.

 

[Artlav]

Apart from the strategic considerations there is also the health and safety issue. They calculated that every Orion launch with nukes in LEO would add enough radioactive contanimation to kill around 10-100 people on Earth.

Over 50000 people are dying in car crashes worldwide every year.
No one bans cars.
A slight increase of probability of getting cancer due to some kind of arcane radiation-cancer dependency for 10 to 100 people per Orion launch is enough to get it out of the question.
Where is the reason in that?
Madhouse.

But with an International Space Station as a construction platform, and an international agreement to waive the OST for this purpose, an Orion Project could be reinitiated today. The Orion could be pushed out to GEO or beyond with IUS type propulsion units and insert to Mars from there.
It might even be a good way of using up all those surplus nukes lying around waiting to be decomissioned.

What's the point? The main purpose of Orion is getting stuff off the ground - something we can barely do now. Once in space, there are much better ways of going around than a nuke-s...g brick of lead.

 

[Belisarius]

Over 50000 people are dying in car crashes worldwide every year.
No one bans cars.
A slight increase of probability of getting cancer due to some kind of arcane radiation-cancer dependency for 10 to 100 people per Orion launch is enough to get it out of the question.

I agree with you, but you have to think in terms of the politically-acceptable. Though individuals like you and I may accept risks after weighing up the potential benefits, our societies as a whole are fantastically risk-averse.

As long as there is freedom of expression and media given to publishing scare stories, that can't be changed. You have to work around it.

Re Andy's point about the work involved in recycling the nuclear warheads into useable fission pellets, I guess it would be fabulously complex and expensive, but not necessarily much more than decommissioning them. I read somewhere that on the whole planet there is no more than 250 kg of natural uranium, and zero naturally-occurring plutonium. Seems like we shouldn't waste what we have.

 

[Missioncmdr]

Over 50000 people are dying in car crashes worldwide every year.
No one bans cars.

I think the difference is that when someone gets into a car, they are making a conscious decision to do so. Basically, they are taking their own life into their own hands. However, with Orion's nukes, if someone dies, it is Orion's fault, not their own.

 

[Ghostrider]

Over 50000 people are dying in car crashes worldwide every year.
No one bans cars.

Almost 50'000 in the US only. Worldwide seems to be about 1.2 millions (http://www.car-accidents.com/). Hadn't the time to check it out more carefully.

Yes, nobody will ban cars, because next to everybody has one or wants one. People do not wish to ban stuff they like, they clamor to ban things they don't have or want, or are not interested in. They'll lobby to ban videogames, books, comic books, movies, TV shows, knives, firearms, trench coats, hoodies, lightsaber props, martial arts, some kind of sports (except soccer or football or anything trendy or fancy), red meat, green vegetables, and sometimes people who are not like them.

 

[Xantcha]

I agree with Ghostrider - road transport is popular and there is little alternative for it. Not so with nuclear blast propulsed crafts

I think the difference is that when someone gets into a car, they are making a conscious decision to do so. Basically, they are taking their own life into their own hands. However, with Orion's nukes, if someone dies, it is Orion's fault, not their own.

Oh yes, consious decisions - it's passengers fault when they die in car wreck. They should've known better than entering that bus.