What if Project Orion was launched in the 1970
- Thread starter Jason222
- Start date
How are we getting it all into orbit?
Or are we Orioning our way up out of the atmosphere as well?
Why are the Russians (or US, as appropriate) not freaking out about several thousand megatons of nukes in orbit, where they can be precisely dropped anywhere in the world with leisure and decent precision?
Or are we Orioning our way up out of the atmosphere as well?
Why are the Russians (or US, as appropriate) not freaking out about several thousand megatons of nukes in orbit, where they can be precisely dropped anywhere in the world with leisure and decent precision?
Would it really be that much? And a delivery system that can reach the end of the ship, is not the same one you need to drop though the atmosphere with accuracy.
I wouldn't blame the *USSR for freaking out about it, though. They don't necessarily know exactly what the Orion delivery system is capable of.
Anyway, it doesn't take much of a delivery system to drop things. Gravity would be a big help there.
With the KGB? They would know everything about Orion.
And a system the puts bombs yards away from the end of the ship would not useful for bombardment.
Now they might claim to be concerned in an attempt to derail the US space program.
Even with the theoretical best Orion-drive I've seen, which gives a top speed of 10% of c, you'd still need about 40 years to get to Alpha Centauri. Given that the human endurance record in space is somewhere around 400 days, there's going to be massive issues with putting people in space that long.
Uh-oh, you may want to check this again. The nearest star system is 4 ly away. Travelling at the speed of light would take it 4 years there and 4 back again. At light speed.
Orion was supposed to achieve what? 0,03c at the very best. This means some 1300 years to Alpha. And the bigger (and more ridiculous one) would travel 13000 years.
Pangur
Donor
Of all the reasons I have heard for not going ahead with Orion this surely is the easiest to fix- show the Russians the design & the actual ship. Ask for Soviet military officers to be on the observation team. Have them in launch control for the launch itself and while thew ship is in earth orbit - heck let them stay later if they want
As a BTW Orioning into orbit is just not on - period .That bit would have to be old fashioned chemical rockets
Which basically means you must build it in the LEO. Or build hilariously impractical 200.000 tons booster to lift it.
Phyrx
Banned
That's something I've wondered about a lot too. Does anyone know if you could design it as a lifting body, maybe? I figure maybe you could use a body of water instead of a landing strip to make things easier, et cetera - but I don't really know much about aerospace engineering.
I've always loved Orion and I think that it could have given us a real foothold in space. Profitable asteroid mining and all that jazz. But, really, you can't do the whole launch-from-orbit thing - it almost eliminates the whole purpose of nuclear pulse propulsion.
Chemical thrusters for the very last phase of the landing--it's OK if you detonate a bomb a kilometer off the ground, with those sub-kiloton yields, but past that they use chemical. At least, that's what I think The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship said about their planned Moon/Mars/Enceladus landings. Earth landings offer the possibility of dumping it in the ocean on the way down--it's certainly big and sturdy enough to survive that from an low enough altitude.
Von Braun's variant of Project Orion was to tie it to a stretched Saturn V first stage to get it up past the majority of the atmosphere and only then start banging one's way to the Moon. That's the only variant that can conceivably be flown. Actually Low Earth Orbit assembly would require too many launches. If it were to fly, it would greatly simplify the issues of interplanetary flight.
'Course, the trouble is getting the damn thing legalized in the first place.
You're assuming the same public and regulatory attitude towards radiation as IOTL. I don't think that's a warranted assumption. We're still arguing over what the effects of low-dose-rate radiation, such as the public would be exposed to by an Orion launch, actually are. There's a group, a minority in the radiation science community but as far as I can tell a legitimate one, that argues it's harmless, and that - except for CASTLE BRAVO and possibly radio-iodine exposure - the atmospheric nuclear testing the US did in the 50s was not actually harmful to public health. So far it's impossible to prove it conclusively one way or the other. For what it's worth, I'm glad I live in a world where the regulatory agencies decided (eventually) to be cautious, but I think it's plausible there might be a TL where society decided to be brave rather than wise. In which case surface launch of an Orion spacecraft might be conceivable, provided it's sufficiently remote from civilization.
Edit to Add: That said, it would require a PoD before 1954 at the absolute latest, and possibly before WW2, to actually achieve that.
amphibulous
Banned
Given the size of the thing, the enormous blast shield and shock absorbing strut, no.
Orion never got past the fantasy stage - Dyson spoke of being able to build an Orion in just years, but other people on the project - especially the engineers - thought a couple of decades was more realistic, if the job could be done at all.
As for landings: my understanding is this was never worked out. This site claims the plan was to have "landing boats":
http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=5167