Project Orion goes ahead

That's for all those fusion plans we are prepping, right?

So we should colonize Mars because at some point, thousands of years from now, it might have an atmosphere. Like Antarctica.

If and when those are built.

You do know what terraforming is. Don't try to paint me as claiming that Mars would someday spontaneously develop an atmosphere.

I can't think of a way to make Antarctica more than marginally habitable without wrecking the rest of the Earth, but I can think of ways (albeit insanely expensive ones) to terraform Mars.
 
Right, and this is all kind of cool. But if these guys look at your plan for using nuclear weapons and go "pshaw."

Those guys also looked at non-centrally-planned economies and went "pshaw." And they looked at protesting students and went "pshaw." And they looked at the idea of drinking vodka in moderation and said, "pshaw."

What the Soviets thought was and was not a good idea has no bearing on what was and was not a good idea.
 
Frex, Ian pointed out that orbital nuclear detonations would be very dangerous to satellites.


*Whose* satellites? If the USA, for example, decided to make a serious go of Orion, they would know *years* in advance that conventional lightly-built satellites are soon going to be toast... but satellites with proper shielding will hold up just fine, as well as being probably cheaper to build (instead of finely-machined special light alloys and fabulously thin structures... you can stick-weld the main structure from, say, iron sheet).
 
*Whose* satellites? If the USA, for example, decided to make a serious go of Orion, they would know *years* in advance that conventional lightly-built satellites are soon going to be toast... but satellites with proper shielding will hold up just fine, as well as being probably cheaper to build (instead of finely-machined special light alloys and fabulously thin structures... you can stick-weld the main structure from, say, iron sheet).

Wrecking Soviet satellites accidentally might look like an "accident" to the Soviets and that could cause a war, especially if they're already freaking out about Orion.

And then there are the satellites of allied countries.
 
WHY is every one focusing here on nuclear Fallout ?!

Like the this graphic show
pax-orionis-Model-1024x394.png

The REAL USAF and NASA look in concept to Lift the Orion with ROCKET POWER 80 km/50 miles up OUTSIDE Earth Atmosphere

And the Bomb yield of standard Orion pulse unit is 140 metric tons TNT !
enough to vaporize the tungsten propellant that hit the pusher plate...
Using rockets to loft the vessel 80kms up negates most of the delta V advantage you're trying to gain, for one.

Furthermore, the optimistic studies on Project Orion assumed that pure fusion warheads would be used to minimize fallout. That hasn't panned out. Making the warheads smaller is actually the worst thing imaginable.

Because you're dealing with the critical mass of your fissile material. There's a certain minimum you need or you won't get a boom. To get a smaller yield explosion, you have to make your bomb less efficient. You have to have less of the fissile material react. The end result is you're still spreading as much radiological material with a 140 ton yield bomb as you are with a 10 kiloton bomb.

Any Orion launch means the fallout equivalent of hundreds of Hiroshima bombs
 
Wrecking Soviet satellites accidentally might look like an "accident" to the Soviets and that could cause a war, especially if they're already freaking out about Orion.

And then there are the satellites of allied countries.

Allies get free rides for their new satellites. Soviets get warned years in advance to stop launching cheap crap, and to step up their satellite shielding game. if they can't be bothered to update... whose fault is that?
 
Wrecking Soviet satellites accidentally might look like an "accident" to the Soviets and that could cause a war, especially if they're already freaking out about Orion.


I can see it now.
Sorry Ivan, your Polar Orbit 'Weather' Satellites may get knocked out.

We would be more than happy to carry and deploy replacements for the USSR if you will give them to us before the launch
 
Why would fallout come down over the eastern seaboard??

Replace that with "populated area" then. No need to be so literal.

That said, there've been crashes of aircraft carrying nuclear weapons that didn't contaminate the area they've landed in. If an Orion fell from orbit, unless there was some weird chain reaction that caused all the nukes to detonate upon landing, I don't see a mass contamination event.

(Of course, something that big hitting the ground would still do a lot of damage if it landed on a city.)

Of course, people might believe such a thing would happen and try to stop Orion out of error-based fear. The U.S. is not a technocratic nerd dictatorship, after all.

The only scenario I could see this happening would be if the Orion fired its drive traveling laterally within the atmosphere rather than straight up into orbit. Imagine the Orion flying over a populated area, basically.

But how to get that to happen?
 
But how to get that to happen?

The Orion gets taken over by a highly-trained team of suicidal environmental activists. If this becomes a concern, the answer isn't to get rid of Orion, but to get rid of environmentalists. Ship then all off someplace environmentally pure, like Lake Vostok.
 
Hey guys glad to see this topic is still alive I really have an interest in space travel and orion. To be clear though I was sort of asking if the air force project from the 60s went ahead not something in the 80s. I say this because defense seems like the best way to get the thing built. The idea of larger satellites interests me, in fact its orion's heavy lift and ability to move around the solar system fast that interests me the most.


I think colonization is out of the question for at least a century, though maybe it would be discussed more. I was however interested in the possibility of semi permanent bases through out the solar system staffed by professional scientists.
 

Archibald

Banned
Carl Sagan wanted to cut nukes and use them for Orions. He'd LOVE this.

Yes. I really, really would like to see a TL developing this - a successful Reykjavik summit leading to the end of ICBMs with all the warheads recycled into a reborn Orion nuclear pulse spaceship...
 
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