Very interesting/cool Project Orion video

[Ghostrider]

Passenger or driver, once you get onto the highway (and often sooner) any control over your fate is illusory. If a big truck jacknifes or invades your lane, you can be the best driver this side of Steve McQueen and it won't matter.

 

[JamesG]

There are only a couple of scenarios where an Orion would be practicable. As as desperate escape from a doomed or dying Earth, and as a way of launching a "warship" against alien invaders. Beyond these to far fetched sci-fi cases, there is no way that an Orion would ever get built. By the tiime we are ready to build starships or large solar-system traveling ships we'll have as effective and less extreme propulsion systems.

 

[Andy44]

By the tiime we are ready to build starships or large solar-system traveling ships we'll have as effective and less extreme propulsion systems.

At this period in history, such a statement is wishful thinking at best. There is a generally accepted rule that any propulsion system powerful enough to get you easy space travel is also a weapon of mass destruction.

Some of the ideas for advanced space propulsion involve things much more dangerous and radioactive than an Orion-style nuke pulse drive; look at nuclear salt-water rockets and nuclear gas core rockets for example. Some of these things may work fantastically, producing high thrust along with very high Isp, but using one anywhere but in deep space will kill lots of people.

Look here at some of them: http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3c2.html

 

[eveningsky339]

Alas, abandoning the Orion was a mistake. But I agree that the politics of the time would have made it impossible.

However, things are different now.

 

[JamesG]

Heh, not really. Radioisotope thermoelectric generators (plutonium batteries) are just barely tolerated to be launched. There is no way in hell that a craft carrying "nuclear bombs" would get off the ground, figuratively and literally.

 

[Andy44]

Hey, guys, here's an interesting TED Talk video of George Dyson discussing Project Orion. It's a bit too short, I'm afraid:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/george_dyson_on_project_orion.html