'Project Orion' looks back at explosive vision of the future
In a 1983 Kenneth Brower book called "The Starship and the Canoe," George Dyson, the backwoods kayak builder, was contrasted with Freeman Dyson, the Princeton physicist who helped design an atom-bomb-powered spaceship.
The son-and-father tale was of two generations, two engineers and two lifestyles: one of simplicity and the other of 20th-century technology, each represented by highly intelligent, individualistic men.
Now, in "Project Orion," the son (who lives in Bellingham and who has already authored his own book about seagoing kayaks) has written a much more complete history of his father's starship project.
It was a vision so loony, so bold and so grand that it sums up the technological optimism of the 1950s that culminated in Seattle's "Century 21" World's Fair of 1962. Science fiction was expected to become science fact.
Dyson tells the story with wit, humor and a hundred interesting digressions, nicely capturing both the oddness of the idea and the underlying logic that remains compelling to this day.
At a time when no human had yet flown in space, Freeman Dyson and colleagues gathered at General Atomic's seaside California campus to seriously design a 4,000-ton spaceship that would be lifted off the ground by the explosions of small atomic bombs, one ignited every second.
The idea was as simple as putting a firecracker under a tin can and butting it skyward. A scale-model was dubbed "Putt-Putt."
Weird? Yes. All the common-sense questions anyone might ask, such as how to keep the spaceship from being blown apart or how to funnel fresh atomic bombs into its exhaust, were real ones the scientists had to wrestle with.
Yet Orion, they promised, could be an orbiting battleship that could trump the Cold War, a speedy platform to explore the solar system, or a multigenerational starship that might reach Alpha Centauri after a flight of 150 years.
The idea persisted for seven years until its cost, confused purpose, engineering problems and the ban on atmospheric nuclear explosions finally killed it. When George Dyson was growing up, many of the details were secret, but most have since been declassified. By interviewing his father and colleagues, he reconstructs the history.
The book has minor disappointments. Dyson never delivers a succinct biography of his still-living father, nor does he provide any titillating candor on what it was like to grow up with an eccentric genius for a dad. In a few places, the science and technology language becomes dense. Orion's slow bureaucratic death is a little tedious.
Yet the details of the Beach Boy era and the book's scientist characters are often marvelous. Dyson comments wryly on these boys who loved bangs, recalling a kerosene stove flare-up that caused his father to exclaim, "Oh, good! An explosion!" Project leader Ted Taylor used a parabolic mirror to light a cigarette from an atomic-bomb flash 12 miles away. Three stainless-steel mixing bowls were assembled as the first test spaceship. And so on.
The book is also a cautionary reminder that brilliance doesn't equal wisdom.
Scientists were so fascinated with the theoretical advantages of nuclear energy that the political improbability of kicking skyward thousands of tons of steel loaded with hundreds of atomic bombs never really occurred to them.
The idea was doomed by the 1960s revolution in values that would send George on a different path than Freeman. But oh, what a spaceship it would have been.
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