It has always irked me that since our glorious days when we
were routinely sending men to the moon, and yes we did go there, regardless of
the amount of “supposed” evidence that the conspiracy people like to put out
there, that we have never been able to go anywhere else in the solar system.
Not just sending probes to orbit planets or land on mars and drive around
taking panoramas, but actually sending humans to mars.
So in my research for propulsion systems for the space
empire story idea I have, I stumbled across a little gem where humans came
close to developing an engine design to go to the stars.
I know that NASA says it will send a crewed spacecraft on a
30-month round trip to Mars as early as February 2031. Are you kidding me? Apollo
11 was the spaceflight that landed the first humans on the Moon, American
Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, on July 20, 1969, that means it has
taken us 62-years or more than half a century to explore another planet.
Oh, I understand the issues that have kept us from going;
the waning political support for our exploration of space, after all the money
used for funding such things can be better spent by the politicos who
apparently have decided that spending us into oblivion, with nothing to show
for it is a much worthier cause.
What if I told you that in the late fifties, a group of
scientist had developed an engine that could have taken us to Mars and
potentially to Alpha Centauri on a one-way trip that would have lasted
133-years. Granted our cryogenics are lacking so that mission to Alpha Centauri
most likely would have been unmanned but the data sent back from the ship, well,
it would have filled reams and reams of books. Given us a greater understanding
of space and perhaps reinvigorated the sense of wonder and exploration that
once gripped us as a people.
Ah, you are piqued aren’t you? Well the project was called
Orion. It was funded by ARPA, the USAF and NASA to design an Atomic (Nuclear) pulse-powered spacecraft. They were to be
propelled by a series of nuclear explosions. The expanding plasma by each
explosion would impact a cushioned "pusher plate" made of steel or aluminum
at the rear of the spacecraft and push it forward. The spacecraft envisaged for
Project Orion were all single-stage and entirely reusable. Imagine that reusable
spacecraft.
Unlike Saturn V, the Space Shuttle, Ares, etc., there would
be no throwaway external fuel tanks or booster rockets. Project Orion engineers
believed that the entire craft would travel to its destination, regardless of
whether that is Earth orbit, the moon, Mars, Saturn or further.
Project Orion had worked out plans for space ships of
varying in size from 300 tons (the smallest version) to 8,000,000 tons (the
size of a small city). By comparison, the Shuttle orbiter had a mass of
approximately 110 tons and carried about 30 tons of payload into LEO (low Earth
orbit), and the Saturn V could launch about 120 tons in low Earth orbit or 50
tons into lunar orbit.
The best part of course is the price, including development
and all other associated costs, Project Orion was estimated to be at least 20
times cheaper per pound, than any chemical rocket, at putting payload into low
Earth orbit... and considerably cheaper for more distant destinations.
So what happened? Well the main unsolved problem for a
launch from the surface of the Earth was thought to be nuclear fallout. The explosions
within the magnetosphere would carry fissionable materials back to earth unless
the spaceships were to be launched from one of the Polar Regions, perhaps from a
barge in the higher regions of the Arctic. The initial launching explosion would
have been a large mass of conventional high explosive only to reduce fallout; while
all subsequent detonations would be in the air and therefore much cleaner.
Antarctica is not viable, as this would require enormous legal changes, as the
continent is presently an international wildlife preserve. But the North Pole
would have been a good place.
However the reasons for shelving the project included a lack
of mission requirement (apparently no one in the US Government could think of
any reason to put thousands of tons of payload into orbit). The decision to
focus on chemical rockets (for the Moon mission) and, ultimately, the signing
of the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963 spelled the end to the only viable
system to send humans to far distant shores.
Therefore, for one brief shining moment humanity had come up
with a feasible propulsion system to allow us exploration of our solar system
and ultimately the vast sea of stars that lay around us.
