08-14-2025, 03:17 PM
Dyson’s Project Orion
In the 1960s, a Soviet astrophysicist N. S. Kardashev of the Soviet Sternberg Astronomical Institute, released a paper offering a simple classification system for the levels of technological expertise that intelligent beings throughout the Universe could be expected to have acquired. His classification was based upon the amount of energy such civilizations used to conduct their activities. He suggested three general categories. Type I civilizations include our puny efforts. It is equivalent to grade school, and we are in the kindergarten class. Type II civilizations have the ability to control the output of, or equivalent of their own suns. Type III civilizations can manipulate energy comparable to the entire output of a galaxy. (Kardashev’s intent was to lay stepping stones toward his idea that the enormous power being witnessed in quasars during those early days of their discovery was, in fact, evidence of Type III communication devices.)
The point here is that our thinking about the future is always aimed at the lower levels of our sub-group. The Martians evidently reside higher up, but within our type I classification. Certainly, we see no display of energy powers on par with gigantic changes within our solar system. But on the other hand, we should not blind ourselves with our own limitations. There are knowledgeable scientists among our number that may offer a strong case for direct evidence of indications above the norm.
The select group of insider scientists are revealed in the recent book, Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship by George Dyson. He is a science writer, the son of physicist Freeman Dyson, an early principal in the project after whole the unique machine was nicknamed: Dyson’s Rocket, as it is commonly known today.
Basically, the concept is simple. Also, it is seemingly unlikely, impractical, absolutely unthinkable, if not totally impossible...on the face of it. Nonetheless, it almost had its day in the annals of American’s space flight systems rather than being a mere historic footnote. However, it isn’t entirely gone yet but lays dormant in a multitude of disorganized secret and classified papers that may surface again if the whims of science, politics, and public opinion all concurrently shift a few degrees.
The plan was to use a succession of quickly repeated atomic bomb blast at the back end of a spaceship to propel it into space and on to Mars and beyond. The concept originated in the mind of physicist Stanislaw Ulam shortly after he witnessed the Trinity atomic bomb test in Alamogordo, New Mexico, in July of 1945. He had been wondering if there was not a better use of such power, a way to harness such energy, rather than merely letting it blow things to Hell. It was not until 1959 that a patent was issued for the process he had set in motion, but the actual development begun years earlier. The concept got a kick-start on October 4, 1957, when Sputnik I was launched by the Soviets. Its official start date was a few months later in the middle of 1958. But it was a plagued birth. During its seven-year lifetime various unrelated factors arose from the political, technical, and environmental quarters to stall, hinder, and finally strangle the program. Its final termination, from lack of nourishment and neglect, was in 1965. The powers that be had decided that chemically fueled rockets would be America’s ride into space. (Dyson, having seen the trend from early on, left the program in September of 1959.)
By the mid-1959s, nuclear bomb building was past its pinnacle, in decline. The brilliant minds behind that industry were looking for other challenges, preferably nuclear power plant…jobs. A core group of bright physicists, many from the atomic bomb group at Los Alamos, had come to believe that such ships could be built. The Dyson spaceship on paper looked like a natural progression as they saw it. Rewarding, we might suppose. The design utilized nuclear energy of the bomb-building type united with a long-standing dream of scientist and lay person alike: a spaceship for exploring the solar system, not merely sending small satellites into low Earth orbit as were the methods at the time. Under various parentages over the years the project came close to achieving a full-fledged program on its way toward achieving a prototype. As a work of science on paper, the Dyson Rocket was one of the longest-lived, researched and Could-Have-Been projects that was every seriously commissioned. But Werner von Braun and his rockets were making headway against the Soviets by the early 1960s and as the Dyson Rocket R&D had reached the Now-Or-Never decision point about being a serious program. The money, eventually, went to von Braun.
The details of the Dyson Rocket are amazing. They read like science fiction gone amok. Yet the concept went forward because of the theoretical work of Dyson and others. The working principles were sound and extremely promising when compared to chemical rockets. In the book Project Orion, George Dysone quotes his father’s perspective: “’I saw in half an hour that it was the thing all of the space-flight projects had been praying for,’ Freeman wrote in July 1958, when his optimism was at its height. ‘I have never had any reason to change this opinion. It will work, and it will open the skies to us. The problem is of course to convince oneself that one can sit on top of a bomb without being fried. If you do not think about it carefully, it looks obvious that you can’t do it.’”
Early in the book the younger Dyson gives a brief description of the way the Orion would work.
To visualize Orion, image an enormous one-cylinder external combustion engine: a single piston reciprocating within the combustion chamber of empty space. The ship itself, egg-shaped and the height of a twenty-story building, is the piston, armored by a 1,000-ton push plate attached by shock-absorbing legs. The first two hundred explosions, fired at half-second internals, with a total yield equivalent to some 100,000 tons of TNT, would lift the ship from sea level to 125,000 feet. Each kick adds about 20 miles per hour to the ship’s velocity, an impulse equivalent to dropping the ship from a height of 15 feet. Six hundred more explosions, gradually increasing to yield to 5 kilotons each, would loft the ship into a 300-mile orbit around the earth.
The chief reason for wanting to build such a craft was not just another use for atomic bombs, but because the energy conversion efficiency was a huge advantage over chemicals. To grasp that difference, imagine the power of an atomic bomb weighing one ton as compared to a one-ton stack of TNT. Fission is about a million times more powerful than the volatile chemicals we can use. Plus, chemical rockets are limited by the upper limits of their nozzle exhaust velocities and must rely upon multiple states to compensate for varying conditions during flight. A nuclear-bomb powered ship has no such meager limits. Theoretically, it could lift off from Earth, continually accelerating at a fairly constant g level until it used up half of its bomb load. (As with standard rockets, about half of a spaceship’s bomb/fuel supply must be retained for slowing and stopping at the end of the journey.) Studies done for exploring the moons of Saturn by Orion ships figured to achieve 60,000 mph (30km/sec). Visions of star-bound voyages for gigantic Orion ark ships pushed concepts over the 100,000 mph mark.
There were several primary problems to be overcome with the Orion concept. Two were major. First, a safe and reliable way to deliver each bomb in a timely and precise fashion to the firing area at the outside rear of the craft. Second, how to transfer the sudden effect of the blast into a far slower and smoother acceleration of the ship that didn’t leave the occupants mere smears on the rear bulkheads. Both of these areas were deep inside the engineering areas of the project and neither were wholly and satisfactorily answered by the project’s end due to full-scale prototyping not being allowed under the project’s various parameters. In theory, some of the physicist developers thought they were on the right track in solving these problems, but such paperwork never was translated into the engineered reality of mechanical mechanisms.
Other problems were no less critical, however. One dealt with the size, shape, and composition of the push shield upon which the bomb’s blast reacted and which protected the rest of the ship and crew from particles and radiation. It being so close to the ever-half-a-second blast rate was a subject of concern. How to keep it from deteriorating? (Though a chance fingerprint left on a small, test push plate, a thin coating of grease was found to all but eliminate the ablation problem.) Much effort was done to theoretically develop clean explosions that gave off minimal radiation to safeguard the crew and not dispel more than a minimum amount into the atmosphere. Also, part of that work was efforts to build more compact and cheaper bombs that could swiftly pass through a conveyor system.
Freeman Dyson thought it necessary to explore the outer limits of capabilities for the Orion ships to show that there was a future for them that went far beyond the inherent constraints of chemical rockets. He ran the numbers and found that Orion ships capable of lifting off from Earth could weigh 8,000,000 tons. One million tons would be payload. He figured to propel it with H-bombs with yields of a few megatons each. All of which would be doctored with radiation absorbing materials to greatly reduce if not eliminate scattered radiation to those left far below.
The many shortcomings of the design and engineering problems associated with launching a Dyson Rocket directly from Earth’s surface would be eliminated if the craft was assembled in a high orbit around the planet similar to the space station. From there it could be pushed by standard chemical rocket boosters out to where it could be set in motion by its own power. In this way, nuclear radiation effects and even the brilliant flashes of such explosions would indirectly impact the planet. Ideally, positioning the craft behind the Moon before it was set into nuclear operation would fully protect Earth, for a time, from even those distant effects.
Unfortunately, this strategy would limit the unique attributes of the craft to interplanetary travels to operations beyond the Moon but, again, that is the exact domain for which such craft are best suited. This then, tells us that the Dyson Rocket was many decades ahead of its time and at some future epoch of space flight, those assorted papers detailing its theory and construction may be sought again. In fact, those documents have been sought. The author, Dyson’s son, mentions in closing that NASA has purchased from him copies of 1,750 pages of old Orion reports that he had diligently obtained through the Freedom Of Information Act and other sources.
As he closed the book, he revealed a most curious fact:
In late spring of 1999, out of the blue, Freeman Dyson reported that ‘NASA officials have booked a conference room at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton for Monday morning next week and are flying up from Huntsville with twelve scientists who want to talk about Orion. Do they know something we don’t?’
We can wonder if he was being coy and playing with us, or if they were both mystified about the sudden interest in the old data? From our perspective here, the data NASA obtained from Dyson was perfectly understandable and exactly hit and explained a mystery. It detailed the finer details of moving a large body in space with explosive charges.
One does not need to be a rocket scientist to look at the cone of the Stickney crater and surmise that it was a blast cone, the results of using multiple blasts, to push Phobos, a former asteroid from near Jupiter’s orbit, down inward to eventually be positioned very closely to Mars where Nature alone would never have allowed.
Finally, Stickney, the newest and by far largest and most peculiar crater on Phobos, is located exactly at the center of mass of the body longish body. Right where you would place a pusher engine of any sort.
While “Dyson’s Shell” theory must remain mythical at the present, I suggest that the name of the crater Stickney on Phobos be changed to Dyson’s Crater until we get a revision of the proper Martian title.
In the 1960s, a Soviet astrophysicist N. S. Kardashev of the Soviet Sternberg Astronomical Institute, released a paper offering a simple classification system for the levels of technological expertise that intelligent beings throughout the Universe could be expected to have acquired. His classification was based upon the amount of energy such civilizations used to conduct their activities. He suggested three general categories. Type I civilizations include our puny efforts. It is equivalent to grade school, and we are in the kindergarten class. Type II civilizations have the ability to control the output of, or equivalent of their own suns. Type III civilizations can manipulate energy comparable to the entire output of a galaxy. (Kardashev’s intent was to lay stepping stones toward his idea that the enormous power being witnessed in quasars during those early days of their discovery was, in fact, evidence of Type III communication devices.)
The point here is that our thinking about the future is always aimed at the lower levels of our sub-group. The Martians evidently reside higher up, but within our type I classification. Certainly, we see no display of energy powers on par with gigantic changes within our solar system. But on the other hand, we should not blind ourselves with our own limitations. There are knowledgeable scientists among our number that may offer a strong case for direct evidence of indications above the norm.
The select group of insider scientists are revealed in the recent book, Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship by George Dyson. He is a science writer, the son of physicist Freeman Dyson, an early principal in the project after whole the unique machine was nicknamed: Dyson’s Rocket, as it is commonly known today.
Basically, the concept is simple. Also, it is seemingly unlikely, impractical, absolutely unthinkable, if not totally impossible...on the face of it. Nonetheless, it almost had its day in the annals of American’s space flight systems rather than being a mere historic footnote. However, it isn’t entirely gone yet but lays dormant in a multitude of disorganized secret and classified papers that may surface again if the whims of science, politics, and public opinion all concurrently shift a few degrees.
The plan was to use a succession of quickly repeated atomic bomb blast at the back end of a spaceship to propel it into space and on to Mars and beyond. The concept originated in the mind of physicist Stanislaw Ulam shortly after he witnessed the Trinity atomic bomb test in Alamogordo, New Mexico, in July of 1945. He had been wondering if there was not a better use of such power, a way to harness such energy, rather than merely letting it blow things to Hell. It was not until 1959 that a patent was issued for the process he had set in motion, but the actual development begun years earlier. The concept got a kick-start on October 4, 1957, when Sputnik I was launched by the Soviets. Its official start date was a few months later in the middle of 1958. But it was a plagued birth. During its seven-year lifetime various unrelated factors arose from the political, technical, and environmental quarters to stall, hinder, and finally strangle the program. Its final termination, from lack of nourishment and neglect, was in 1965. The powers that be had decided that chemically fueled rockets would be America’s ride into space. (Dyson, having seen the trend from early on, left the program in September of 1959.)
By the mid-1959s, nuclear bomb building was past its pinnacle, in decline. The brilliant minds behind that industry were looking for other challenges, preferably nuclear power plant…jobs. A core group of bright physicists, many from the atomic bomb group at Los Alamos, had come to believe that such ships could be built. The Dyson spaceship on paper looked like a natural progression as they saw it. Rewarding, we might suppose. The design utilized nuclear energy of the bomb-building type united with a long-standing dream of scientist and lay person alike: a spaceship for exploring the solar system, not merely sending small satellites into low Earth orbit as were the methods at the time. Under various parentages over the years the project came close to achieving a full-fledged program on its way toward achieving a prototype. As a work of science on paper, the Dyson Rocket was one of the longest-lived, researched and Could-Have-Been projects that was every seriously commissioned. But Werner von Braun and his rockets were making headway against the Soviets by the early 1960s and as the Dyson Rocket R&D had reached the Now-Or-Never decision point about being a serious program. The money, eventually, went to von Braun.
The details of the Dyson Rocket are amazing. They read like science fiction gone amok. Yet the concept went forward because of the theoretical work of Dyson and others. The working principles were sound and extremely promising when compared to chemical rockets. In the book Project Orion, George Dysone quotes his father’s perspective: “’I saw in half an hour that it was the thing all of the space-flight projects had been praying for,’ Freeman wrote in July 1958, when his optimism was at its height. ‘I have never had any reason to change this opinion. It will work, and it will open the skies to us. The problem is of course to convince oneself that one can sit on top of a bomb without being fried. If you do not think about it carefully, it looks obvious that you can’t do it.’”
Early in the book the younger Dyson gives a brief description of the way the Orion would work.
To visualize Orion, image an enormous one-cylinder external combustion engine: a single piston reciprocating within the combustion chamber of empty space. The ship itself, egg-shaped and the height of a twenty-story building, is the piston, armored by a 1,000-ton push plate attached by shock-absorbing legs. The first two hundred explosions, fired at half-second internals, with a total yield equivalent to some 100,000 tons of TNT, would lift the ship from sea level to 125,000 feet. Each kick adds about 20 miles per hour to the ship’s velocity, an impulse equivalent to dropping the ship from a height of 15 feet. Six hundred more explosions, gradually increasing to yield to 5 kilotons each, would loft the ship into a 300-mile orbit around the earth.
The chief reason for wanting to build such a craft was not just another use for atomic bombs, but because the energy conversion efficiency was a huge advantage over chemicals. To grasp that difference, imagine the power of an atomic bomb weighing one ton as compared to a one-ton stack of TNT. Fission is about a million times more powerful than the volatile chemicals we can use. Plus, chemical rockets are limited by the upper limits of their nozzle exhaust velocities and must rely upon multiple states to compensate for varying conditions during flight. A nuclear-bomb powered ship has no such meager limits. Theoretically, it could lift off from Earth, continually accelerating at a fairly constant g level until it used up half of its bomb load. (As with standard rockets, about half of a spaceship’s bomb/fuel supply must be retained for slowing and stopping at the end of the journey.) Studies done for exploring the moons of Saturn by Orion ships figured to achieve 60,000 mph (30km/sec). Visions of star-bound voyages for gigantic Orion ark ships pushed concepts over the 100,000 mph mark.
There were several primary problems to be overcome with the Orion concept. Two were major. First, a safe and reliable way to deliver each bomb in a timely and precise fashion to the firing area at the outside rear of the craft. Second, how to transfer the sudden effect of the blast into a far slower and smoother acceleration of the ship that didn’t leave the occupants mere smears on the rear bulkheads. Both of these areas were deep inside the engineering areas of the project and neither were wholly and satisfactorily answered by the project’s end due to full-scale prototyping not being allowed under the project’s various parameters. In theory, some of the physicist developers thought they were on the right track in solving these problems, but such paperwork never was translated into the engineered reality of mechanical mechanisms.
Other problems were no less critical, however. One dealt with the size, shape, and composition of the push shield upon which the bomb’s blast reacted and which protected the rest of the ship and crew from particles and radiation. It being so close to the ever-half-a-second blast rate was a subject of concern. How to keep it from deteriorating? (Though a chance fingerprint left on a small, test push plate, a thin coating of grease was found to all but eliminate the ablation problem.) Much effort was done to theoretically develop clean explosions that gave off minimal radiation to safeguard the crew and not dispel more than a minimum amount into the atmosphere. Also, part of that work was efforts to build more compact and cheaper bombs that could swiftly pass through a conveyor system.
Freeman Dyson thought it necessary to explore the outer limits of capabilities for the Orion ships to show that there was a future for them that went far beyond the inherent constraints of chemical rockets. He ran the numbers and found that Orion ships capable of lifting off from Earth could weigh 8,000,000 tons. One million tons would be payload. He figured to propel it with H-bombs with yields of a few megatons each. All of which would be doctored with radiation absorbing materials to greatly reduce if not eliminate scattered radiation to those left far below.
The many shortcomings of the design and engineering problems associated with launching a Dyson Rocket directly from Earth’s surface would be eliminated if the craft was assembled in a high orbit around the planet similar to the space station. From there it could be pushed by standard chemical rocket boosters out to where it could be set in motion by its own power. In this way, nuclear radiation effects and even the brilliant flashes of such explosions would indirectly impact the planet. Ideally, positioning the craft behind the Moon before it was set into nuclear operation would fully protect Earth, for a time, from even those distant effects.
Unfortunately, this strategy would limit the unique attributes of the craft to interplanetary travels to operations beyond the Moon but, again, that is the exact domain for which such craft are best suited. This then, tells us that the Dyson Rocket was many decades ahead of its time and at some future epoch of space flight, those assorted papers detailing its theory and construction may be sought again. In fact, those documents have been sought. The author, Dyson’s son, mentions in closing that NASA has purchased from him copies of 1,750 pages of old Orion reports that he had diligently obtained through the Freedom Of Information Act and other sources.
As he closed the book, he revealed a most curious fact:
In late spring of 1999, out of the blue, Freeman Dyson reported that ‘NASA officials have booked a conference room at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton for Monday morning next week and are flying up from Huntsville with twelve scientists who want to talk about Orion. Do they know something we don’t?’
We can wonder if he was being coy and playing with us, or if they were both mystified about the sudden interest in the old data? From our perspective here, the data NASA obtained from Dyson was perfectly understandable and exactly hit and explained a mystery. It detailed the finer details of moving a large body in space with explosive charges.
One does not need to be a rocket scientist to look at the cone of the Stickney crater and surmise that it was a blast cone, the results of using multiple blasts, to push Phobos, a former asteroid from near Jupiter’s orbit, down inward to eventually be positioned very closely to Mars where Nature alone would never have allowed.
Finally, Stickney, the newest and by far largest and most peculiar crater on Phobos, is located exactly at the center of mass of the body longish body. Right where you would place a pusher engine of any sort.
While “Dyson’s Shell” theory must remain mythical at the present, I suggest that the name of the crater Stickney on Phobos be changed to Dyson’s Crater until we get a revision of the proper Martian title.
Intelligence seeks to proliferate itself
not necessarily via its own kind.
not necessarily via its own kind.
![[Image: model_nuke_asteroid.jpg]](https://denyignorance.com/uploader/images/model_nuke_asteroid.jpg)
![[Image: (253)_mathilde.jpg]](https://denyignorance.com/uploader/images/(253)_mathilde.jpg)
