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NASA artist rendering, from 1999, of the Project Orion pulsed nuclear fission spacecraft. Project Orion was a study conducted in the 1950s and 1960s by the United States Air Force, DARPA, [1] and NASA into the viability of a nuclear pulse spaceship that would be directly propelled by a series of atomic explosions behind the craft.
Project Orion was the first serious attempt to design a nuclear pulse rocket. A design was formed at General Atomics during the late 1950s and early 1960s, with the idea of reacting small directional nuclear explosives utilizing a variant of the Teller–Ulam two-stage bomb design against a large steel pusher plate attached to the spacecraft ...
Analysis of the concept in 1937 indicated that the driver of such a vehicle might need a 50-ton lead barrier to shield them from radiation. [ 21 ] In 1941, a Caltech physicist named R. M. Langer espoused the idea of a car powered by uranium-235 in the January edition of Popular Mechanics .
In May 1946, the U.S. Air Force launched the Nuclear Energy for Propulsion of Aircraft (NEPA) project to explore the potential of nuclear energy for powering aircraft. [13] [14] This initiative led to a collaborative effort of the Air Force and the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) known as the Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion (ANP) program, aimed at developing nuclear propulsion systems for ...
Mini-Mag Orion (MMO), or Miniature Magnetic Orion, is a proposed type of spacecraft propulsion based on the Project Orion nuclear propulsion system. The Mini-Mag Orion system achieves propulsion by compressing fissile material in a magnetic field, a Z-pinch, until fission occurs. This fission reaction propels the craft.
The proposed Project Orion nuclear propulsion system would have required the development of nuclear shaped charges for reaction acceleration of spacecraft. Shaped-charge effects driven by nuclear explosions have been discussed speculatively, but are not known to have been produced in fact.
Doubling the price of uranium would add about 10% to the cost of electricity produced in existing nuclear plants, and about half that much to the cost of electricity in future power plants. [53] The cost of raw uranium contributes about $0.0015/kWh to the cost of nuclear electricity, while in breeder reactors the uranium cost falls to $0.000015 ...
The nuclear shaped charge concept was also studied extensively in the 1980s as part of Project Prometheus, along with bomb-pumped lasers. Using a combination of explosive wave-shaping and "gun-barrel" design, up to 5% of a small nuclear bomb could reportedly be converted into kinetic energy driving a beam of particles with a beam angle of 0.001 ...