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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 ...
The design for Project Orion originally used small hydrogen bombs whose explosion ejecta was captured on a pusher plate, a large metal plate mounted on shock absorbers.The explosion of the bomb was spherical and it was only the portion that struck the plate that created thrust.
On July 16, 1945, the world entered the unprecedented atomic age with the successful testing of the most powerful weapon known to man.
Project Orion in the 1960s envisioned the use of nuclear shaped charges for propulsion. The nuclear explosion would turn a tungsten plate into a jet of plasma that would then hit the drive pusher plate. About 85% of the bomb's energy could be directed into the target as plasma, albeit with a very wide cone angle of 22.5 degrees.
The federal government and companies responsible for nuclear bomb production and atomic waste storage sites in the St. Louis area in the mid-20th century were aware of health risks, spills ...
The false claim that a 14-year-old student built an atomic bomb as a science project originates from a satirical website.
An early appearance of an Orion-style nuclear pulse propelled rocket in science fiction was in the science fiction novel Empire of the Atom written by A. E. van Vogt in 1956. In this novel there is a post-atomic-war interplanetary empire called the Empire of Lynn that uses Orion-type nuclear rockets for interplanetary spaceflight.