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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.
Orion (Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle or Orion MPCV) is a partially reusable crewed spacecraft used in NASA's Artemis program. The spacecraft consists of a Crew Module (CM) space capsule designed by Lockheed Martin that is paired with a European Service Module (ESM) manufactured by Airbus Defence and Space .
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 ...
Project Orion may refer to: Project Orion (nuclear propulsion), a study for a nuclear-powered spacecraft; Orion (laser), built in the UK to research thermonuclear ...
Project Rover was successful, but ultimately canceled. On 8 December 1962, President John F. Kennedy visited the NRDS. [4] Jackass Flats was proposed as a possible launch site for Project Orion, administered by General Atomics in the late 1950s.
Project Orion was a study of this idea. It began in 1958 and ended in 1965, after the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 banned nuclear weapons tests in the atmosphere and in space. [65] Work on this project was spearheaded by physicist Freeman Dyson, who commented on the decision to end Orion in his article, "Death of a Project". [66]
Charles Clark Loomis, (February 26, 1921 - July 14, 2011) was a mathematical physicist on Project Orion. Loomis joined General Atomics division of General Dynamics Corporation at the John Jay Hopkins Laboratory for Pure and Applied Science, San Diego, California.
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.