Conference 7.286::space

    The 'bang bang' drive works very well.  All of the more recent computer
    simulations (that I've heard of) show that it works as well as any
    other form of rocket drive.

    In particular, now that we have some really good gatling gun technology
    we might be able to build a cheap launch system out of it.  If I had
    the money to try it, I would (but of course I don't :-)...

    Jerry Pournelle has made use of 'bang bang' rockets in several of his
    novels.  Very well done.

    Among other companies, Pratt and Whitney worked on a nuke powered
    engine for space in the late 50's. It was in the Middletown, Conn. 
    plant and was a real hush-hush project. 
    
    
    Jim

    	Not to stop the discussion on ORION here, but there are two
    Topics in this Conference devoted to starships, at 212 and 313.
    
    	Yes, ORION was originally developed in the 1950s as a means
    of manned interplanetary propulsion.  When the United Nations treaty
    of 1963 banned the testing of nuclear weapons in space, Dyson
    considered using ORION as a nuclear-powered starship, which could
    reach the Alpha Centauri star system - 4.3 light years/25 trillion
    miles away - in roughly 150 years, not bad for an interstellar
    distance.
    
    	ORION is the only "fast" starship on the drawing boards which
    we could build with today's technology.  One of the so-called drawbacks
    is that it would need 300,000 nuclear bombs for propulsion, which
    would use up almost all our nuclear reserves - though personally
    I think this is the only *good* use for nuclear weapons I have ever
    heard of.  Also, it would leave a lot of deadly radioactive debris
    in its path out of the Sol system.  Still, I think it is worth trying,
    if we wish to reach another star system in a century or so.
    
    	Larry
                                                               

    
    When I was a little kid as a dependent in the Phillipine Islands
    I used to buy these interesting triangular, and very flat,
    firecrackers.  Many times, if you laid one of these down on a nice
    solid flat surface and carefully aligned a bottle cap on top of
    it, upon detonation I would see the bottle cap rise straight up
    in the air without any tumbling.  Imagine a frisbee going straight up
    with the main plane of the frisbee in line with the horizontal,
    and you get the effect.  That was "keen", in the parlance of an
    eight year old. 
    
    I've always wondered about all the variables that just seem to say
    that can't happen.  But it sure did.
    
    So when I found the "bang-bang" ships in science fiction, sure,
    why not?
    
    S. Chase 
    

    RE: -.1
    
    Yea but the aerodynamics must have been a drag... ;^)
    
    We did the same thing with "regular" crackers and some tubing.  HAND 

    Les

    	To quote from the ORION article, page 75:
    
    	"I still have a persistent dream that one day man will use the
    most destructive devices he has ever conceived for extending his
    reach to other worlds."
    
      - Theodore Taylor, ANNALS OF THE NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, 1972
                                                                           

    re:6
    I like the idea, disarm and take a trip to Mars and/or the rest of
    our solar system, better then selling old nuclear weapons
    to 3rd power countries.
    
    But seriously, I wonder if the total number of Nuclear bombs
    would be much less now that we can shape the charge in one
    direction. I would think this would give > then a 2x reduction
    in the number of bombs needed. Plus what else and where else
    would you like to put our nuclear waste form our power plants.
    
    
                                             

    Who says we can shape nuclear blasts?  There was an article a while
    back in Scientific American speculating what we could do _if_ we
    could modify various blast parameters, but no-one has (as far as
    I know) actually done so.
    
    Willie

    "The development of nuclear power will make space colonization both
  possible and necessary." - Arthur C. Clarke 

    I like the idea of a nuclear powered space ship, but here's a
    little twist.  Use a nuclear reactor to generate large amounts
    of electricity to drive ion engines.  The ion engine actually
    does work.  Remember the Halley's comet rendevous project that
    was cancled?  That mission was going to use an ion engine.  I
    remember seeing a picture of an ion engine in operation on the
    cover of some magazine.  The engine was emitting a blue haze
    due to ionization of the air.  It was actually a working model.
    
    Ion drives were also used on the Battlestar Galactica... oops!
    Getting my facts mixed with fiction.
    
    "By your command" - Quote from a Cylon.
    
    Ron

    
    NY Times had an artilce titled
    PLANS_FOR_NUCLEAR_POWER_IN_SPACE_RAISE_FEARS
    
    The Times said, The soviet Academy of Sciences recently disclosed
    plans for a manned Mars spaceship, it main engines powered by a
    nuclear energy. No details of the proposed craft but experts think
    that the likely method would be ion propulsion.
    
    I also found a 'more' detail discription in TASS
    
    In the opinion of one of leading Soviet Specialist of power
    engineering for use in space, Georgy Gryaznov, Dr. of Science
    (Technology), nuclear sources are particluarly effective on spacecraft
    of economic purpose in the implementation of programs which are
    connected with high energy consumption (up to 500 KW).  They can
    play an important role in interplanetary flights.  A nuclear power
    plant in which the reactor's thermal power is converted into an
    electrical one (about 15 Megawatts) can develop a jet trust necessary
    for a space flight to Mars.
    
                                                                

Article: 38881
From: [email protected] (Dave Stephenson (Geophysics))
Newsgroups: sci.space
Subject: Orion drive
Date: 2 Jan 92 13:58:40 GMT
Sender: [email protected]
Organization: Dept. of Energy, Mines, and Resources, Ottawa
 
For those interested there was a review of the unclassified history of
the Orion Project, or better known as project Put-put, in the Journal
of the British Interplanetary Soc., Vol. 32, 1979, pp. 283-310,
Anthony R. Martin and Alan Bond, 'Nuclear Pulse Propulsion: A
Historical Review of an Advanced Propulsion Concept.'  This review
covers most of the work that has been done to date on the concept, as
to my knowledge no nuclear pulse propulsion research has been carried
out in the last decade. 
 
Be prepared to have your minds boggled. I was once asked by a
planetary scientist in 1980, what could we do by 2001 if we pulled all
the stops out? I replyed "How many hundred tons do you want in Jupiter
orbit?' I then got him a copy of this article. He read the first
page, and said 'I will have a few beers before I read the rest of
this!' and next day told me that he would not ask me questions like
that again, I was dangerous! 
 
Ulysses (BIX)

        "We have for the first time imagined a way to use the huge
    stockpiles of our bombs for better purpose than for murdering people. 
    My purpose, and my belief, is that the bombs which killed and maimed
    at Hiroshima and Nagasaki shall one day open the skies to man...."

             - Freeman Dyson, MANKIND IN THE UNIVERSE, 1970

Article: 2131
From: [email protected] (Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey)
Newsgroups: sci.space,alt.history.what-if,sci.space.tech
Subject: Re: Spaceflight in _1939_ was Re: Spaceflight in 1951
Date: 6 Jun 94 13:55:25 -0600
Organization: Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
 
In article <[email protected]>, [email protected] (Bruce
Grubb) writes: 
 
[Crossposting to sci.space, a group which has been superseded by several
others; in this case, a historical discussion of the technology, I would
suggest sci.space.tech, and I've set followups there.]
 
> In article <[email protected]> [email protected] 
> (Daniel M Silevitch) writes:                                            
>>There was one technology available in 1951 that could have done the job:
>>the Orion system. 
 
No, Orion was not "available" in 1951.  In his book *Adventures of a
Mathematician* Stanislaw Ulam says he and C. Everett cooked up the
idea around 1955.  Freeman Dyson and Ted Taylor, with others,
developed it as an Air Force project a few years later (1958?) and
worked on it for several years.  You can read about it in Dyson's
*Disturbing the Universe*, in John McPhee's *The Curve of Binding
Energy*, and in Dyson's *Science* article "Death of a Project" (1965?
Check indexes around that time.) 
 
The original thread sprouted from a discussion of the novel *When
Worlds Collide* by Wylie and Balmer.  This book actually appeared in
the late Thirties, though the poster was reading a "new" paperback
edition published with the movie release in 1951.  I can say with
great authority that neither Orion nor any other nuclear rocket drive
was available before 1940!  But science fiction writers knew that
rocket travel beyond the earth, and release of "atomic" energy, were
possible and likely to be developed in the near future.
 
> As Carl Sagan pointed out in his series Cosmos Orion is a interSTELLAR ship.
 
I don't know what he said, but it really doesn't have the performance
to be a good interstellar drive.  James Nicoll has commented on this
in alt.history.what-if, and he is usually reliable in such matters.
 
> Using Orion in the space race which was to go the moon, Venus/Mars, other 
> planets, THEN interstellar flight would be like using a cross town bus to go 
> across the street.
 
Not true. Orion was intended (see the references I gave) to make the
solar system our neighborhood, with flights to other planets lasting a
few days to a few months.  Other stars are *much* further away-- tens
of thousands of times the distance of Pluto.
 
> Why not talk about a spacecraft designed by the British Interplanetary 
> Society?  You know the 1939 ship designed to go to the moon using 1939 
> technology?  The only information I have is that the thing existed.
 
This would make it roughly contemporaneous with *WWC*.  The BIS did a
paper study and published it in a 1939 issue of *Journal of the
British Interplanetary Society*.  A review of the design may be found
in *Smithsonian Annals of Flight #10*; I've forgotten the proper
title, but it's a collection of papers from a symposium on the history
of rocketry. 
 
Another place to read about it is the way-the-future-was book *High
Road to the Moon*, published by the BIS in the early Eighties and
written, if memory serves, by Robert Parkinson. I think this book
would be interesting to alternate-history buffs since it looks at the
milestones of space development envisioned by BIS members in the
Thirties, Forties, and Fifties, and contrasts them to the real events
of the Space Age.  It's a good place to find lovely paintings by R.A.
Smith... I've seen some of the originals hanging in the BIS's Lambeth
Road headquarters.
 
-- 
     O~~*           /_) ' / /   /_/ '  ,   ,  ' ,_  _           \|/
   - ~ -~~~~~~~~~~~/_) / / /   / / / (_) (_) / / / _\~~~~~~~~~~~zap!
 /       \                          (_) (_)                    / | \
 |       |     Bill Higgins   Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
 \       /     Bitnet:     [email protected]
   -   -       Internet:  [email protected]
     ~         SPAN/Hepnet:      43009::HIGGINS 

Article: 2140
From: [email protected] (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: sci.space.tech,alt.history.what-if
Subject: Re: Spaceflight in _1939_ was Re: Spaceflight in 1951
Date: Tue, 7 Jun 1994 17:01:58 GMT
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
 
In article <[email protected]> [email protected]
(Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey) writes: 

>....  You can read about it [Orion] in Dyson's
>*Disturbing the Universe*, in John McPhee's *The Curve of Binding
>Energy*, and in Dyson's *Science* article "Death of a Project" (1965?
>Check indexes around that time.)
 
Also of interest is the brief account in Herbert F. York's "Building
Weapons, Talking Peace" (I think that's the title).  He was the
unnamed man mentioned in Dyson's account, the one making the funding
decisions.  He basically thought Orion was a *very* long shot, with a
lot of major unsolved problems.  In particular, an independent review
said that General Atomic's estimates for development cost and schedule
were grossly optimistic.  He also notes that getting an Orion into
orbit would have required about a megaton of *fission* explosions, and
even in those days of atmospheric H-bomb tests, people were not happy
about that. 
 
>> As Carl Sagan pointed out in his series _Cosmos_ Orion is a interSTELLAR 
>>ship.
>
>I don't know what he said, but it really doesn't have the performance
>to be a good interstellar drive...
 
Sagan appears to be almost entirely ignorant of the extensive
technical literature on interstellar propulsion.  In particular, Bill
is correct:  Even a greatly scaled-up Orion (Orion gets better as it
gets bigger) is only marginally feasible for interstellar use. 
-- 
"...the Russians are coming, and the    | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
launch cartel is worried." - P.Fuhrman  |  [email protected]  utzoo!henry

Article: 2147
From: Aaron P Teske <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: sci.space.tech
Subject: Re: Spaceflight in _1939_ was Re: Spaceflight in 1951
Date: Wed,  8 Jun 1994 00:30:34 -0400 (EDT)
Organization: CRL Dialup Internet Access
 
Excerpts from netnews.sci.space.tech: 6-Jun-94 Re: Spaceflight in _1939_
w.. by Bill H. B. Jockey@fnalv. 

> > Using Orion in the space race which was to go the moon, Venus/Mars, other 
> > planets, THEN interstellar flight would be like using a cross town
> > bus to go across the street.
>  
> Not true. Orion was intended (see the references I gave) to make the
> solar system our neighborhood, with flights to other planets lasting a
> few days to a few months.  Other stars are *much* further away-- tens
> of thousands of times the distance of Pluto.
 
Actually, I recall reading (somewhere -- possibly nowhere serious, but
it seemed like a valid idea) that Orion could make for a fairly good
Moon base.  Build a superstructure, etc, whatever you need/want for a
basic Moon base, put on any equipment that can stand the strain, or
build the equipment to last, and then launch from Earth.  Before you
land, you drop a few (very very very clean) bombs below you, and
presto! you have a flat/slightly concave landling site.  Plus a Moon
base, which can then be expanded.  Any delicate equipment can be
brought over seperately... but then, how much thrust *is* there from
the blasts? Acceleration would presumably be jerky, but not too great.

  Anyone have some numbers to play with? 
 
                    Aaron Teske
                    [email protected]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   "There can be no thought of finishing, for 'aiming for the stars,' both
    literally and figuratively, is a problem to occupy generations, so that
    no matter how much progress one makes, there is always the thrill of
    just beginning." - Dr. Robert Goddard (in a letter to H. G. Wells)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Article: 2150
From: [email protected] (Glenn T. McDavid)
Newsgroups: sci.space.tech
Subject: Re: Spaceflight in _1939_ was Re: Spaceflight in 1951
Date: 8 Jun 1994 08:43:52 -0500
Organization: Another MCSNet Subscriber, Chicago's First Public-Access Internet!
 
[email protected] (Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey) writes:
 
>You can read about it [Orion] in Dyson's
>*Disturbing the Universe*, in John McPhee's *The Curve of Binding
>Energy*, and in Dyson's *Science* article "Death of a Project" (1965?
>Check indexes around that time.)
 
"Death of a Project " was reprinted in Dyson's recent book From Eros to Gaia.
 
Glenn McDavid

Article: 2198
From: [email protected] (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: sci.space.tech,alt.history.what-if
Subject: Re: Spaceflight in _1939_ was Re: Spaceflight in 1951
Date: Sun, 12 Jun 1994 03:15:19 GMT
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
 
I wrote:

>>....  You can read about it [Orion] in Dyson's *Disturbing the Universe*...
>Also of interest is the brief account in Herbert F. York's "Building
>Weapons, Talking Peace" (I think that's the title)...
 
The correct title is "Making Weapons, Talking Peace".  Basic Books, 1987.
 
However, having now read the book completely, I have to say that I don't
recommend it.  It sheds an interesting light on various events early in
the US space program -- York was one of the key people in US military
science+technology policy at the time -- but you don't want to read it
without considerable independent knowledge of what was going on.  There is
nothing much in this book that's actually *wrong*, but a lot of things
have been left out, sometimes to the point of giving a rather distorted
picture.  (For example, he mentions the embarrassment of the early Pioneer
program, with its five consecutive failures, and nearby he lauds the
military Discoverer program for achieving a successful mission two years
after program start, without mentioning that said mission followed
*twelve* consecutive failures, and was itself only a partial success.)
 
A frustrating, disappointing book.  Not worth your time unless you're
a serious space historian.
-- 
"...the Russians are coming, and the    | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
launch cartel is worried." - P.Fuhrman  |  [email protected]  utzoo!henry

Date: 8 Jun 1994 10:50:01 GMT
From: Tor Houghton <[email protected]>
Subject: Spaceflight in 1951
Newsgroups: sci.space,alt.history.what-if

Chris Owen ([email protected]) wrote:

:> Would this have actually *worked*? Surely the people inside the thing would
:>have been fried by the radiation, shattered by the blasts or squashed by the
:>acceleration? I certainly wouldn't want to bet on the astronauts surviving...

I think even they developed an experimental craft and launched it; gained
about 100m of altitude, I think.

"Put-Put" I think the name of the vessel was called.

;)

Tor.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
email: [email protected]                         "Old England is dying."
                                                      - The Waterboys
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: 8 Jun 94 11:11:24 GMT
From: Steve Linton <[email protected]>
Subject: Spaceflight in 1951
Newsgroups: sci.space,alt.history.what-if

Indeed. Of course it was powered by conventional explosives, not
nukes. Also the physics of this drive in air are quite different from
those in vacuum. 

To make Orion behave you:

(a) use small bombs: 1-2 ktons at most
(b) build the ship very big, with the manned bits standing on
    a very big shock absorber. The usual design has a domed 'pusher
    plate', which carries the bomb delivery system and not much more
    and then a set of huge shock absorbers which carry the rest of the
    ship (and possibly a second set of shock absorbers under the actual crew).

Date: Wed, 8 Jun 1994 13:13:47 GMT
From: Peter Venetoklis <[email protected]>
Subject: Spaceflight in 1951
Newsgroups: sci.space,alt.history.what-if

>>Chris Owen ([email protected]) wrote:
>
>>:> Would this have actually *worked*? Surely the people inside the thing would
>>:>have been fried by the radiation, shattered by the blasts or squashed by the
>>:>acceleration? I certainly wouldn't want to bet on the astronauts surviving.

Nuclear bombs are not infinitely destructive and do not emit infinite
radiation.  A properly sized shield and shock absorber can counter the
radiation and shock of a pulse.  Plus, you'd be using smaller devices,
in the 100's of tons or in the low kilotons. 

There was also a concept called HELIOS, which used a spherical
containment vessel with a throat and nozzle.  Small nukes would heat
reaction mass that would eject through the nozzle.  The nuke-e in the
office next to me did some work on the idea, and the physics and
materials are sound.  You can get about 1300 seconds of Isp out of it.
However, the pressure vessel is REALLY heavy (1000+ t) so the
benefits only become apparent for moving large masses around. 
____________________________________________________________________
Peter Venetoklis                           [email protected]
Senior Engineer - Mission Analysis      Northrop Grumman Corporation
Opinions are mine, not Grumman's, not Northrop's, not anyone else's.

Date: Wed, 8 Jun 94 10:19:04 EDT
From: [email protected] (Operator)
Subject: Test Ban and O. (was Re: Orion Ships (Was: Spaceflight)

>There was a drawing of the Orion spacecraft (by STAR TREK artist
>Rich Sternback) in Carl Sagan's COSMOS...the accompanying article stated
>that Daedalus *AND* Orion would be capable of 0.10c. I thought it sounded
>a bit unlikely, since the Orion spacecraft clearly was designed for MANNED
>missions within the solar system. Unlike Daedalus, it was 100% SSTO
>(oops: "Single Stage To Interstellar Space"-sorry:-).
>---
>Could anyone shed some light on this?
>
>MARCU$

The original Orion proposal (1958) was for a SSIPS
(single-stage-to-interplanetary-space) vehicle using 2000 small atomic
bombs.  For various (mainly political) reasons this was redesigned in
the early 1960s into an upper stage for the Saturn V for planetary
missions; the total number of "pulse units" would have been several
hundred (the exact # would depend on the mission, of course). After
Orion's cancellation, Dyson still championed the nuclear-pulse
technology and proposed (in a 1968 paper) a starship using several
MILLION (10e6) hydrogen bombs that would have reached an appreciable
fraction of c. 

Michael Flora
NASA - Marshall Space Flight Center