Review of Project Orion

Thoroughly researched, clearly and engagingly written, Project Orion is a true page-turner that held my attention through the two days after I bought it (yesterday and the day before) and caused me to miss this year's Amateur Radio Field Day.

Of course, the subject is fascinating in itself. Picture a 4,000-ton spaceship, capable of placing 1,000 tons of payload in low Earth orbit (LEO) — propelled by atomic bombs! Dyson traces the concept from its roots in the Manhattan Project, specifically in the mind of physicist Stanislaw Ulam, through the seven-year effort by a varying team of mostly physicists to come up with a workable design and get proof-of-concept tests funded.

They failed, of course. Not "of course, because the whole idea is nutty", but "of course, because after World War II all things nuclear gradually came under a cloud, and because of political competition for what little funding there was for such weapons-related work."

This is not to say that Orion is without problems. There are several, ranging from whether turbulence at the pusher plate will cause excessive ablation (one thing the proof-of-concept tests would have determined) to radioactive fallout. Fallout is the most vexing, because to keep it from ending up on Earth, you'd have to get the ship not only out of the atmosphere, but out of the magnetosphere, before you fire up its engines. But fallout is only one of many environmental hazards, and as Dyson's book amply illustrates, might under certain circumstances be acceptable.

The book documents other failures besides that of the Orion project. The military-industrial complex became less innovative and more bureaucratic, less honest and more bound to special interests. As Ted Taylor, Orion's leader — and, in his time, the best bomb designer the U.S. had — notes on page 286, "I discovered cases of willful deception, at all levels of government, concerning the effects of nuclear weapons on people, on buildings, on military equipment, on everything."

Dyson is a gifted writer. His prose is not elegant, in the manner of Carl Sagan; but it conveys complex ideas just as smoothly. He also had a good editor. Aside from a tendency to name characters without introducing them (Norris Bradbury on page (25?), Wernher von Braun on page 59), he made few errors1, and those are merely typos. I found only two:

Errata

1 In a previous version of this review, I complained about the name Dyson used for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). I was mistaken. Dyson's reference, on page 264, to "the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Livermore, California" is correct.

PROJECT ORION: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship George Dyson New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2002				Rating: 5.0 High
ISBN 0-8050-5985-7	345pp.	HC/BWI	$26.00

Page 109:	"I was cooking breakfast for my father, in British Columbia, on a pressurized kerosene stove that sprung a leak and became engulfed in flames."
	A verb-tense error: S/B "sprang".

Page 109:	"Jules Verne's lunar adventures, cushioned inside an explosive-driven projectile for their voyage in *From the Earth to the Moon*..."
	A typo: S/B "adventurers".

PROJECT ORION

Reviewed 1/07/2002

Errata