Project Orion: Secret Mars Mission Powered by Nuclear Bombs 

Now that was called big brain

the real concept had a fairing

@@5000mahmud I know, but it doesn't necessarily need one, depending on what you want to do with it

@@dsdy1205 True.

*s c i e n c e*

@The Student Official ever read footfall

Are you indonesian

@@tariqahmad1371 Yes!! Niven and Pournelle?

@born levensregt yes

Alien cocks an eyebrow. Human shrugs and adds, "We've got plenty of them lying around."

Weird how people sometimes call both of them "nuclear engines" when they have completely different work principles... By the way, do you prefer the weak Nerv or this literal nuclear bomb blowup?

Meanwhile me: PROJECT SUPER ORION!

mods of ksp: SUPER ORION

ksp 2 players: both

@@edith8048 you copied meh?

R.I.P. imagination. :D

@@petroscephasxd

Manovv Pathak aerodynamics are useless anyway

Aerodynamics are useless in space.

@@ChrisMontgomery-xtrmagamr I think he mean during lift off

Press f to pay respect

@@blazeyt7543 f

Campbell Mays yes it was the interstage of the Saturn v, they had to separately separate it because the j2 engines on the second stage couldn’t pass the interstage without hitting anything, they could have the engines on and then separate it. I’m surprised they would do the same with Orion because there is no engine bell

There should be a hold in middle of ablative plate for bomb release.

@@blazeyt7543 f

ScienceIsTruth yes me too it is so Royal

I bet your speakers don't like it..

It's like rocket farting

This is my toilet bowl hear when it Tuesday

The Orion engine, on the other hand, is pretty terrifying ...

Russkies don't use interstages. They have exposed engines that fire while the lower stage is still attached eliminating the need for ullage thrusters. It works.

Perhaps a fairing would simply be too heavy to properly surround the entire spacecraft.

When it gets up to speed(usually 15-30 seconds after launch), close to 40% of the total chemical fuel will be used just to fight the air, the difference between aero and non-aero would be dramatic, the outer shell shape needs to be optimized to cut through the air, such a shape can also reduce air turbulence to a controllable degree so it doesn't overwhelm the engines' gimbals(doesn't take much since most of them can only do 10 degrees); more aerodynamic = easier for the rocket to stabilize while transiting the atmosphere, jagged and square-y bits exposed to the wind just won't do.

The only reason that it uses a lower chemical stage is because NASA didn't want to nuke Florida multiple times on every Orion launch. A nuclear pulse drive has _way_ more than enough ∆V to stick something directly into orbit, but practically they needed to get it high enough first. With a payload that heavy, even a re-purposed Saturn V lower stage would have a hard time getting it up to speed; it would get it there, but it wouldn't get there fast. So, because it's flying much slower than most rockets, it doesn't build up enough drag to require a heavy streamlined fairing. TL;DR: Rocket is too slow, fairing is too heavy, and don't nuke Florida.

it's just an artistic liberty so that we can see the orion. people are trying to rationalize it but the actual concept does have the fairing www.astronautix.com/o/orionsaturnv.html

Also thought about that since the whole goal of going into space is to minimize the drag on the spacecraft and so forth.

The real concept did have a fairing.

There is no drag in a perfect vacuum of space.

@@herbyg777 Yes, but you have to be very far away from Earth to experience a perfect vacuum.

@@ryanspence5831 True, but you only have to go up 60km to experience a vacuum good enough for practical purposes

It doesn't appear in common media because most information about Project Orion is highly classified even today.

The whole concept makes my head hurt. Detonating consecutive nukes while traveling through the atmosphere would play havoc on radio communications, not to mention all the crap infrastructure that still hasn't been updated to protect against solar flares.

Also the propulsion nukes are not regular nukes, but specially designed nuclear shaped charges with low yield and designed to focus most of the energy at the pusher plate.

@@boymahina123 casaba howitzer An air burst MIRV ballistic missile with it would be cool as hell

@@japzone Detonating consecutive nukes while moving through the atmosphere is an idiotic idea. Especially for those living even hundreds of miles from the launch site.

you also get emps

Yeah true meaning it would have to have a Saturn v second stage as well as first stage to get it to LEO since the first stage doesn’t even take it to space. The rocket might be a bit too big though.

air burst nukes have very little fallout.

@@5000mahmud Yea, no kidding. There were a LOT of nukes tested in the 50's and 60's, most of which WAY higher yield than that proposed for Orion. And these are way up in the atmosphere with very little debris TOO fallout.

It's more about public opinion of anything nuclear than actual danger of fallout etc these days unfortunately. Unless Russia or China did it ;)

Orion's drive bombs are too weak to generate any significant EMP.

Just to pass-on the advantages of a 20-m diameter Orion about which I've read: such a vehicle would have a 3,150-sec ISP, and a maximum velocity of 192,000 fps, which would permit a single-stage round trip to Jupiter, with a 20-man complement and 100,000 kg of destination payload, in the duration of 900 days.

caav56: Your reply encouraged me to do research into the planned yields for the pulse units of the Saturn-lofted Orion design, and how much EMP such pulses would generate. It turns out, that's a very complicated issue to determine, as I'm finding! The pulse units contemplated for the Saturn-lofted Orion vehicle were expected to yield 15 kt. EMP does its damage by "peak electric field at ground zero" in units of volts/meter, which is dependent on multiple factors: (1.) "Prompt gamma input" in kt - NOT the same as total yield of the weapon. Depending on the design of the weapon (fission or fusion), prompt gamma input can vary from 0.115-0.5% of the total weapon yield - fission weapons produce higher prompt gamma input than fusion ones. "The EMP at a fixed distance from an explosion increases at most as the square root of the yield...This means that although a 10 kiloton weapon has only 0.7% of the energy release of the 1.44-megaton Starfish Prime test, the EMP will be at least 8% as powerful. Since the E1 component of nuclear EMP depends on the prompt gamma ray output, which was only 0.1% of yield in Starfish Prime but can be 0.5% of yield in low yield pure nuclear fission weapons, a 10 kiloton bomb can easily be 5 x 8% = 40% as powerful as the 1.44 megaton Starfish Prime at producing EMP." (glasstone.blogspot.com/2006/03/emp-radiation-from-nuclear-space.html). (2.) Altitude. For example, "To boost the EMP lethality of a simple one-kiloton fission weapon, it must be detonated much lower than the hundreds of km that would expose the entire continental US to harmful electric fields. In fact, the “sweet spot” for maximizing the EMP lethality of such weapons would be a detonation altitude of about 40 kilometers-significantly higher, or lower, and the peak fields at ground level will decrease." (www.thespacereview.com/article/1549/2). Other factors include target distance, intervening geographical features, and local strength of the Earth's magnetic field (the latter, of course, depends on latitude). For reference: the Saturn V in its production design typically staged between its first and second stages at 36 nautical miles (67 km), and downrange of Cape Canaveral about 50 nautical miles (93 km). All this to say: I hope you're right - but I would defer to somebody A LOT smarter than myself on that question! ;-)

You've missed one little thing - for atmo part of launch, Orion uses sub-kiloton bombs (0.14 or 0.35 kt, depending on version of Orion). The bigger nukes are only put to use, when ship is in high enough orbit.

I had not found that info! Can you recommend a source(s) which gives the yields of the pulse units for various periods of ascent/escape velocity profiles? I would love to incorporate such source(s) into my research. Many thanks for any guidance you can offer!

Sadly enough The only thing that was tested was the mini propolsion system

The concept works though

@@koharumi1 With nuclear power, everything works.

Linecraftman I think he didn’t include the fairing just to give us the look of it.

fairing separation would look very satisfying though

The swirling air would have ripped that craft apart. Great intentions but a bit ridic!

@@berylrosenberg704 In reality it would've looked something like this: www.astronautix.com/nails/o/orionsco.jpg It's a shame that it never got built. One of these things could do a single stage mission to *Saturn* and back.

Mars should be that red.

It is very inefficient of the energy in the nuclear fuel, and a crude and wasteful way, but the amount of energy available in even a small blast is so much. A spherical neutron reflector doesn't affect more than a few percent of the neutrons flying around, but the little bit they do is enough to make their inclusion into a bomb necessary. This then is similarly wasteful, but it works. This small ship vaporizes a jet of ~half a ton of tungsten into a jet hotter than the surface of the Sun, before its own blast blows it apart.

@@JFrazer4303 The actual nuclear explosion only fissions about 5% (or so) of the available fissile material, so it's wasteful in that sense as well. Reactors only use up about 2% of the fissile material before it has to be reprocessed. I'm sure fusion reactors would only fuse about half or less of their material.

probably not :D It's a *space* ship after all

Project Orion was an external nuclear pulse drive, it was designed to withstand sub kiloton nuclear blasts for propulsion.

The concept had a fairing I’m pretty sure he didn’t do one so we could see the space craft

@@johnwang9914 those blasts only be behind the shock absorber tho

This vehicle wouldn't land, it would carry a separate lander.

It's not abandoned, it's still in theory just like time machine. Definitely inorder for longer traveling we will be needing this and people are working on it everywhere from every corner. Without nuclear propulsion we have no chance of going to even the nearest star system.

It's abandoned due to NTB treaty and Nuclear Non-proliferation agreement. This applies to all sea, land, air and outerspace.

@@Hannan_1325 welp. I guess we’ll have to just do it ourselves lol 🤷‍♂️

The debris hitting the pusher plate would transfer "sound". You'd hear it.

The original Project Orion project included studies on what it would be like for the crew and also the extent of retinal burns on any spectators on the ground. Basically, don't look at this ship when it's under propulsion.

Cavaron EV I remember they said “4 per second “ in the documentary.

@@dosomething3 And as far as the light, yeah it would be far brighter considering nuclear explosions are usually described as looking like small suns.

The real frequency of using the bombs would have been one every one or two seconds. You can't shoot them out that fast and the frequency of detonation is determined by the natural frequency of the three mass-two spring system of the pusher plate, shock absorber-legs and body of the space craft. You must use another bomb before the pusher plate becomes fully extended or you will have the ship being pulled backwards at like, negative 2 g's or something.

@@battleoid2411 I always wanted a son.

@@xrfa7422 The fuck

+Gun Slinger I think you mean Freeman Dyson as it was his son who put together the book chronicling it's development.

@@johnwang9914 Both Stanton Friedman and Freeman Dyson worked on the project.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ullage_motor

@@chrisjohnston4445 this things on the ring? so i say.. they are not needed in this case

@@wingstrongwingstrong I know. Just trying to help you out.

​@@chrisjohnston4445 ясно, понятно

Yeah, why did they need a spacer?

Yep. And killed by the atmospheric test ban treaty. A damn shame because we could have colonized Alpha Centauri by now.

@@seen203 O O F

@@ryanspence5831 Big OOF. We literally could have done so in that time frame. Technically speaking.

Aliens visiting us will have 1960’s tech.

@@seen203 damn it we were supposed to be out there exploring damn

That's the same with any rocket.

You'd really have to treat the bombs like fuel, make sure 50 or so are queued up on average, if it drop down to a couple bombs left, cut off the ignition of further bombs. This takes the load off off the ejector system., as it can shut down in the event of an issue. Also put in a few overrides just to be safe. Those can be system or human controlled. Then, you'd really need to make sure those bombs only detonate at a fair distance, whatever that would be depending on the yield. There are many ways to achieve this, but it really comes down to a "Best design" principle and will likely be best achieved with many redundancies such as a gun type device which was seen in Little Boy (Think almost like a safety on a gun being one such redundancy) which also promotes the detonation being directed at the rear of the ship through a shaped charge. With the blast directed at the rear of the ship, you can make a smaller yield and carry more fuel. And finally, the system in which you use to navigate while your tail end is pointed at your target when your slowing down needs to also be thought out well.

I mean rockets are just flying bombs anyway if anything goes wrong. Doesn't really matter if it's a nuke or normal then. The radiation damage would be relatively low. Nukes don't just simply explode eather.

Its not a nuclear bomb on a timer, its a pellet of dueterium. It goes boom only after being smacked by high intensity laser beams so all you have to do to avoid unwanted boom is shut the laser off.

@@tyson31415 uh no man Orion is fisdion bombs.

What alien spaceships you talking about?

To quote the book: "God was knocking and he wanted in bad"

@@sudragon2k3 Larry Niven's Footfall, right?

It's not as crazy as you might think. You need some truly gargantuan bombs before you you to worry about any kind of long-lasting damage or damage anywhere aside from directly around the site of detonation. There's a lot of them but they're only the size of soft drink cans. You wouldn't want to do it over a populated area or for takeoff but there's really no reason to not fire the engine inside the Earth's atmosphere as a second stage. No impact site means no fallout and they're only small bombs so it's not like radiation is a concern. Worst case scenario that interstage gets blown to buggery and nobody can clean it up for a couple of months.

Space based nukes generate huge EMP, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime and I doubt the radiation and fallout will NOT be a concern.

Starfish Prime was more than a megaton. Orion drive bombs are sub-kiloton. More than a thousand times weaker.

Brad Erickson It was and testbed vehicles were built that used conventional explosives. Orion on its own was SSTO+. The Saturn V first stage here is just to minimize fallout (and save some fuel pellets).

It was an actual US airforce project hence top secret and all the tests occurred on the planned timeline. What killed it was the anti-missile treaties which forbade orbital nuclear weapons. The original plan was for a 300 man bullet shaped spaceship launched from Coyote flats with over a thousand nuclear bomblets. This animation seems to be derived from NASA's 8 man Mars mission and 20 man Jupiter mission version which were intended to be launched into orbit by the Saturn V. The transfer from the airforce to NASA was in hopes of negotiating a civilian exception to the arms agreement, the Soviets would have none of that. President Kennedy was also horrified by the idea as the Airforce presented him with a six foot tall model covered with gun turrets. Nobody knows what happened to that model.

This was a serious idea for a long time in one form or another developed by the brightest minds in physics at the time.

Non nuclear explosions will have low specific impulse

@@TheAmericanCatholic Even lithium Hydride BLU 82s or FAE?

+Skiper747 Only to electronics and the power grid. The idea behind the stripped down 8 man NASA Mars mission version was to launch it into orbit on a Saturn V before using the sub kiloton bomblet propulsion units. Personally, I would've designed it with hexagonal blast plates so multiple units could be linked together for a greater cross section, the narrow version may be sufficient for a Mars mission but the spaceship will never return to the surface of Earth so why not build it up in modules over time since the number of propellent nuclear bomblets need not be increased as the mass of the ship is increased. It was the original three hundred man version that was to be ground launched with about a thousand nuclear bomblets into orbit, the first few bomblets might not be nuclear in order to reduce fallout but they had determined that a steel plate on the ground would prevent the bombs from blasting up the irradiated dirt as fallout. The impact of all those bomblets would still be less than the open air atomic tests of the fifties and only one launch would've been needed to place all the infrastructure and manpower needed for a permanent presence in space. Project Orion is still our best interplanetary and perhaps interstellar drive, however accumulating the thousands of nuclear bombs needed is not only a political impossibility but an impossible scenario to secure from theft and abuse.

Skiper747 that’s why it was canceled after nuke testing was banned. Also the original plan had a larger Saturn V variant take it all the way to orbit then the Orion would use nuke propulsion.

Hello, they tested all kinds of nukes for decades.........we are all still alive.

@@uhvman War and famine has happened for tens of thousands of years and we are also still alive today. Guess war and famine mustn't be that bad then eh.

@@adamanderson3042 War and famine are completely different. Nuclear weapons are never tested in massive population centres (exluding Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which weren't "tests" so to speak). In my opinion project Orion represents the best possible use of nuclear weapons.

+jack kennedy Yes, it could've sucured humanity from global catastrophes forever. But at least we haven't died from nuclear war or terrorism, accumulation the thousands of small sub kiloton nuclear bombs would've been both a political and security problem.

@@johnwang9914 Yeah, it was scientifically very feasible but unfortunately politically infeasible. It would take a killer asteroid on approach to Earth to encourage this kind of development.

It would, which is one of the reasons why project Orion was abandoned

Orion used shaped-charge nuclear explosives -- not "pellets" -- you are thinking of Project Daedalus. Different system entirely.

best point in the comments.

The wear and tear would be similar to that of a car engine, where you have explosions in every cylinder driving moving parts. A tricky engineering problem for sure but not an unsolvable one.

Look up the documentary. They discuss this issue. You are all wrong. There was no wear and tear. Atomic explosions almost don’t harm steel. That was the discovery that sparked the whole project.

It's a game

Wrong. Why don't you people research anything before posting nonsense?

@@williamblack4006 Can you prove right here and now that radiation doesn't spread through space? Can you prove that detonating nuclear explosions behind the space craft won't create radiation? Can you prove that there isn't already a lot of radiation in space between here and Mars? Can you prove that Mars is protected from radiation assuming that this idea works and the astronauts somehow make it to Mars alive? I'll wait.

@@williamblack4006 They just like being naysayers. The people that designed this thing knew everything about nukes and would put in the proper shielding.