Obviously it's not going to be cheap to build such a thing, but has anyone ever worked up a cost estimate of what one would cost to build?

[Carl Sagan voice] Beelyuns and Beelyuns! [/Carl Sagan voice]

ops: Sorry, I just couldn't resist a straight line like that. ops:

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You mean AFTER its invented, right?

Well test models have been built, and surely Dyson and the others calculated what it would cost to build a full-size version.

From what I can gather, the 'Orion' was propelled by explosives, in some book or movie.
Which book or movie?

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I would suggest we go for a fusion -pulse type drive, which would be smoother; rather than dump h-bombs out the back and expect the shock absorbers to smooth the ride out, we should be looking at fusing tiny pellets of deuterium/He3 by laser almost continually, the pulses would be so short you could hardly feel them.
The pulsed fusion rocket is at the bottom of this page;
http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_rocket

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Orion may have been featured in fiction somewhere, but it was actually proposed in the 1950's as a serious spacecraft design. It would have been propelled by the explosion of nuclear devices, and could theoretically travel to the stars, although not at a very fast rate (but better than conventional fuels would do by far). It sounds like enough work was done to demonstrate that it actually would have been possible to build, but a treaty banning nuclear explosions in space prevented further work.

The movie was Deep Impact.

It's actually really simple and cheap. I mean, once you find anything that can stand up to a nuclear blast.

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Two books that I know of that have Orion type spacecraft are "Footfall" by Niven and Pournelle, and "Orion Shall Rise" (I can't remember the author).

The technology on that is just a bit far off, don't ya think?

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Contrary to the opinion of the press, the public, and their mothers, most scientists are dull and uninteresting people.
- James Watson

Poul Anderson. Interesting example of synchronicity--two novels dealing with Project Orion coming out at just about the same time.

In his book The Curve of Binding Energy John McPhee talked with Theodore Taylor about the original Orion concept (which was indeed aborted by, among other things, the test ban teaty). It was tested using conventional explosives and seemed to work quite well. There's an interesting little story in there about how they brought the idea to von Braun.

By the way, is that a GREAT title for a book, or what?

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Agreed. I'm interested in the Orion because we could build one today if we were so inclined. (We've got plenty of fuel available.)

You just have to convince people that nuk-yu-lar is not a dirty word.

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Project Orion, written by Freeman Dyson's son, is a great book that describes the effort to build the real Orion starship. Politics killed it, not technology.

Say, sol, he wouldn't have mentioned an estimated price tag for one of the ships in the book, would he?

Yeah, you know I always have to wonder where the energy to fire the laser is supposed to come from... I like the concept but it's hard to picture right now.

This is a good account of Orion, pro and con. Seems it might have been a little more difficult to pull off than the early proponents claimed.

http://www.alternatehistory.com/gate...ml#Performance[/url]

There is a big difference between that and a working prototype.

A nice image of Larry Niven's version here.

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