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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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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THis is a good site about nuclear technology in space: http://www.nuclearspace.com/

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I'd hazard a guess that it would cost about as much as the Apollo project did in the 60s. There are similar analogues; when apollo was started we had the required theoretical knowledge but lacked engineering know-how, and both projects would be on a similar scale. Building an orion drive would be a massive undertaking.


Also what stuff do we have that can survive a nuclear blast? I'm thinking not a lot.

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just need to find an unobtanium deposit somewhere, and we can get this thing built.

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What yield? Standoff, air burst, direct hit or digger? And do ya mean just one or a whole barrage of them?

Listen buddy, Hell I can set you up with something which will take on ten Tsar Bombs in a row... It's gona cost ya though.


(And by cost ya, I mean how many miles deep into ancient granite formations are you looking to go?)


;-)

I believe the project, as it now is on paper involves designing a rocket to go to the moon to harvest the massive titanium deposits on the moon and then take the back to earth to build the Orion spacecraft out of, so that it can be used to go to the moon....

Yeah... that's how stuff tends to work at Nasa

No.Just a carefuly build pusher plate made of some good metal.
The explosion will be pushing the plate and propel the ship.
Simple and effective, that is Orion, but also unecconomical and very heavy.
Use more brain than pessimism pls folks.

Crude cost estimates are in the declassified documents available for downloading from NASA's Technical Reports Server at http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp

Section 6 of "Nuclear Pulse Space Vehicle Study, Vol. 1 -- Summary" (1964) projected a development cost of about $2 Billion for the 10-meter version of the spacecraft.
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/ca...1965058729.pdf

It already exusts, it's called distance. The nuclear blasts would take place at a carefully calculated distance from the pusher plate, so that the released energy would ablate the plate surface, adding to the overall thrust in most designs.

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In the early, sixties, the U.S. actually started building an engine for a nuclear airplane - the idea was it could fly around with a bunch of warheads, ready to nuke any advisary at a moment's notice. I think the effort ended before the test ban; more a victim of sanity and the perfection of in-air refueling.

The prototype engine is on display near the Atomic Energy Museum in Arco, Idaho. So is the first breeder reactor, and the first reactor used to generate electricity.

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It's a big universe out there...is it really unwinding, really burning out?

Jerry, it also left a radioactive contrail which left it vulnerable to seeking weapons, among other drawbacks.

I recall the plate only needs to be three feet thick of iron.

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