To the stars by atom bomb:
The incredible tale of the top secret Orion Project
Imagine it's July 20, 1969 and no one is paying much attention as Neil Armstrong sets foot on the Moon, because all eyes are on the first manned mission to reach Saturn. That may sound absurd, but while NASA was figuring out how to use rockets to reach the Moon, a super secret US government project was developing a gigantic reusable spaceship powered by atom bomb explosions that was designed to carry a crew of 20 to the outer Solar System by 1970 as a first step to the stars. New Atlas looks at the story behind the original Orion Project.
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Now picture a spacecraft 200 ft (60 m) tall, weighing around 4,000 ton, and capable of lofting 1,600 ton into LEO along with a crew of eight living in quarters more like that of a small submarine than a cramped capsule.
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This monstrous craft was designed as a multi-mission platform. The idea was to go to Mars in 1965, then to Saturn in 1970 with a stopover on Mars along the way. And how would it do this? By dropping atomic bombs out the stern and riding the blast waves.
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So serious was this commitment that from 1957 to 1965, Washington spent US$10.5 million (US$85 million in today's money) on the idea, with many of the same minds behind the Manhattan Project turning their expertise from creating weapons of war to developing a means of space travel. The project was so advanced that much of the work is still classified half a century later.
Read more at http://newatlas.com/orion-project-atom-bomb-spaceship/49454/.
