Orion Starship

Orion Starship

Among Leonardo’s many interests and accomplishments – in painting, sculpture, anatomy, geology, natural history, military and civil engineering – he had a great passion: to devise and fabricate a machine that could fly. He drew pictures, constructed models, built full-size prototypes – and not one of them worked. No sufficiently powerful and lightweight engine then existed. The designs, however, were brilliant and encouraged the engineers of future times. Leonardo himself was depressed by these failures. But it was hardly his fault. He was trapped in the fifteenth century.

A similar case occurred in 1939 when a group of engineers calling themselves the British Interplanetary Society designed a ship to take people to the Moon – using 1939 technology. It was by no means identical to the design of the Apollo spacecraft which accomplished exactly this mission three decades later, but it suggested that a mission to the Moon might one day be a practical engineering possibility.

The star which is the closest to Earth. Photo: Elena

Today we have preliminary designs for ships to take people to the stars. None of these spacecraft is imagined to leave the Earth directly. Rather, they are constructed in Earth orbit from where they are launched on their long interstellar journeys. One of them was called Project Orion after the constellation, a reminder that the ship’s ultimate objective was the stars. Orion was designed to utilize explosions of hydrogen bombs, nuclear weapons, against an inertial plate, each explosion providing a kind of “putt-putt”, a vast nuclear motorboat in space. Orion seems entirely practical from an engineering point of view. By its very nature it would have produced vast quantities or radioactive debris, but for conscientious mission profiles only in the emptiness of interplanetary or interstellar space. Orion was under serious development in the United States until the signing of the international treaty that forbids the detonation of nuclear weapons in space. This seems to me a great pity.

The Orion star-ship is the best use of nuclear weapons I can think of. Image: © Elena