The Forgotten Space Race
A couple of flash games are taking up far too much of my time at the moment: Zookeeper and Weboggle.
Other than that, I’ve just started reading Project Orion, which is the true account of a group of serious scientists who, funded by the US government, worked from 1957 to 1964 to design a spaceship powered by Nuclear pulse propulsion. This is rather more dramatic than it might sound. Some of the details are still classified, but essentially the idea was to take 4000 tons of ship, carrying perhaps 50 people, and propel it around the solar system using nuclear explosions. It was to have carried thousands of atomic bombs to be fired out the back of the ship and detonated, and the force of the explosions on the back of the ship would have thrust it forwards. The crew would have been shielded from radiation by a massive “pusher plate” mounted on shock absorbers at the rear of the spacecraft. Apparently, the technology to build such a ship is probably available today. Please God, nobody tell George Bush!
The book is written by George Dyson, the son of Freeman Dyson who was one of the main scientists working on the project. On the cover there is a comment by Arthur C. Clarke:
One of the most awesome might-have-beens (and might-yet-bes!) of the Space Age.
September 9th, 2004 at 08:04
This reminds me of an episode of ‘Star Trek : The Next Generation’ which featured a ‘Dyson Sphere’. Apparently the brainchild of Freeman Dyson. It is a spherical spaceship of planetary proportions in which the inhabitants would live on the inner surface, exposed to an artificial atmosphere.