The Golden Age of Atomic Power in Space
Just at that point we began thinking about coupling nuclear energy to space. Ted was already bored with TRIGA, and I was getting bored with it, too. It was about the spring of 1958 that we started talking to Freddie (Frederich de Hoffman, General Atomic's director) about building rockets with bombs. At that time, nothing was too far out for General Atomic. Anyway, I met with Marshall Rosenbluth and Ted Taylor and others. They made some calculations, and the whole thing was very loose-jointed.
LW: How did the Orion name come about?
Dunne: The basic idea was "man in the heavens". Marshall Rosenbluth proposed that we spell it "O'Ryan" so that no one would know what it was, and they could keep the security a little better.
Taylor's first idea was that the spaceship would be doughnut-shaped, and it would have this diaphragm covering the doughnut, looking a little bit like one of those frisbees. I remember the picture she drew on the board. You shot the bombs out of the doughnut part to the point of detonation and the membrane would catch the blast. He asked me to put together some notions about what could be done in the way of experiments. I did this, drawing on some work that had been done earlier at Los Alamos. They had devised a method for producing a toroidal implosion with a high-explosive charge, and it made a jet of tremendous energy and velocity. With a plastic liner, that would be a good way of producing a jet of CH2 as a propellant.
LW: Something with low molecular weight?
Dunne: That's right, and so this was embodied in the first proposal that was put in to ARPA. ARPA had been founded just before that, and they were really looking for something far out. It was the Advanced Research Projects Agency, that was its title and its charter. Taylor was a marvelous salesman. He went in and came out with a million dollars, just like that.
Meanwhile, I went over to Europe to do this previous stint, and I told him that as soon as I finished over there that I would come back and work on Orion, which I did. And he asked me to run the experimental effort.
So we started at this Point Loma facility which the Navy was kind enough to give us the use of. There were big bunkers down there, this Atlas test tower. So we
Latest Articles