Why not turn the mind breaking energy of nuclear bombs to making the kind of absurdly huge spaceships Galactic Empires favour a reality?
This kind of size. Although less pointy. Image courtesy of ComicVine |
In the 1950's a bunch of the engineers, who worked on American nukes, developed project Orion. Orion was a plan for .... frankly, quite insanely huge.... spaceships. Spaceships propelled by, essentially, throwing nukes out the back one at a time and setting them off.
"Satellite" Orion | "Midrange" Orion | "Super" Orion | |
---|---|---|---|
Ship diameter | 17–20 m | 40 m | 400 m |
Ship mass | 300 t | 1000–2000 t | 8,000,000 t |
Number of bombs | 540 | 1080 | 1080 |
Individual bomb mass | 0.22 t | 0.37–0.75 t | 3000 t |
Above: A table I've shamelessly cribbed from wikipedia, showing the sizes of three different classes of Orion space ship. Note the number of zeros - that's not a typo. You could carry a small town into space with one of these things.
And, as far as we can tell, it probably would have worked. Two things closed the project down: The nuclear test ban treaty, and one important piece of technology never happening - a fallout free nuke. Without that even starting these bad boys up in orbit would have increased cancers worldwide.
There're still people interested in the general idea today - as I said, it's very possible it could have been made to work. The original engineers even built a miniature Orion that used high explosive instead of nukes:
For bit more detail, here's the son of one of the engineers that worked on it:
Above: An artists impression of the inside of an O'Neill colony. |
Above: An artists impression of an Asteroid city, by JustV23 |
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