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Epilogue
The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in the cradle forever.
If we can get to Mars, we can go anywhere.
In his lecture “Mankind in the Universe,” given before the German and Austrian Physical Societies in Salzburg in 1969, American theoretical physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson marked the beginning of the Space Age as June 5, 1927, when “nine men meeting in a restaurant in Breslau [now Wroclaw, Poland] founded Verein für Raumschiffahrt” (VFR), the Association for Space Navigation. The VFR was a private upstart without government funding that for six years “carried through the basic engineering development of liquid-fueled rockets.” Hitler shut it down, but as Dyson sees it, the VFR stands as the “first romantic age in the history of spaceflight.”
Then in 1958, another grassroots organization, this time in the United States, formed around a theoretical physicist named Ted Taylor, who wanted to build a spacecraft powered by nuclear explosions. Dyson, one of the key members of the team, stated in his 1969 lecture that the organization had the spirit of the VFR in mind, and they began with three principles:
1. The conventional von Braun approach to space travel using chemical rockets would soon run into a dead end, since manned flights going farther than the moon would become absurdly expensive.
2. The key to interplanetary flight must be to use nuclear fuel, which carries in each kilogram a million times as much energy as chemical fuel.
3. A small group of people with daring and imagination could design a nuclear spaceship that would be both cheaper and enormously more capable than the best chemical rocket.
The group called itself Project Orion. “We felt from the beginning,” Dyson said, “that space travel must become cheap before it can have a liberating influence on human affairs.” In Project Orion, Dyson saw a better use of the world’s stockpiles of nuclear weapons: “We have for the first time imagined a way to use the huge stockpiles of our bombs for better purpose than for murdering people. My purpose, and my belief, is that the bombs which killed and maimed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki shall one day open the skies to man.”
Ted Taylor, whose story is the subject of John McPhee’s 1973 book The Curve of Binding Energy, called the H-bomb the worst invention ever but also the most interesting. He was attracted to extremes in physics, and nuclear explosions are about as extreme as it gets. Space exploration and science go side by side with the bomb and its delivery system, the missile, with one key difference: while highly competitive, space exploration and science also encourage cooperation among nations, as opposed to conflict, to achieve goals. Turner saw an opportunity to transform humankind’s most destructive power into one of its most constructive. Dyson agreed wholeheartedly, suggesting that Project Orion was “not only a scientific instrument but an imperative for the future of the world,” writes McPhee. While one danger of possessing the awesome power of nuclear weapons was using them against each other, Dyson also identified another danger fundamental to the human species. “He saw the human race running out of frontiers,” McPhee writes, “and he considered frontiers essential to the human psyche, for without them pressures would build that would implode upon the race and destroy it.” Space—that final frontier—Dyson was saying, might save us from ourselves.
Taylor’s vision was a spaceship containing two thousand nuclear bombs that dispensed through a hole one at a time and exploded beneath the ship, propelling it upward. Building the bombs was the easy part. In order to learn how to deploy them, Project Orion consulted with Coca-Cola to understand their coin-operated Coke dispensing machines. The bottom of the spacecraft had to be constructed of something that could take multiple nuclear blasts. Taylor considered steel, copper, aluminum, and wood. The team resolved that some kind of fiberglass might work best. The bombs would be of increasingly higher yield, pushing the ship upward out of the Earth’s atmosphere, until the fiftieth bomb, which, “at twenty kilotons,” writes McPhee, “would be of the force that destroyed Nagasaki.” Such immense power (unachievable using liquid-or solid-fueled rockets) could lift a payload of a thousand tons into orbit and then beyond. The team imagined a spaceship shaped like a bullet about the size of a ten-story building with all the amenities of a cruise ship inside: state rooms, exercise and recreation rooms, a restaurant with an observation deck, a level devoted to gardens and food animals. The ship would launch from Jackass Flats, Nevada, or possibly from a barge at sea, and it would be, Taylor told McPhee, “the most sensational thing anyone ever saw.” With Orion, the team determined, human beings would land on Mars by 1965 and travel to Saturn by 1970.
In 1961 Taylor traveled to Huntsville, Alabama, and presented his idea to Werner von Braun, who became its powerful proponent. A believer in the necessity of a voyage to Mars, von Braun had written a book on the subject more than ten years earlier, Das Marsprojekt, which was later translated into English as The Mars Project. It is, writes Stephen Petranek in How We’ll Live on Mars, “a work of extraordinary foresight and sheer engineering genius.”