Closing Points to Consider

1. Tests in space would require conventional counter thrust engines to bring the tube back time and again for inspection. The explosion being tested is so huge that these counter thrust engines would be truly massive and have a dual application for a fast journey to Mars even if physical containment of nuclear fission proved allusive. Orion is thus a project for those wishing to see men on Mars.

2. Physical containment of fission in space has many comparisons with the physical containment of gunpowder, a revolutionary new reaction in its own century. The secrets of its making were shrouded in alchemy. However the Chinese failed to embark upon the path of physical containment and left it to European engineers to come up with the cannon. Thus the Orion project whilst a product of American minds may therefore always be the cannon to the Chinese, an impossible development. The path once begun upon led to the musket, rifle etc over many centuries of improvements. What we could do in space now in the way of physical containment may be only the primitive start of a very long development path.

3. The travelling of man to the stars may be the ultimate goal of Orion and any other project seeking to physically contain fission in space. However applying that objective, the control of massive thrust, to the old sci-fi concept of a “sky hook” brings it an essential new dimension. Effectively huge quantities of payload could be pulled into space, whereas at the moment everything put into space is pushed there. If the tube for containing fission weighed 200 tonnes, then it might pull into space 10,000 tonnes of equipment with each operation. This makes the hull construction of a massive interstellar ship a more realistic possibility.

Closing Points to Consider continued

4. The main error in project Orion and others like it (e.g. British Daedalus project) is to conceptualize a smaller than average nuclear explosion. Further concessions are then often made such as avoiding the emphasis on physical containment. Cranky concepts appear such as detonation being made harmlessly behind a plate and catching the wave! Critical mass dictates an explosion cannot occur at smaller levels. The fact that we could argue endlessly about this fact is one excellent reminder of the nature of alchemy that surrounds us like the one that surrounded gunpowder before the cannon was successfully engineered. Observation of the development path from cannon to rifle should encourage us to accept the challenge is physical containment in a tube or a cannon and not force fields, plasma or magnetic fields. The first gunpowder cannon were made in many pieces and would have to be done again. After ACCTOPE is working, construction of the second and subsequent cannons are done on earth in single, complete pieces and pulled into space.
 

5. In an atomic age, is our planet, like “any planet anywhere”, safe when saddled with enough bombs to destroy it many times over? If the bombs have a use in space for propulsion, is that not a natural and evolutionary theory for non use on the planet surface? Since the end of the MAD doctrine, do we really have any solid theories for non use? If on our planet we believe the light speed barrier to be a limit, does this weaken the natural evolutionary theory of non use? Some planets may never have had a flat earth theory because their arrangements of the continents made circumnavigation a foregone conclusion. As we did have a flat earth theory historical period, have we succumbed to the light speed limit theory with more readiness on the basis of lightening doesn’t strike twice? Are we doomed as a planet, imperfect because continental drift left the shame of the flat earth theory for us to repeat all over again as we looked into space in the age of Einstein?