Simplified Loading Mechanism

There was much focus during the original Orion project on the loading mechanism for the explosions. However those technical issues are greatly simplified once it is design with physical containment objectives.

 Consider it perhaps as rather like one of the very first cannons in the era of castles, the "mix" can simply be stuffed into "the tube and pusher plate" or horse-shoe ring cannon using a ram-road. To worry about the issue of sequencing and hence release/activation methods is to jump way ahead of the fundamental issue/challenge. Just like the Chinese when first bundling a load of gunpowder into an early design cannon, is it going to stay together or shatter into a thousand pieces? This is the core issue: physical containment. I do not believe any system or design that attempts to side-step this major challenge will ever work. A millennium of gunsmiths still face this core issue with any design as pertinent today as it was 1,000 years ago. If I make design adjustments is it still safe to fire the thing or will the gun-barrel shatter and expose me to great danger?

I am sure there are going to be hundreds of variations in sequencing. What is however needed is the material scientists that can propose what the actual cannon should be made of, how thick it would be and bearing in mind the payload launch limitations how it could be welded, screwed or ring locked together. To begin with you can simply stuff the mix to the back of the cannon with a ramrod and have a couple of wires protruding to control detonation. Hopefully as you can see from my diagram above the design is simple but because of the shield it would effectively allow bamboo to be tested. However the price of testing bamboo would be a total failure of physical containment and the potential loss of billions of dollars of orbiting satellites. The pilot would however be safe behind his shield. Hopefully however the very first test will be a successful 100% physical containment. Yet because the conditions of space can never be 100% duplicated on earth (you may try to create the vacuum but certainly cannot reproduce the zero gravity in a meaningful way) such a first test in space will be fundamentally leap into the unknown. That is why the pilot is there hopefully with enough skill and control to bring back the tube and pusher plate along with his craft for inspection. Of course if physical containment is 100% successful the pilot will be thrust back at great distance and some speed away from his earth orbit.

While that may be a thrilling ride for the pilot, his reverse chemical engines to get him back into an earth orbit are going to be truly massive. So large in fact that re-filling them for the next test and the next will consume vast resources. Hence if all goes wrong and the attempts as physical containment do not succeed, at very least these refillable, orbiting reverse thrust engines can be detached and donated to a manned Mars mission. Their very size, perhaps not indicated on the diagram as it is not drawn to scale, would propel a manned Mars mission as speeds quicker than ever envisioned at the moment. This is no secret, it is simply that the scale of investment required to build such large orbiting chemical engines to reach Mars is not justifiable in terms of the economic benefits obtainable from reaching the Red planet. Taxpayers are not scientists and they are not going to willingly invest trillions of dollars for a few hand-picked rock samples. The Orion test, as I envision it, would however justifies such a large investment in orbiting re-fuel able chemical rockets on the basis that EPPP travel would be conducive to long term speed trials that may or may not open the way to ex-solar exploration and the potential profits foreseen. Such profits only exist when a similar "earth" like planet can be brought into a resource trading arrangement. While that is never going to be a guaranteed outcome of such investment, to deny the potential of such windfall profits for whatever reasons, scientific or philosophical, is to prohibit the political will to attempt such experimentation.

Simplified Loading Mechanism continued

We are thus left in the unfortunate global predicament of the nuclear capability to destroy ourselves three times over, waiting for a supposed scientific breakthrough to allow us to travel to the stars. Virtually all physicists who understand enough about the explosions I and other Orioneers would say to be enough to make us travel in the right direction are "theologically" wedded to the Einstein theory of a light speed barrier. This catch22 if maintained will condemn us never to attempt the Orion experiment simply out of crude economic reasoning. In that I am sure and hence our future lies in the hands of the politicians ad infinitum to avoid serious global, and by reasoning of previous global conflicts, unrestrained nuclear war. This virtuosity must be retained indefinitely until the scientists "come up" with an invention to provide our escape from our confinement. Unfortunately it is the theology of the physicists that have placed us in the situation where escaping from our confinement on earth becomes the surest and realistic long term path for the survival of human civilisation, but out of our reach with current technology. I do not believe this new invention, implicitly longed for in such programs as Star Trek (a cultural reflection that man's historical capacity for unrestrained warfare must push us on to the stars); will ever arise because it has already been invented. Already invented by the man most closely associated with the theological limitation of its application: the light speed barrier. You know who I am talking about!

Hence I believe that if Orion cannot hope to reach the stars (and Arthur C Clarke was brave enough to hope so in the BBC documentary on Orion) I am afraid it is a non starter, in my books as an economist. I don't care if Governments have to dress it up as a project to reach Saturn and then to conduct casual speed tests, the business investment required will be met when those windfall profits can be promised. Unfortunately the gods on this topic, the physicists, are unlikely to go against the Einstein model as Socialists are to abandon communism/Keynesianism in favour of the free markets. Repeat F=MA five hundred times. Oops now I am a classical physicist. I hope you realize that our current global economic system of free markets is running under the classical economics new theory introduced in 1979? So even if you are unclear as to what we economists were abandoning to return to the classical view of economic science, I am sure you can appreciate that the same return to classical views on light speed barriers would invoke the Newtonian principle of F=MA. That there is none. My own view is that there is a relativity effect but that it does not apply equally across relevant masses. What applies for a molecule at CERN does not apply to a million tonne spaceship. Its relativity curve might well be suggested to diminish to a zero point between C SQUARED and C TO THE POWER OF C. The effects of energy loss up to the light barrier might therefore be almost negligible for such a large relevant mass.