On Sat, Sep 20, 2025 at 02:55:20PM -0400, John Clark wrote: > *Just a few hours ago very a interesting documentary about project Orion > was posted on YouTube: * > > *Earth to Mars in 10 Days* > <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVwlTsa9oMM&t=1459s> > > *I've been fascinated by this idea for years, back in 1998 I posted the > following to the old Extropian list, the video contains some details that I > didn't know then because they were still classified top-secret in 1998:* > *===*
There was also Project Daedalus [1]. Yeah, I believe I have read about them both while still very young, maybe in middle 1980-ties? Not too many details, but enough to fire up imagination. [...] > *Yes, there is a catch, Project Orion needed nuclear energy, even worse it > needed nuclear bombs. The Orion spacecraft would contain 2000 nuclear > bombs, most in the 20 kiloton range, the size of the bomb that destroyed > Nagasaki. A bomb in a tank of water would shoot out the back of the ship, > when it was 100 feet away it would explode, the water would hit a carefully > designed 75 ton pusher plate and accelerate the ship. Between the pusher > plate and the ship were 50 foot long gas filled shock absorbers to even out > the jerk. They wanted everything to be as cheap as possible, so they asked > the Coca-Cola company for the blueprints of one of their vending machines, > then they scaled it up a little and planned to use it as the mechanism to > dispense the bombs.* Nuke dispenser made from scaled up coke dispenser. Uh-hum. Okay. [...] > *Orion wasn't the only thing Taylor was interested in, he found a way to > make a new type of nuclear bomb, one that would produce a highly > directional blast. He designed a little one kiloton bomb that could blast a > 1000 foot tunnel straight through solid rock, he wanted to build a cheap > tunnel between New York and San Francisco and have a supersonic subway 3000 > miles long. * They were so cavalier about using atomic power... -- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Daedalus -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:[email protected] ** -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/aM/bxPuU9lYevP9U%40tau1.ceti.pl.
