In 1957, tail fins, not seat belts, were standard equipment on American cars. Tail fins reached a peak in popularity with the 1957 Chevrolet Bel-Air. Powered by a 235-cubic-inch straight six or a 283-cubic-inch V-8, with either manual overdrive or powerglide automatic transmission, the Bel-Air had a two-tone exterior, accented by anodized aluminum suggesting space-age Los Angeles rather than iron-age Detroit. Optional equipment, besides seat belts, included power windows, six-way power seats, and a built-in electric razor. The Russians were ahead in space, but General Motors was ahead on the road.
This book is the story of Project Orion. In 1957, a small group of scientists, led by physicist Theodore B. Taylor and including my father, Freeman J. Dyson, launched a serious attempt to build an interplanetary spaceship propelled by nuclear bombs. This account, as best as I can reconstruct it, is the story my father could tell me only in fragments at the time.
Orion was a sibling of both Sputnik and the Chevrolet Bel-Air. When my father joined Project Orion, he was driving a 1949 Ford. After a year in La Jolla, California, it was time to give up the Ford. "Our poor old car finally gave up the ghost," he reported in his weekly letter home. "So on Friday night we took the old car out for its last run. We went to a big car-dealer in San Diego. We looked at a lot of cars, drove three, and finally bought a 2-year-old Chevrolet at 9 P.M." A turquoise and white 1957 Bel-Air. [1]
To a five-year-old from New Jersey, La Jolla (the jewel) was paradise found. General Atomic, the project's contractor, provided a house with a swimming pool and citrus orchard, draped in bougainvillea and overlooking the Pacific Ocean, which we scanned at sunset for the green flash. Winter swells broke over the reef at Windansea, where a surfing culture as tenacious as the inshore kelp beds had taken hold. Theodore Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, visited our three-room schoolhouse at La Jolla Cove. Abalone big enough to resist a tire iron could be gathered at low tide. My father and later my thirteen-year-old sister Katarina joined the local glider club and spent Saturdays trying to stay aloft in a fabric-covered sailplane winched into the updrafts above the cliffs at Torrey Pines. Jack Kerouac published On the Road.
The tail fins on the Chevrolet matched those on the Atlas intercontinental ballistic missiles that Convair Astronautics, a branch of the same corporate family as General Atomic, was building at a new $40 million facility four miles inland. In July of 1958 Convair held an open house, providing free hot dogs and the hourly flight of a model ICBM, which, the local paper announced, "will emit a trail of smoke and will complete its trip with a big red flash, simulating the detonation of a warhead." Real Atlas missiles, with a range of 5,000 miles, carried thermonuclear warheads yielding one hundred Hiroshimas each. The delivery of hydrogen bombs to civilian targets was celebrated with an open house, while Orion, a spaceship that would use bombs to deliver civilians to Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, was so encumbered by secrecy that until July of 1958 even the existence of the project remained publicly unknown.[2]
Much of the record of Project Orion is still classified "Secret—Restricted Data" even though most of what kept the project secret in 1958 is now in the open, except for a few specific technical details. Any danger of Project Orion literature being used for destructive purposes is outweighed by the possibility that knowledge of Orion may be useful in ways that we cannot now predict or understand. Eventually, we will outgrow the use of nuclear energy as a weapon. Project Orion is a monument to those who once believed, or still believe, in turning the power of these weapons into something else.
All the people I visited or revisited in gathering this account believe they contributed to a dream that was nonetheless important for having failed. The years they spent working on Orion were the most exciting of their lives. Would they do it again? Definitely yes. Should we do it now? Probably not.
"We had a wonderfully free time, before any of that fallout stuff came down," says Orion's lead experimentalist, Brian Dunne. "It was a crazy era. All of our values were tweaked because of the cold war. It was a closed society, and all kinds of strange ideas were able to grow."