10

Columbus

"We shall know what we go to Mars for, only after we get there," wrote Freeman Dyson in May of 1958. "You might as well ask Columbus why he wasted his time discovering America when he could have been improving the methods of Spanish sheep-farming. It is lucky that the U.S. government like Queen Isabella is willing to pay for the ships."[120]

Officially, Project Orion was a feasibility study. No development allowed. Even building the 1-meter flying model was outside the scope of ARPA's contract and was initially paid for out of General Atomic's $50,200 "overhead," not directly from ARPA funds. Among Orion's True Believers, however, the question was not if the ship would fly, but when. Ted Taylor's official title was technical director and chief scientist. Unofficially, he was the leader of an expedition and began assembling his crew. "A lot of personal focus went on at General Atomic, on being a member of the crew of Orion, and on spending the next fifteen or twenty years walking on Ganymede," he remembers. "I didn't care about the ship, I was much more interested in what was out there, in poking around. It didn't matter what we built, as long as it would get us there."

"He wanted to make this a comfortable ship on which people could really live," Harris Mayer explains. "And with four thousand tons, which would have nearly a thousand tons payload, you could do all these things. It was the difference between something so stringent, like in the space program, a little capsule and no space to move, compared to a yacht. Orion was a big heavy thing, and used conventional engineering. This means steel, no fancy materials, and really no restrictions on the weight of things. And little by little it began to be, 'Now, let's do the engineering on it.' Ted Taylor's idea was low technology—make it out of standard parts. A grand concept, absolutely, but essentially no new technology."

Freeman's imagination was captured by Ted's determination to go into space quickly, comfortably, and large scale. "He is such a modest and ordinary-looking young man, it is hard to believe when I am chatting with him that this is the Columbus of the new age," Freeman wrote to his parents in June 1958, when the ARPA contract was first announced. "On Friday night I went around to their house with a bottle of good cognac, and the three of us, Ted and his wife Caro and I, looked at Jupiter and Saturn through Ted's 6-inch telescope. The seeing was good, and we drank to the moons of Jupiter, to our children, and to the success of our enterprise."[121]

"I remember lying on picnic tables at our house in La Jolla, with Freeman, looking up in the sky, and he knew what everything was," says Ted. "The sense of being out there, physically, big time, not all huddled together in a little capsule, was unbearably exciting. You just couldn't stay sitting down when you start really thinking hard about that." Ted hoped to take some of his four children along. "What would I as father do about the family if I went off for three years?" he asks "Quite often the expectation was that some of them would be on board." Freeman assumed he would be leaving his own children on the ground. "It was always a question, what about the family," he says. "You'd be leaving them behind for five years or so. That was a little bit of a problem. But at that time I was young and irresponsible so I didn't think that would be a fatal flaw."[122]

Ted and Freeman saw Orion as a first step toward a space-faring society that would someday produce children on board. "One thing that always had a way of drifting in when we were talking about what it would be like when there were dozens of Orions flying about all over the place," remembers Ted, "was the whole matter of, in a big vehicle, where one wasn't at all cramped, what would lovemaking be like?" The ship's designers imagined a room shaped like a chambered nautilus, where the period of oscillation in zero-g could be varied by moving around. "The physical layout of the bedroom, if you want to call it that, was really interesting to think about," says Ted. "What can you do that you can't do on the ground? A whole lot of things. You would move around in a padded room which could be shaped like a snail or a funnel so that the timing of any emotionally charged contact could be slow and easy if you were in the big part, you could just push off gently from the wall, or you could get more and more high frequency."

A million dollars went a long way in 1958. General Atomic's support staff' and infrastructure were already paid for on General Dynamics' account. Some of ARPA's money went into technical design and engineering, some went into computer time and experimental tests, but much of it went directly to people who were paid to think. Outside consultants were paid $50 to $200 per day. A senior design engineer was paid $16,000 a year. Many of the Orion team bought houses in Del Mar or Solana Beach, where beachfront living was inexpensive and within twenty minutes' drive from Torrey Pines. A two-bedroom house could be purchased even in La Jolla for $15,000, and $45,000 would buy a three-bedroom, 2.5-bath house on a half-acre lot on La Jolla Farms Road, above Black's Beach. Ted purchased an acre on top of Muirlands Drive, overlooking La Jolla, for $10,000, planning to build a house, but, when he left for the Pentagon in 1964, he sold it for $15,000 instead. Renting a car in San Diego cost $9 per day. A General Electric Low-boy black-and-white television cost $199. An IBM 704 computer with 16,000 words of core memory cost $205 per hour—more than one of its programmers earned in a week.

Project Orion was well under way before the first dollar of ARPA's money was spent. In October 1957, with Sputnik overhead, Ted spoke with Freddy de Hoffmann, who authorized spending whatever time and General Atomic resources were necessary to move the idea along. It was de Hoffmann who went to Princeton to recruit Freeman, the subject being too secret to discuss by mail or phone. "He came here and he said, 'Look, you've got to come to GA,' " says Freeman. "I said no, I have no intention of coming to GA, I've done my bit for GA. And he said no, you must come, we have something much bigger and much more exciting, and then he told me Ted had this wonderful scheme for getting around the solar system with bombs."

Charles Loomis, a mathematical physicist from Los Alamos, helped to germinate Ted's plan. "I was up all night and then I got alarmed that things were getting big," says Ted. "Energy divided by volume is giving pressure, so the pressures were out of sight, unless it was very big. It got easier as it got bigger. I was thinking of something that might carry a couple people, with shock absorbers. I went in to General Atomic the next morning and my office was right next to Chuck Loomis who had come down from Los Alamos to work on bombs, and I told him about the sense of discouragement because it was so big. And he said, 'Well, think big! If it isn't big, it's the wrong concept. What's wrong with it being big?' In less than thirty seconds everything flipped. It was Chuck's call that if you were serious about exploring the solar system, why not use something the size of the Queen Mary? He understood that bombs could in principle do it. They could lift downtown Chicago into orbit."

The next person brought on board was Marshall Rosenbluth, a Los Alamos colleague of Ted's who had been hired by de Hoffmann in 1956. A plasma physicist who had played a key role in the development of the hydrogen bomb, he was well equipped to evaluate Ted's scheme. Orion's feasibility depended on how much pusher plate would be ablated with each shot. Ted had seen the effects of nuclear explosions, but to go any further with the idea required more than an intuitive guess. "This question about ablation, how thick a layer you would actually wind up with, I couldn't calculate, I didn't know how," says Ted. "I talked to Marshall, and he said, 'Well, I can model that.' Which he did right away, making sense out of those experiments where people picked up things that had been exposed to twenty kilotons twenty feet away. The order of magnitude of the ablated thickness of the pusher plate, whether it was a conducting material or not, was a few thousandths of an inch. And Marshall's stamp of approval in that was enormously important." Rosenbluth had worked on two similar problems. "I was quite familiar with this," he says, "both from the reentry-vehicle nose cone work people had been doing and also from looking at what happens when the radiation hits the cases of bombs."

Multiple-Orion Mars exploration mission: two 4,000-ton Orion ships (not to scale) remain in Mars orbit in the background; the payload compartment of a third ship, separated from its propulsion module, has been landed to serve as a surface base.

Rosenbluth then produced, as he describes it, some "real quick and dirty calculations, the way a physicist would do the problem" concerning the capabilities of shock absorbers, and whether a bomb-driven ship would be stable in flight. "Far from whether you could really engineer it," he adds, "I could have proven it was utterly impossible, but it came out that it was possible, but you would have to avoid goofs like the bomb that didn't go off or unbalanced shock absorbers and things like that." He saw that the worst thing for Orion, worse than a complete dud, might be a bomb whose high explosive detonated without the bomb going nuclear, throwing shrapnel rather than plasma at the ship.

"That remains a very serious question," says Ted. "What do you do? The answer we used to give was, 'We'll make damn sure they all go off.' Well, how do you do that if you are going to fire four thousand of them? Marshall wrote that one up, brought that question up enough so that in his mind it may have been a showstopper—the kind of thing that could have killed the project if left unresolved. It's peculiar that our biggest problem was if we didn't get an explosion."

Rosenbluth was listed as Ted's coauthor on the report that formed the basis of the proposal to ARPA, and he accompanied Ted, de Hoffmann, and Creutz to Washington to begin, as Ted remembers it, "the first probing as to what some of the fancy people in Washington thought about this." Roy Johnson, the new head of ARPA, responded, according to Ted, by saying that "people have been coming in here over and over and over again and telling me about the gigantic things required to put a small payload in orbit, and you're coming in here and saying you are going to put an honest to God spaceship up there."

"Marshall Rosenbluth had already done most of the theory," says Freeman of his visit to La Jolla over New Year's 1958. "So 1 spent a week or so, hearing what Ted and Marshall had done. Marshall would find out something and explain it to me and then it would take me a week to understand why he had done it right. He was amazingly quick. The basic theory was already done—essentially just calculating how much stuff would get ablated from the surface, that was the only real uncertainty. The rest of it was just mechanics."

For the first six months of the project, until the ARPA contract was announced, most of the work was done by Ted, Marshall Rosenbluth, Chuck Loomis, Burt Freeman, and other individuals already at General Atomic, supplemented by consulting agreements with people like Freeman Dyson, who visited regularly, and others who were consulted once or twice. The list of consultants included many notables in physics: Hans Bethe, Stan Ulam, Richard Courant, Harris Mayer, Wallace Birnbaum, Thomas Gold, Willem Malkus, Ken Watson, Murray Gell-Mann, Robert Christy, Keith Brueckner, Hans Liepmann, Arthur Kantrowitz, and more. Richard Feynman came down to General Atomic but declined the invitation to sign on. He called Orion "the pie in the sky." He did not believe the idea was technically impossible, he just did not wish to have anything more to do with secret projects or nuclear bombs. "Feynman was determined after Los Alamos never to do anything like that again," says Freeman. "He got too addicted when he was at Los Alamos and didn't want to be involved."

"This summer we shall be running around cajoling all the best people we can think of to come and work with us," Freeman reported at the end of April 1858, after accepting Ted's invitation to move to La Jolla and work for the project full time. "Money is no object. You cannot get people to drop everything, leave their jobs and move house, without giving them some idea of what it is you want them to do. For this reason we asked the government to allow us to make public the existence and general purpose of our project."[123] It then became possible to recruit openly and the crew began to expand. On July 3, 1958, Freeman sent a one-line telegram to H. Pierre Noyes at the CERN High Energy Physical Conference in Geneva:

SPACE SHIP PROJECT OFFICIALLY BEGUN. JOB WAITING FOR YOU.
DYSON.

Noyes was a physicist, then at Livermore, who had met Freeman through Hans Bethe and Rudolf Peierls during Freeman's two years at the University of Birmingham. Enthusiastic about space, Noyes had made a bet—for two bottles of scotch—with Brian Flowers, Her Majesty's advisor for atomic energy, that there would be a man on the moon by 1970. "When Flowers heard I was going to work on Orion," says Noyes, "he said, 'That's dirty pool. That wasn't included in the bet.' "

"Your bet with Flowers is quite safe," Freeman had assured Noyes in a letter from La Jolla shortly before the contract with ARPA was announced. "About what we are intending to do I cannot of course tell you anything. All I can say is, everything else in this field will be children's toys when we are finished. If no unforeseen breakthrough occurs, I think 1970 should see us on one of the satellites of Saturn. I would be surprised if the Russians are not several years ahead of us."[124] It was never determined whether landing on one of the moons of Saturn would have allowed Pierre Noyes to collect on the scotch.

Keith Brueckner, who had already done some consulting on the project, was at the Geneva conference and was able to give Noyes a few more hints about what was up. "I knew that it would involve nuclear explosives," says Noyes. "But I didn't have a clue until I arrived how they were planning to use them. And then as soon as Freeman and Ted told me about throwing stuff at a pusher plate and having a shock absorber, I understood it. And then I started to think about what the problems would be."

Orion featured an international cast. Stan Ulam was Polish; de Hoffmann was Austrian; Michael Treshow, Danish; Dennis ver Planck, Dutch; Jaromir Astl, Czech; Carlo Riparbelli, Italian; Ed Day, German-Scot; Ta Li, Chinese; Thomas Macken, British; Hans Amtmann, German. Constant David, who did endless shock absorber experiments and wrote a huge number of technical reports, was French. "There was some talk in the offices at General Atomic about the liberating aspects of being out there, and the solution of international tensions," remembers Ted. "I always dreamed a lot about a Star Trek-like crew."

The initial rate of progress suggested the ship might soon fly. "That was the best working environment and best working conditions that I have experienced in my life," remembers Jerry Astl. "And that's why we achieved what we did, because nobody worried whether it was your sphere or not, if you knew you could help you did help. Nobody worried about punching the clock. There was free exchange of information and opinions. And I believe that is what is necessary to formulate everybody's mind and push it forward. If you can bring together high theoreticians and men with practical experience and ability to create, and if you can get them to work together, like brothers, then you have something."

Most of the crew had worked on large, ambitious projects during and after the recent war. Besides the experience gained in the development of nuclear weapons, Orion benefited from the general wartime tradition of get the job done, fast. For the first year, almost everything went right. "I can't emphasize enough the fun we had in '58 and "59," says Bill Vulliet. Most of the problems were minor complications arising from trying to reconcile the speed at which Orion was progressing with the slow pace of bureaucracy at the AEC and the Department of Defense. When the first twelve months were up, it turned out there was still money left—so the contract had to be extended for an extra month. "About the worst news you can give the source of the funds is that you've got money left over," says Ted. "We did not feel strapped for money that first year. It just didn't cost all that much."

Payload restrictions were also no obstacle. In 1958 and 1959, a crew cut was part of the uniform, both among the Air Force officers from Albuquerque and among the engineers and technicians at General Atomic. "I wanted to just be an ordinary member of the crew," says Ted. "I had a lot of fun making tallies of payload, and one thing I always saw to it that was on there, in scorn for the cost of payload weight, was an old-fashioned two-ton barber's chair." Some of Ted's more serious thoughts about "Uses of Large Payloads" were recorded on two handwritten pages of notes as follows: "Solar power... Electrical power beamed to earth by microwave... Visible light beamed to earth by mirrors... Local weather control... Deuteron accelerator... Solar powered orbital computers, information storage banks... Arbitrarily big communications system, ultra-many channel relay stations, house-to-house TV, coded conference linkups, etc., huge influence on education... Bomb power, BATS & MICE on moon or asteroid... Space exploration, Astronomy, Dyson's parallax measurement."[125]

Dyson began to think about really large payloads. One of his ideas became known as Project Deluge, a plan for bringing water to Mars. "There was an old science-fiction novel with the title Wasser fuer den Mars with the theme of crashing a big ice comet into Mars," he explains. "We had talked of using Orion to do this on a more modest scale, bringing water from Enceladus to Mars." Such thinking was encouraged, as was the assumption that those working on Orion would be among those going along. "The importance of the large space ship is, of course, that it will be manned," wrote Bryce DeWitt, in The Scientific Uses of Large Space Ships, which catalogued the ideas of the General Atomic scientists during the summer of 1959. "Of all the complex and versatile devices in existence today, men are among the easiest to produce." One suggestion was the establishment of a permanent space observatory, occupied by "eight or ten families, including a number of bona fide astronomers and the equivalent of a 'night assistant' or two."[126]

Ted's enthusiasm was infectious. "The morale and enthusiasm of the group is extraordinarily high," reported an Air Force official sent to check up on the project in early 1959. "I think these people are practically convinced that they can turn this dream into reality."[127] Orion was going to fly, and Ted had gathered a group of fellow nonconformists who were ready to go along. "Ted put up with anything to keep good theorists within the organization," remembers Brian Dunne. "A group like that is like a ballet or an opera. Very talented but temperamental people. You never saw such diversity of personalities—and it was due to Ted. He attracted all these diverse characters. Completely different people, like Jerry Astl, would work for him, who wouldn't work for anybody else." Astl explains why: "He didn't play big shot. He played one of the guys. That gives you an incentive to pull all you can."

Ted's modesty and informality were incongruous for the leader of a big project, and he was an unlikely Columbus when it came to leaving Earth. He battled a deep, inner phobia about outer space. "I had a lot of dreams about being out there, some of them nightmares, like being in a big spaceship looking out a porthole and seeing an incredible, unbelievable display of stars. And the sense of motion through that under-surface sea of stars, a sense of wonderment, and then all of a sudden it would all go black, and I would look out and realize there was nothing there at all to see," he explains. "It was a terrible feeling—I get a little of it back right now—of being absolutely alone, not even conscious of being in a ship. Out there there's nothing. Inside there's nothing. There's nothing anywhere. I would wake up screaming and I mean screaming, yelling. I still do that every now and then. It seems to some extent to be connected to this terrible fear of a large spherical image of light color or mottled color on jet black, and I remember being terrified by that all the way back to when I was just a few years old, and I've never been able to explain that, this fear. I still cannot look through a pair of binoculars let alone a big telescope and see the full moon. It's like standing on a ledge on a tall building. I just refuse to do it."

These feelings haunted Ted long before Orion. "We had a book on astronomy at home in Mexico City when I was a little kid, and there was a full-page photograph of the full moon, and if I even glanced at that from across the room I began having the shudders, and I just could not look inside of it. I think my mother knew about this: 'Don't worry about it. Don't look at it.' I have never found anybody who has this fear of looking through a telescope. I want to know what's there. I can steel myself to look at a double star, but I cannot look at Saturn or Jupiter when the image is big. I wonder sometimes if everybody goes through a series of lives and whether the reason I'm terrified is I was up there somewhere in the past and crashed."