24: 2001

"Between the first and last decades of the Twentieth Century lay a gulf greater than the wildest imagination could have conceived. It was the gulf between gunpowder and nuclear bomb, between messages tapped in Morse code and global television from the sky," wrote Arthur C. Clarke in 1964. "Above all, it was the gulf between the first hundred-foot flight at Kitty Hawk, and the first billion-mile mission to the moons of Jupiter."[366]

Clarke left Ceylon for New York in April 1964 to collaborate with film director Stanley Kubrick, who had just released his cold war masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Kubrick was now developing a project provisionally titled Journey Beyond the Stars and commissioned Clarke to write a novel filling in some of the background that the film, suffused with the mystery of contact with a truly alien intelligence, would be unable to convey. "I felt that when the novel finally appeared it should be 'by Arthur Clarke and Stanley Kubrick; based on the screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur Clark'—whereas the movie should have the credits reversed," noted Clarke.[367] While the two masters were incubating the odyssey of astronaut David Bowman and his ship Discovery, the odyssey of Orion was drawing to a close.

On October 5, 1964, General Atomic released a fourteen-page unclassified report, Nuclear Pulse Propulsion, by James Nance, explaining the basic principles of Orion without revealing any specifics such us the size, yield, standoff distance, or quantity of bombs, This was followed on March 19, 1965, by a thirty-three-page paper by Paul Shipps, Manned Planetary Exploration Capability Using Nuclear Pulse Propulsion, presented at the Canaveral Council of Technical Societies Second Space Congress, April 5-7, 1965. Nance hoped that open discussion of the project might lead to a last-minute reprieve. It was too late to influence the executioners at NASA, but not too late to influence the imaginations of Kubrick and Clarke.

"When we started work on 2001, some of the Orion documents had just been declassified, and were passed on to us by scientists indignant about the demise of the project," Clarke explained.[368] His diary for October 26, 1965—while the film, now titled 2001: A Space Odyssey, was in production at MGM's studios at Boreham Wood near London—notes "a discussion with Stanley over his latest idea—that Discovery should be nuclear-pulse-driven. Read a recently declassified report on this and was quite impressed—but the design staff rather upset."[369] The design department won. Orion survives, in Kubrick's film, in name but not in physics. "I think the main reason Stanley didn't want to go the Orion way," Clarke adds, thirty-six years later, "was that after Dr. Strangelove, he'd had enough of atomic bombs." In an early version of the screenplay, however, the Discovery enters the scene propelled by bombs:

DISCOVERY 1,000,000 MILES FROM EARTH. SEE EARTH AND MOON SMALL. WE SEE A BLINDING FLASH EVERY 5 SECONDS FROM ITS NUCLEAR PULSE PROPULSION. IT STRIKES AGAINST THE SHIPS THICK ABLATIVE TAIL PLATE.

Kubrick had been inspired by Clarke's 1950 short story "The Sentinel," in which an artifact, discovered on the Moon, is revealed to be monitoring our solar system for signs that advanced space-propulsion technology has emerged—and that the invention of nuclear weapons has not extinguished our civilization first. In the original screenplay, the Orion ship, leaving a trail of nuclear explosions against the dark background of interplanetary space, triggers the alarm:

Narrator: A hundred million miles beyond Mars, in the cold loneliness where no man had yet travelled, Deep-Space-Monitor-79 drifts slowly among the tangled orbits of the asteroids.

Radiation detectors noted and analyzed incoming cosmic rays from the galaxy and points beyond; neutron and X-ray telescopes kept watch on strange stars that no human eye would ever see; magnetometers observed the gusts and hurricanes of the solar winds, as the sun breathed million mile-an-hour blasts of plasma into the faces of its circling children.

All these things and many others were patiently noted by Deep-Space-Monitor-79, and recorded in its crystalline memory.

But now it had noted something strange—the faint yet unmistakable disturbance rippling across the solar system, and quite unlike any natural phenomena it had ever observed in the past.

It was also observed by Orbiter M-15, circling Mars twice a day; and High Inclination Probe-21, climbing slowly above the plane of the ecliptic; and even artificial Comet-5, heading out into the cold wastes beyond Pluto, along an orbit whose far point it would not reach for a thousand years.

All noticed the peculiar burst of energy that leaped from the face of the Moon and moved across the solar system, throwing off a spray of radiation like the wake of a racing speedboat.[370]

In the film, the Discovery's voyage ends at Jupiter; in the novel the ship continues on to Saturn, taking advantage of a gravity assist. "Stanley and his special-effects team spent a great deal of time working on Saturn," said Clarke, "but the more accurately we reproduced this extraordinary world, the less believable it seemed."[371] It was nature, not technology, that defied the imagination in 1965. The interplanetary ship Discovery, the Earth-to-orbit passenger shuttles, the circular space station, and lunar settlements all seemed plausible when the film was released in 1968. "Before the '70s had ended, the first permanent colony had been established on the Moon," Clarke's novel explained.[372] "The cost of space travel had been slashed tenfold, and would be cut tenfold again with nuclear power. The brief age of the rocket dinosaurs, each capable of but a single flight, was drawing to its close."

Ted's vision for the year 2001 was much the same as Clarke's. "Nature has been kind to those who dream of space exploration on a vast scale, within the lifetimes of those of us assembled here," Ted told a Las Vegas audience in October 1961.[373] "We always tend to underimagine the future more than a decade or so away; we tend to extrapolate only on the basis of what we have done, rather than what we know," he told an Austin, Texas, audience in 1962.[374] By the time Kubrick began shooting his film, Ted was warning a Washington audience that "unless we take action soon, Apollo is likely to turn into a huge, expensive, dead-ended project that simply wasn't worth the effort. We must break away from the idea that we have to proceed slowly, one small step at a time."[375]

Orion could make the steps all at once. "Bigger, higher-performance versions of Orion would make possible the detailed exploration of virtually all of the solar system in ships as large as ocean liners," he told a Vienna audience in 1966.[376]

Ten million dollars had been spent over eight years on Project Orion; $10 million would be spent in four years on Kubrick's 2001. Apollo, Clarke pointed out in 1965, was costing NASA $10 million a day. "Apollo costs too much and does too little," observed Freeman after the first Moon landing in 1969. "As soon as we are tired of this particular spectacle and wish to go farther than the moon, we shall find that we need ships of a different kind."[377] Neither of the two next steps after Apollo—a manned Mars mission, or a lunar base—ever got off the ground. Costs rose astronomically; post-Apollo missions did not.

It now is 2001—and twenty-nine years since our last visit to the Moon. Orion has gone the way of the tail fin. "History has passed Orion by," says Freeman. "There will be no going back."[378] What became of the future that appeared so promising in 1958?

Stan Ulam died in 1984. Orion remained his favorite invention, though the Teller-Ulam invention became better known. He stayed close to Ted, who credited his contributions, while growing increasingly estranged from Edward Teller, who did not. He never questioned whether Orion would have worked, and continued to hope for "its resurrection, which I, myself, believe will come."[379]

Freddy de Hoffmann left General Atomic in 1968, after General Dynamics' support for his Shangri-la for physicists finally ran out. Few peaceful uses of atomic energy proved as successful as their progenitor, the bomb. De Hoffmann bet heavily, and lost, on commercializing a High Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor, just before the market for large-scale nuclear power plants went into a decline. TRIGA succeeded by being small and quick; the nature of the nuclear power business forced HTGR to become large and slow. The unbounded optimism of Orion receded into memory, along with the 1956 Thunderbird convertibles that had dotted the parking lot at GA. De Hoffmann went on to become the director of the Salk Institute, a Shangri-la for biologists on the bluffs at Torrey Pines, and died in October 1989. "I still think Orion is the best way to get out there," he said at the thirtieth anniversary of General Atomic in 1985.[380]

Gulf General Atomic, renamed Gulf Energy and Environmental Systems, was sold to Royal Dutch/Shell, who changed the name back to General Atomic, and then in turn sold it to Chevron, who named it GA Technologies. Since 1986 the company, now renamed General Atomics, has been privately owned by Neal and Linden Blue. When General Atomic was a division of General Dynamics, de Hoffmann ran the company as if it was a family business. Now, General Atomics is a family business, and the Blue family, including sons Linden P. Blue and Karsten Blue, has diversified into ventures ranging from unmanned reconnaissance aircraft to data networking, superconducting magnets, supercomputing, runway de-icing, and medical electronics—as well as defense work, including weapons dismantling for both East and West. General Atomics owns the largest privately operated controlled fusion facility in the United States, pursuing ideas that go back to the discussions held at the Barnard Street School during the summer of 1956. As one of its sidelines, it supplies the target fuel pellets for all United States inertial-confinement fusion experiments. If high enough energy densities can ever be achieved, the pellets may be beneficially exploded like a series of very small, clean bombs.

General Atomics headquarters in La Jolla remain largely unchanged from when Project Orion closed up shop in 1965, although many peripheral facilities, including the linear accelerator, fuel-processing facility, and critical assembly building, have been shut down. "We make the TRIGA fuel elements now in France," says Doug Fouquet, who has remained at General Atomic since 1959, "and we are working with the Russians on a modular helium reactor to burn up some of their old plutonium. The spirit of international cooperation in which General Atomic was founded is alive and well. With Russian scientists discussing the design of bomb-consuming reactors over lunch in the General Atomics cafeteria, Niels Bohr's vision of pursuing Orion as an international joint venture no longer seems as far-fetched as it did in 1959. Directly and through its affiliates, General Atomics controls 190 million pounds of uranium reserves in Texas, New Mexico, and Australia. If there is ever a reason to revive Orion, General Atomics would be a good place to start.

Michael Treshow, Carlo Riparbelli, Ed Day, Fred Ross, John Wild, Don Mixson, and others among the original Orion crew have passed on. Some of the group—including Freeman Dyson and Ted Taylor—moved elsewhere or returned to previous homes, but many of the Orion old-timers remain nearby. La Jolla is hard to leave—especially if you purchased a house between 1957 and 1965. The Hotel Del Charro, no longer host to visiting Orioneers, gradually lost the Hollywood horse-racing crowd to newer hotels in Del Mar, but remained known for its "secluded bungalows favored by visitors such as the late FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover," until its 3.7 acres were sold to developers, leaving the Andrea Villa Motel to preserve some mementos of the Del Charro on its walls.

Marshall Rosenbluth, now back in La Jolla, maintains a part-time office at General Atomics, pursuing controlled fusion with the same determination he brought to Project Sherwood in 1956. The offices in Rosenbluth's wing of Building H are still furnished with cold war-era steel desks, chairs, and bookshelves, and except for the desktop computers have not changed much from Orion times, when an IBM 7090 cost $597 per hour, and the swivel chairs were new. Rosenbluth reserves judgment on whether the proposal he and Ted made in 1958 for a 4,000-ton spaceship was technically sound. "Well, I can safely say it wouldn't get off the ground now, politically, whether it would work or not." As for post-Orion proposals by Los Alamos and Livermore to use inertial-confinement fusion for space propulsion, he points out that "it was sort of odd to think of doing it in space before you really knew how to do it on Earth."

Shielded command module, solar storm shelter, and escape vehicle for a proposed 20-meter-diameter Jupiter exploration vehicle, 1964. Note the navigation station and observation ports.

Herbert York's career at the forefront of the armament and disarmament establishments, before and after his involvement with Project Orion, follows the title of his 1987 autobiography. Making Weapons, Talking Peace. In 1961 he became the first chancellor of the University of California at San Diego, adjacent to General Atomic, and lives just south of Windansea. "We could live without nuclear fission," he says, "and if I could abolish the fission process I would, the net would be good." What keeps him awake at night are biological weapons not bombs. "It's the most dangerous thing on the horizon," he fears. "We in the United States, in the name of examining what the possibilities are so we can defend against it, are going to lead the world into a much greater trap than nuclear fission did."

York harbors no illusions about large government undertakings such as manned ventures into space. "Thinking broadly without thinking really stupidly is just hard to do—for the government," he observes. "While I was at ARPA trying to do things like supporting the initial thinking on Orion, my boss was saying we're going to send out contract proposals for anti-gravity and things like that." He has no regrets about helping to get Orion started—and no regrets about helping to bring the project to a halt. "Looked at in terms of what the whole country was doing it was an interesting thing that deserved some attention. But as a real project with real people and real money, it would have ended up with disappointed people, that's right." To York, it is not the feasibility but the evolvability of Orion that "was, and for a very long time to come will be, the showstopper." We arrived at successful technologies like airplanes or telephones, he points out, by building millions or billions of units, and making modifications one at a time. "Orion involved putting together simultaneously a number of novel technologies, most of which could not be meaningfully tested in isolation from each other or on small scale."

Brian Dunne, who lives high up on Mount Soledad in La Jolla, overlooking both the ocean and the Torrey Pines mesa, favors a middle approach: "You need to have three classes for decisions about projects: Yes, no, and suspended judgment." He thinks Orion should have been given a firm maybe, supporting continued research and engineering but postponing the political decision about whether development should go ahead. After leaving General Atomic when Orion and then Casaba-Howitzer were folded up, Dunne worked for a number of General Atomic spin-offs before starting his own company, Ship Systems, based in part on his shaped-charge and directed-plasma work. "They had some very weird projects, classified, so I cannot talk about it," says Jerry Astl. Dunne is through with weaponeering, but sees a busy future ahead. "I look for SDI [Star Wars] to have another renaissance," he explains. "I see the cold war all over again, except the Chinese are smarter—and better dispersed."

Except for brief acceleration periods, the ship is coasting through space with the engines off allowing the crew to inspect the ship, keep up with routine maintenance, and make repairs.

Dunne is an amateur archaeologist, and his perspective on Orion is similarly long term. "Orion will arise Phoenix-like from the ashes around 2040-2050," he says, predicting that we will eventually get to the Moon, find it uninteresting, and move on, via Orion, from there. The dates have slipped slightly from what he told Freeman in 1973: "I always thought that she should be grown from a huge Lunar base—who knows, perhaps in—2020, she will!"[381] In Dunne's office, a three-canister section of the Orion meter-model charge-ejection system, and a piece of the model's perforated drag-skirt, sit under a shelf filled with archaeological texts.

Ten miles north of La Jolla, in Solana Beach, Jerry Astl's Orion artifacts go one layer further back than Dunne's. After leaving General Atomic in 1970, he became an independent consultant and founded Mar Den International Corporation in 1972. The l:130-scale Orion model survives in his garage—and a wealth of undocumented details about the project survive in his mind. Explaining how the shock absorbers should have been reconfigured, he adds that "if they ever start Orion again they are going to find out pretty quick that they are going to need some ideas like that."

Moe Scharff now works for Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), the earliest and most successful spin-off from General Atomic. He is still engaged in concepts descended from Project Orion via Casaba-Howitzer, which was funded under ARPA's Project Defender in 1960. Defender was there to look at advanced methods of missile defense, he explains, "and what I was proposing was certainly advanced. If you want to shut off the tape recorder I can tell you a little bit and then I can go back."

Burt Freeman lives on Mount Soledad slightly below Brian Dunne, and worked until recently at Maxwell Technologies, where the core of the Orion weapons effects group remained intact. He now works from home, modeling aerosols and magnetohydrodynamics, using a gigaherz desktop computer, with which, he says, "I'm able to do all of the tasks once requiring a big supporting staff. What more to want?" Conversation drifts quickly to radiation hydrodynamics, on both the "source" (bomb) and "interaction" (pusher) side—where so much progress has been made in the intervening years. "I haven't looked back," he says. "What impact that would have on Orion, now, I haven't the faintest idea. Or, really, interest, I must say." After some discussion of the problem of turbulent ablation, "an issue we never came to grips with," he changes his mind: "Yes, okay, I could get real interested! I think all these problems could be solved, particularly with an experimental program." He believes it would be easier to build Orion now, and even easier in the future, but "Orion shouldn't be developed now and I would choose not to work with it." He sees the same basic problem as Freeman and Ted: the dangerous nature of highly miniaturized bombs, and "whether it would be a good idea to have an industrial project that makes a lot more of them." He wonders if "maybe you could use some of the Russian stockpile—but I'd prefer just to dig holes and explode them all down there, to hell with the energy that they're potentially worth."

Kedar (Bud) Pyatt lives at the foot of Mount Soledad, not far from where the Hotel Del Charro has been replaced by condominiums at La Jolla shores. He remains convinced of Orion's feasibility and the ability of today's computers to answer many of the questions that were left unanswered in 1965. "For years and years and years the basic problem of calculating the behavior of a two-stage device and getting the yield right was an empirical treatment, he explains. Nobody got the calculation absolutely right. There were fudge factors all over the place. In the last year with the advent of the new supercomputers some cohorts of mine at Los Alamos calculated from the high-explosive implosions through to the final yield and got it right."

Thomas Macken lives a few blocks from Windansea. As a hands-on aeronautical engineer, schooled in an era when you were expected to fly what you designed, he admits that "I was always skeptical about it. The thing that used to bug me most of all was the frequency of the delivery system, 1.1 seconds or something like that. It was really hard for me to visualize, maybe I'm too old-fashioned. I've always been very radical-minded—except when it comes to engineering." He was never comfortable with putting so many people on top of such a large number of bombs.

Ten miles inland from General Atomic, past Miramar and Green Farm, Bill Vulliet is still doing physics, though no longer making the now-congested drive to Torrey Pines. He stayed at General Atomic long after the Orion group disbanded, and then worked for a series of smaller companies as a consultant on weapons effects. Unlike his former colleagues who believe the project was technically sound, Vulliet now thinks that Orion could never have survived intact. "Opacity was only part of the problem," he says. "The other part of the problem is spallation from the violent shock waves that go through that pusher. Any time a shock waves meets a surface, a rarefied surface, like air or gas on one side, metal plate on the other—it goes roaring through there, it comes to this air/steel interface, reflects, starts going back the other way and reflects as a rarefaction wave. This shock wave is strong enough that nothing would survive! There's no way you could design a pusher to do that job. It's nice to have specific impulse, but you don't want to grind the whole ship into powder on the first two or three shots! And if Ted Taylor were to approach me today, I would say, 'Let's go see if we can't pick daisies or do something useful around here. Because this isn't going to fly.' "

Seven miles up the coast highway from General Atomic, in Del Mar, David Weiss remains convinced that Orion—under international safeguards—will eventually be revived. "It's not a matter of if it will ever be built," he says. "It's the German if/when, which means both if and when. After almost one hundred years of experience with flying machines it is difficult to realize that Orion is not really an aerospace vehicle, but rather a completely new animal: an orbital and/or interplanetary traveling colony. The intelligence and spirit of its inhabitants will be more determinate of its value and usefulness than any factor of its spectacular performance! You'll be doing the world a great service to finally let that rabbit out of its hat."

Empty propellant magazines are ejected and en route maintenance performed, two days after departure from Earth orbit for Mars.

Lew Allen retired as chief of staff of the Air Force in 1982, moving to Pasadena to direct the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, whose interplanetary missions have all been unmanned flights. "The technology permits one to do more and more with less and less spacecraft," he explains. "Every day you are finding things you didn't expect, like 'Is there really water that one could exploit on die Moon? Is there helium 3, and if there were, would you know what to do with it? Could there possibly be life under the surface of Europa? How much water is there really at the polar caps of Mars?' Sending people has never made any real objective sense." Manned voyages would be sent in search of something else. "Orion was so bold, and so imaginative. Let's shove aside the obvious practical problems. I think all of us, even today, would say, 'Well, I don't know exactly why I want to do it, but I can't believe that there isn't a reason to do it,' that sort of thing. Maybe it's getting asteroids or, for one reason or another, just doing very ambitious missions. If we could sweep away the practical difficulties associated with bombs, I'd still be very excited about Orion as something we ought to do."

Bruno Augenstein maintains an office at RAND, in downtown Santa Monica, where he held positions ranging from vice president to chief scientist from 1967 to 1995, after serving as special assistant for Intelligence and Reconnaissance in the Department of Defense from 1961 to 1965. The top-secret Corona reconnaissance satellite program, which he believes distracted the Department of Defense from Orion, has now been declassified, revealing that "they had twelve failures on the Corona, partial success on the thirteenth try, and it was only the fourteenth that produced significant returns. You'd never get the opportunity today to go through that kind of a cycle. You would have Congress screaming after the second or third failure." RAND has the best institutional memory of the surviving cold war organizations, and Augenstein summarizes one of its later (and still classified) studies, Orion: Future Space Propulsion System?, as "a discussion of manned missions, primarily, and the possibility of establishing bases on the Moon and the planets. It was a report that recommended a full-fledged go-ahead."[382] He remains convinced that Orion still deserves serious consideration, not only as a means of exploring the solar system, but as "a means of purposefully eliminating vast stockpiles of nuclear weapons; and an outlet for the hordes of skilled bomb designers, especially those of the former Soviet Union, whose efforts might otherwise be drawn in inappropriate directions."

Pierre Noyes remains at the Stanford Linear Accelerator, where he thinks seriously about antimatter, and semiseriously about how to use antimatter as fuel for interstellar transport—not with any expectation of building such vehicles, but to keep at least some science fiction grounded in fact. His nostalgia for Orion is tempered by an overwhelming fear of some of the other things that could be done with thousands of small, directed-energy bombs. "For a long time Freeman thought that this was the way we really would explore the solar system," he says, "when we had a lunar base and could launch where the fallout would be confined."

Edward Teller, the last of the Hungarian "Martians" who gave twentieth-century science and technology so many advances—John von Neumann, Theodore von Karman, Eugene Wigner, and Leo Szilard having predeceased him—still keeps one office at Livermore, and another at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. Teller played a background role in Orion, but as a mentor to de Hoffmann, Ted Taylor, and Freeman Dyson, he helped give the project its start. "It was the right idea in principle," he says in retrospect, but many of the details were wrong."

Livermore and Los Alamos laboratories, then belonging to the AEC, now belong to the Department of Energy, or DOE. After Project Orion was over, both labs continued to consider Orion-like vehicles, especially whenever new developments renewed the possibility of small, clean bombs. In the early 1970s a revival of interest in Orion at Los Alamos resulted in a number of advances, including an experimental investigation of pusher-plate ablation at higher energy densities, and a proposal by Ted P Cotter for a "rotating-cable pusher." Instead of a massive pusher plate backed by shock absorbers, the ship, spinning slowly around its central axis, would unreel a large number of steel cables, radiating outward like the arms of a giant squid. The cables, with flattened extremities, would absorb momentum from the explosions, transmitting it gently to the main body of the ship. Cotter credited this design to a still-classified proposal of Freeman Dyson's, circulated in November 1958 under the title The Bob and the Squid.

The squid's latest incarnation at Los Alamos is a concept named Medusa by its inventor, Johndale Solem, coordinator for advanced concepts at the theoretical division. "Orion is mind-blowing compared to any other kind of spacecraft," he says. "As soon as you start thinking about nuclear explosives and how they might be used other than for breaking things and killing people—you think, 'Wow! Would this ever make a terrific propellant!' " Solem took a fresh look at the entire problem and came up with a small, lightweight spacecraft pulled along on elastic tethers behind a large, parachute-like canopy, billowing out under the pressure from the explosion of very small, low-yield bombs. Estimates of remarkable performance (Isp ranging from 4,000 to 40,000) are driven by Solem's knowledge that "to make a nuclear explosive with mass 25 kg and yield 2.5 kilotons is not much more difficult or expensive than to make a 25-kg, 25-ton yield device."[383]

The last of the original Orion group still active at Los Alamos is Harris Mayer. "When you're a scientist you develop intuition," he says. "I knew that Orion would work. We knew how to make the bombs, there's no question about that. We knew how to make a structure that could stand 10 g's; we knew how to make a shock absorber that would reduce 100 g's to 10 g's. We even thought we knew about how to make an ablation pusher. There are all the elements. And we knew about how to launch through the atmosphere. The constraints may be important, but they're not given by nature. They're given by society and our culture and its values: 'At this time, no launches in the atmosphere.' That doesn't mean you can't launch in the atmosphere. And we passed it up not because people said the technology wouldn't work. I don't think we're going to be building Orion. But if we wanted to, we could be selling tickets for Orion like you do for an ocean liner.

"I didn't have the impression at the end of that year that it wasn't going anywhere. Quite the opposite. I thought that it had a grand start. These were days when we thought big. Now, whether it made economic sense to tour around the solar system and bring back asteroids, or pieces of asteroids, that I never thought made economic sense. But that wasn't the purpose of it. At that time we were a rich nation with unrestricted ambitions, so we thought of doing all these wonderful things. We're an even richer nation now, but with much restricted ambitions.

"Orion was a grand concept, which a rich nation with great vision and great opportunity could embrace. And it didn't even matter if it was a success. It was in working together toward a magnificent goal, and the camaraderie and intellectual stimulation in doing this had enduring benefit to the people involved and to the nation. We've lost this. You can't really think about something like Orion now. In talking with the old-timers about Orion, it's always a grand regret: a wonderful thing and we didn't get it done. It stepped on too many other toes. People were worried about being able to launch a thousand-pound payload, and we were talking about a thousand tons!"

Sixty miles south of the Los Alamos mesa lies Albuquerque and Kirt-land Air Force Base, where AFSWC's physicists and administrators fought for Orion for seven difficult years. "In the final analysis, the Space Administration did not lend its wholehearted support to ORION and the Air Force was unable to carry the burden alone," AFSWC's historians concluded in their postmortem account.[384] The Air Force Special Weapons Center became the Air Force Weapons Laboratory and then the Air Force Research Laboratory, with most of the nuclear weapons work shifting to Sandia National Laboratory, across a carefully guarded fence. Things that fly and things that explode are now kept in distinct administrative compartments, and in today's Air Force Project Orion would never stand a chance.

In the late 1950s, Don Prickett and Ed Giller purchased adjoining property in the foothills of the San Juan Mountains above Bayfield, Colorado, on Vallecito Creek. In late September, the summer visitors have left, elk-hunting season is just opening, and dark thunderstorms, bringing the first snow of the season, are swirling around the 12,000-foot peaks. "Black powder season's on," says Prickett. "The black powder people are up there in the hills." Elk-hunting season opens with bows and arrows, then black powder rifles, and finally conventional guns—a ritualized arms race where the more primitive weapons get first chance at the elk. "A miserable day for black powder," says Giller as the hail pounds on Prickett's roof. "Pretty hard to keep your powder dry." That sums up Prickett and Giller's careers as nuclear weaponeers: keep your powder dry, even if the purpose in doing so is to ensure it is never used.

Prickett attributes Orion's demise, as an Air Force project, to a specific Pentagon briefing where Department of Defense officials withdrew support. "I think we cut our own throat when we tried to push the Star Wars too soon, too fast," he explains. "At that final briefing, that the Pentagon insisted on, we should have just pushed the specific impulse capability and then you can worry about the details of what you are going to do with it later. We know what we're going to do with it eventually—but to try and sell it too soon was a big mistake. To turn it into Star Wars just didn't fly at that time." In Giller's opinion, "The concept was just too big a step to swallow. It was beyond the ability of the community, on the science and social side, to make such big steps, so it died."

Don Mixson, after leaving AFSWC for SAC, retired from the Air Force and moved to northern California, where he pursued his artwork until his death in 1997. In 1979, Freeman Dyson's Disturbing the Universe referred to Mixson's 1959 study of possible military applications of Orion, prompting Mixson to respond: "It was written not to make Orion a military machine, but to con a military machine into yet another installment of funds to keep your beautiful big dream alive. You see, I shared that same dream and it was the only reason I was in the Air Force. NASA did not exist."[385]

Ted Taylor left the Pentagon—and his Q clearance—in 1966. During two years in the Pentagon, he says, "I did a complete about-face in my attitude toward nuclear weapons. I discovered cases of willful deception, at all levels of government, concerning the effects of nuclear weapons on people, on buildings, on military equipment, on everything, if we ever used even a small fraction of the weapons in stockpile. Every nuclear weapon that is made makes the world a more dangerous place."[386] He uprooted his family once again, this time to Vienna and the headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Agency, where, as a consultant to the United States Atomic Energy Commission, he sought to assess what the IAEA was doing to prevent diversion of nuclear material from peaceful to destructive purposes. He found that safeguards on die civilian side were as porous as the logic behind military justifications for stockpiling more and more bombs. "I vowed that I would use whatever energy I had left to try to stimulate the total abolition of nuclear weapons," he says. Ted knew what all those kilotons and megatons could do. "The awesomeness of it got to him after a while," says Don Prickett.

Ted, now living in retirement in upstate New York, tries to dream about space travel and solar energy, but finds he still dreams about bombs. "I had a dream last night, about a new form of nuclear weapon," he admits. "And I'm really scared of it. I have tried, I thought successfully, to hold on to a vow of just not thinking about new types of nuclear weapons anymore. And what's happened, to put it simply, is that it has gone from my conscious to my unconscious, and it's emerging as a dream; I cannot shut it off. I woke up at two A.M. and went back to bed at about six o'clock, and when I started writing I wound up filling up a page with notes, and it still makes sense. So it wasn't some weird possibility that I cannot describe, but I don't see any point in doing anything but just keeping it in my head, and, if I could, getting rid of it. What I am afraid is in the offing is people figuring out how to make a transition as spectacular as going from trying to kill a deer at two hundred yards with a pile of high explosive, to shooting at it.

"We haven't opened Pandora's box and found the really important content of that box, which was hope. Down in the bottom. If we just fiddle around at the surface, all kinds of terrible things come out. We just freeze up and say, 'No, no, no, no. That can't be done. Not allowable.' " Ted's hope is that the dream of Orion will one day be disentangled from the nightmare of the bomb.

"There is nothing indispensable about bombs," says Freeman, who, in retirement in Princeton, still thinks about space travel, but no longer expects to personally go along. He is more interested now in micro-spacecraft that fly on beams of light or use solar sails. The future of space, in Freeman's imagination, belongs to flocks of butterflies, not fleets of ships. Here on Earth, both military and peaceful uses of nuclear explosives have led us to dead ends. "There's nothing that nuclear explosions can do in the way of digging holes that you can't do without nuclear explosions. It takes only a little longer, and costs a little more." If you want to send a group of fifty people to Saturn in two years, however, nuclear-pulse propulsion is still worth a look. "The only thing that bombs can do that nothing else can do is something like Orion," he says.[387]

The year 2001 is not 2001. Orion—and Arthur C. Clarke's sentinel, if there is one—must wait until we have given up atomic energy as a weapon and are ready to step beyond.