9

ARPA

General Atomics proposal for a nuclear bomb-propelled space vehicle spent the first six months of 1958 bouncing from desk to desk. Officials who thought the idea was crazy were reluctant to say no and officials who thought the idea had potential were reluctant to say yes. Orion was orphaned from the start. For the entire seven years of its existence, the project was plagued, politically, by the features that made it so appealing to people like Freeman and Ted. Our military space program was unable to wholeheartedly adopt a project aimed at peacefully exploring the solar system. Our nonmilitary space program was unable to wholeheartedly adopt a project driven by bombs. For a brief moment in history, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was in the business of doing both.

Ted Taylor's diplomacy, Freddy de Hoffmann's influence within General Dynamics and the AEC, and the efforts of individuals such as Lew Allen within the military establishment eventually achieved a compromise giving Project Orion a chance. In early 1958, there were a half-dozen places where Orion could seek support: General Dynamics, the AEC, the Pentagon, Congress, ARPA, and NASA—which had not yet been formed. "Several important people have said, 'Yes, this is very important. In fact it is so important that I cannot possibly do anything about it until Congress decides who is to handle it,' " Freeman reported after a visit to Washington with Ted in the spring of 1958. "Congress is just now in the middle of creating a new Space Agency to administer all nonmilitary schemes of this kind."[110]

Congress was a slow way to launch anything into space. In January of 1958, just as Secretary of Defense Neil H. McElroy was creating ARPA, the United States Congress Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE) held a series of hearings on outer space propulsion by nuclear energy before a number of influential congressmen, including Senator Clinton F Anderson of New Mexico, chairman of the Subcommittee on Outer Space Propulsion, and Senator Albert Gore of Tennessee. The assembled congressmen had two main questions for the physicists, who included Stan Ulam from Los Alamos and Theodore Merkle from Livermore: Were the Russians using nuclear energy to launch their Sputniks? Could the United States use nuclear energy to regain the lead? Senator John Pas-tore, Rhode Island, asked Dr. Ulam: "Do you believe in the admonition that the nation that controls outer space will control the world?" Ulam, having already hinted at possibilities such as Orion, replied: "If some nation controls travel in space and is in possession of the Moon, it ipso facto, it seems to me, dominates this planet too."[111] The subsequent questioning of Dr. Merkle went adrift:

Representative James T. Patterson (Connecticut): Is there any theory that states after you get a certain distance from our earth in space then the atmosphere becomes comparable to the one we live in now?

Dr. Theodore Merkle: I am not sure I quite understand your question.

Representative Patterson: I do not know just how to put it myself.

Dr. Merkle: Let me put it this way: The earth's atmosphere which you are currently breathing gets thinner and thinner as you increase the distance from the earth.

Representative Patterson: When you arrive at a certain point, then does it reverse itself?

Dr. Merkle: No, indeed, sir. After you get up a few hundred miles the atmosphere disappears and it never again reappears. Space is truly empty.[112]

It was this political vacuum, in the aftermath of Sputnik, that gave Project Orion its chance. General Dynamics sponsored Orion's nine-month initial incubation at General Atomic, hoping to recoup this investment through research and development contracts once the project got off the ground. Someday, fleets of Orion ships might be cruising space under the General Dynamics label in the same way that General Dynamics' Electric Boat Division, starting with the 3,500-ton Nautilus, had become the leading brand in nuclear submarines. Orion would have been "built like a submarine, not an airplane," says Freeman, who remembers that "the Electric Boat division of General Dynamics was to some extent involved. We did talk with them about how you build submarines and I think a couple of those people came to talk to Ted. They would have got the contract if the thing had gone ahead."

Physicist Herbert York, an advisor to Eisenhower who was appointed the first director of Livermore Laboratory in 1952 and the first technical director of ARPA in 1958, remembers John Jay Hopkins asking his advice about whether General Dynamics should lend more support. "I said that from a government point of view it was worth putting in some small amount of money, like a million dollars, to get the thinking further along, but that if I was involved in investing General Dynamics money I wouldn't put a nickel in." In 1958 General Dynamics was in the process of losing a fortune on an ill-fated attempt to enter the commercial aviation market with the Convair 880 jetliner, and inclined to side with York. Their backing was contingent on the government picking up the tab for most of the expenses along the way.

The AEG was firmly on board. Without their blessing, it would have been impossible for a private contractor, acting independently from the weapons labs, to undertake a project involving nuclear secrets and nuclear bombs. Orion's first contract, for $5,000 in January of 1958, was with the AEC, but this was for the provision of classified information (including the results from Lew Allen's tests), not research or development costs. The AEC had to be careful not to alienate the military establishment by appearing to be making their own preemptive bid for space. Herbert York, who began testifying before the JCAE in 1953, emphasizes that political battles larger than Orion were being fought. "The JCAE had been the most important committee, and they knew that space was going to take that away, so they tried very hard to get the responsibility for space," he says. "Which they couldn't do. It's entirely possible that their hidden agenda was to somehow or other make it evident that space propulsion and nuclear energy were so intrinsically and powerfully connected that they had to be kept connected. That's a suspicious thought—but the JCAE was really losing its position. And so was the AEC."

Establishing NASA required an act of Congress, whereas the Department of Defense was able to establish ARPA by executive order as an immediate response to Sputnik's launch. "It was Secretary of Defense Neil H. McElroy's personal answer to Sputnik," says York. The first task was to prevent rivalries between the Army, Navy, and Air Force from getting in the way. The conflicts arose not only over military activities; all three services viewed peaceful exploration of space as a desirable extension of their turf, and their contractors sought prestige in the peaceful "conquest" of space. There was also a military imperative to promote nonmilitary projects, since it was essential for reconnaissance, guidance, and other defense objectives to establish a precedent that national boundaries were not being violated by spacecraft flying overhead. In anticipation of NASA's formation, ARPA was chartered to consolidate everything—military and nonmilitary—for a year or so and then, once NASA was established, divide things up. "I played a key role," says York, "in getting ARPA going into a lot of things, and then taking them out of it when it was time to do so. The most difficult thing I did was getting ARPA out of the big space-transport business because von Braun and the Army were determined to keep it in. But the president wanted them out." When ARPA undertook sponsorship of Project Orion, the assumption was that this was a long-range, deep-space venture that would be transferred to NASA once things got sorted out.

General Atomics proposal was a radical departure from anything under consideration in 1958. While the United States was struggling to launch low-Earth-orbit satellites weighing fewer than one hundred pounds, Ted was proposing interplanetary payloads of one thousand tons. "I remember the document," says Air Force Colonel Don Prickett. "Ted brought it to the Pentagon. I had what they called a nuclear desk at that time, and I saw it and read it. Of course I take off on anything like that. We fired it back down to Lew Allen at Kirtland for a comment. And then, as I remember, it went to RAND for a comment. I didn't know Ted from Adam's off ox, but it was an intriguing proposal and at a time that we didn't have much in the way of propulsion systems. The Russians were running away from us."

Orion attracted interest within the Air Force, but no one was able to come up with a plausible military requirement for sending a 4,000-ton spaceship to Mars or points beyond. The Moon was already spoken for by the Army and von Braun. The military was interested in the capabilities of a large, manned observation, and fire-control platform, but even in 1958 it was evident (if secret) that by the time Orion could be developed, unmanned satellites would be sending high-resolution imagery back to Earth. Orion scaled up better than it scaled down. There were no immediate military requirements for anything that large, other than the argument that if we did not build Orion the Russians might build it first. "Luckily the work we are doing here is not regarded as having military importance," Freeman reported in June of 1958.[113] "I think this is a mistake, but I am happy to leave the generals out of it as long as possible."

The proposal kept landing back at ARPA on Herbert York's desk. Finally it stuck. "We asked the government for a few million dollars to get the thing started," Freeman explained when the contract was signed. "The committee which reviews such proposals has at least 500 proposals a year to look at, most of them crazy or stupid, but all of them asking for a few million dollars to get started, all of them submitted by people who get very indignant when they are refused. So naturally the committee was inclined to say no to us. The thing looks completely crazy at first sight. So we had to wear down their resistance, getting various other influential people in the government to believe in us and put in good words for us, and so on. On the whole the committee has not treated us badly. They gave us a number of meetings to explain what we wanted to do, and in the end they agreed to give us the money. The whole procedure took about six months.

"One reason why things were slow," Freeman continued, "is that we shall be under the responsibility of a civilian space agency which will undertake all long-range scientific programs concerned with space and not for directly military purposes. This Space Agency does not yet exist and will probably start next year. Meanwhile we are being paid by the Defense Department out of its research funds. So the contract had to be approved both by the Defense people and by the people who are going run to the Space Agency. I think in the long run this Space Agency will turn out very well. It has enthusiastic support in Congress, and it will probably be able to see us through to the end."[114]

The Orion team lobbied hard. Bethe lobbied James Killian, chairman of Eisenhower's Presidential Science Advisory Committee. Ulam lobbied Congress via the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. Lewis Strauss, chairman of the AEC, lobbied both ARPA and the Department of Defense. Lew Allen remembers it was Edward Teller who first told him of the project, diverting him from Albuquerque to La Jolla to meet with Ted Taylor, urging the Air Force to lend support.

After it was decided, in early 1958, that the Air Force should not undertake Orion directly, Lew Allen recommended that ARPA fund the project, but as a modest theoretical effort that would reduce both the political liability and the cost. "Conceptually at least, the whole thing looks feasible except for the very serious objection that during the initial liftoff from the earth and while in the dense atmosphere the entire vehicle is immersed within the weapon fireball," he wrote in May 1958. "It may be possible to design for survival but it will not be trivial. Although there are many reservations in our minds regarding the feasibility of the scheme, the possible ultimate reward is so high that we feel strongly that further research should be carried out. General Atomic has done the work so far on an unfunded contract with AEC and are now asking for something like $4,000,000 to carry out an ambitious program involving much experimentation. We have heard that ARPA was considering such a sum favorably. We feel that that amount is too imaginative and recommend that a more modest effort be supported at present, at most a few hundred thousand to fund more study over the next year. The idea is exciting, the reward for success immense, the chance for success slim, but the chance that the study will uncover variants or new ideas of more practical importance is very high."[115]

Herb York was in a bind. As Eisenhower's representative, he was skeptical of the Air Force's tendency to build expensive weapon systems not required for fighting wars. On the other hand, ARPA's mission was to leave no alternative unturned. Politicians tended to be overawed by scientists like Bethe, Dyson, or Rosenbluth, but this did not work on a physicist like York. "Smart people are just as capable of being naive as dumb people. Maybe more so," he argues. He also refused to believe the estimated costs. "It wasn't just Orion. Almost every cost estimate made by a physicist is wildly wrong, and the better the physicist the worse it is."

York was also a space enthusiast. "I came out of the 1930s space cadet tradition, Buck Rogers and science fiction," he explains. "I was interested in astronomy. Among the very first books I read was a very particular book called Astronomy for Amateurs, by a French astronomer called Camille Flammarion, which a somewhat eccentric uncle gave to me when I was eight or nine years old." As a member of the von Neumann committee that set the United States, long in advance of Sputnik, on the path toward both peaceful launch vehicles and H-bomb-carrying ICBMs, York helped guide the decisions that set the global agenda for space. In 1958, he wrote a classified report for Killian and Eisenhower that laid out plans for a series of large boosters and called for reaching the Moon in ten to twenty years—which turned out to be right. But in the 1950s, ICBMs came first, and those in York's position kept their dreams to themselves. "In the back of everybody's minds, what stimulated all of us, von Neumann and everyone else—maybe not everyone else, but most of the people—was the long-range possibility, the ultimate idea of Man flying out into the universe. But it wasn't what we were working on," he says.

Free flight of 1-meter, high-explosive-driven model, version 1, October 1959. P81

Upon his appointment as technical director of ARPA, on March 17, 1958, York found a proposal for a 4,000-ton interplanetary spaceship on his desk. "It was the time after Sputnik when everybody was looking for some kind of an answer and thinking that technology was the likeliest place to look, and so a lot of stuff that would be too far out under ordinary circumstances managed to get included inside the envelope, he explains. He authorized a one-year feasibility study, with, according to AFSWC officials, "the verbal understanding that the contract would be extended at a somewhat higher rate if it proved technically impossible to disprove feasibility at the end of the first year."[116] York believed the idea, however improbable, should be given a chance. "It was a unique time. When we were getting ARPA started we were willing to take some fliers. I never thought it was feasible, but that's OK, I thought it was interesting. And of sufficiently dramatic ultimate potential that even very low feasibility merited some attention. I tried to put that combination together somehow and multiply that out."

The result of ARPA's decision was Air Force Contract AF 18(600)-1812, "Feasibility Study of a Nuclear Bomb Propelled Space Vehicle," dated June 30, 1958, between the USAF Air Research and Development Command and the General Atomic division of General Dynamics Corporation. "Preliminary studies have indicated that it is conceivable to use nuclear bombs as the energy source to propel a very large, manned vehicle to very high velocities," is the opening sentence in the included four-page Statement of Work. In a total of twenty-three pages, the conceptual and contractual framework was established for the ensuing seven years of work.

"If the concept is feasible," the contract explains, "it may be possible to propel a vehicle weighing several thousand tons to velocities several times earth escape velocities. Such a vehicle would represent a major advance in the field of space propulsion. The Concept which will be under study by the Contractor is, briefly, as follows: A circular disk of material, which is called the pusher, is connected through a shock-absorbing mechanism to the ship proper, which is above the pusher-shock-absorber assembly. A number of nuclear bombs, which are stored in the ship, are fired periodically below the pusher. Each bomb is surrounded by a mass of material called the propellant. As a result of each explosion, the propellant contained within the solid angle subtended by the pusher strikes the pusher and drives it upward into the shock absorbers, which then deliver a structurally tolerable impulse to the ship."[117]

The amount of the contract was $949,550 with a fixed fee of $50,200 for a total of $999,750. "There must have been a million-dollar limit," says Ed Giller, a young physicist and Air Force colonel who had flown the first P-38 fighter into combat in Europe and was effectively running things at AFSWC in 1958. "Right up against the peg!" says Don Prickett.

The next problem was what to do with the money. ARPA could not just hand over a million dollars to General Atomic and walk away. Officially, the contract was administered by the Air Research and Development Command, through the Air Force's Los Angeles office via the San Diego Air Procurement District, with technical cognizance and reporting assigned to AFSWC at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque. Procuring the design for a nuclear bomb-propelled spaceship had little in common with procuring engine parts or runway paint, and bureaucratic wrangling between La Jolla and Los Angeles set in immediately, starting with procedures for transferring classified AEC documents to the Department of Defense and ending with a dispute over whether Project Orion consultants could bill the contractor for actual costs or standard per diem for their hotels. "We do not consider the primary role of General Atomic to be the engineering of existing concepts into slightly improved products," General Atomic's contract administrator answered the San Diego Air Procurement District, which had requested General Atomic to procure less-expensive physicists and keep them closer to home. "The cost of hotel accommodations, for example, in some of the larger cities I have mentioned run well in excess of $10 and approach, in New York at least, $15 to $20 per night."[118]

AFSWC, composed largely of Air Force physicists, intermediated and soon assumed complete control. "The technical people enjoyed it and wanted to work on it," says Giller. "I remember flying a B-25 out to General Atomic, stuffing people in the back of the airplane, noisier than hell. We'd fly out and visit them, and then we'd fly back." General Atomic was five miles west of Miramar Naval Air Station. Flying out from Albuquerque to visit General Atomic was a favorite way to get in some flight time, check up on the Orion contract, and perhaps run into Hans Bethe or other luminary physicists over lunch. Orion and AFSWC were a perfect match.

"We [AFSWC] were standing around not doing anything," explains Giller, "when they [ARPA] had the money so they gave it to us." AFSWC had been established, shortly after the Ivy Mike explosion at Eniwetok, to weaponize a liquid-deuterium hydrogen bomb so that it could be delivered by our largest bomber, the B-36. "We kept it the deepest dark secret," says York—negating the weapon's value as a deterrent, since "something the Russians knew nothing about couldn't possibly deter them." Before this predicament was resolved, next-generation solid-fuel H-bombs made the project obsolete. AFSWC suddenly had a lot of highly trained physicists looking for something to do. "I went to the Air Force and said, 'Send me all your Ph.D.s,' " Giller remembers. "All these people who had their commitment deferred while they got a doctorate and then they owed two years. A lot of the other labs said, 'They only have two years and then they're gone.' I said, 'I don't care. If one stays it's worth it.' So they all came with enthusiasm and energy and wanting to do something. We turned them loose."

Orion was irresistible. "I remember talking to Herb York about it," says Ed Giller. "They had some money and we wanted it. Herb didn't even have an office, he was just parked someplace in Washington. We all showed up and said, 'Herb, we'll do it, we'll do it. What is it? You got money, you got an idea? We can spend it.' Our little group at Kirtland was really gung ho to find anything new. This excited us. So we went out and tried to grab it, as the contract monitor, put it that way. We were in the nuclear game, but weren't building anything. We were the marriage fraternity between the bomb and the carrying fraternity, and we were trying to break that mold. It was just a gung ho, 'We can do anything. You want to go to Mars? We're ready.' "

ARPA remained behind the scenes, but continued to lend support. Roy W. Johnson, the head of ARPA when Orion was initially funded, told a Senate Aeronautical and Space Sciences Subcommittee in 1959 that at first "it looked screwball; it doesn't look quite as screwball today." He described Orion to the senators as follows: "This is quite a little trick. First of all, you use bombs, and you use a lot of them. The trick is the creation of a spring mechanism on the platform. This is a peculiar thing; it won't work with anything little like a hundred tons. You are going to have to have several thousand tons; it has got to be real big or it won't work, and it has a springing device, against which the shock wave thrusts. Driving the vehicle, of course, the shock must be absorbed sufficiently so that the inhabitants of it are not killed, but so that thrust is still obtained. Some of the very finest scientists in the country have conceived this and are working on it."[119]

Thanks to ARPA, a small group of Air Force physicists who had been assembled in Albuquerque to squeeze a single H-bomb into a ten-engine B-36 bomber found themselves instead assigned to help Ted Taylor send 2,600 atomic bombs on their way to Mars. It was a marriage made in heaven. The honeymoon cost $999,750 and lasted for thirteen months.

"Herb York had just left Livermore, and things nuclear were high on the totem pole," Giller explains. "They were really the thing. Congress was all excited about things nuclear and so were all the services. Everybody's got to have his own bomb. The Marines, Army, Navy, and Air Force. There was no NASA, and ARPA had just been launched. The Advanced Research Projects Agency—you couldn't get any more advanced than that. It's in that general atmosphere. Space is out there, nuclear is good—or not bad, I'll put it that way. And a bunch of scientists—not crackpot scientists—got interested in it for the science, not necessarily for the mission. They realize they have to have a mission, but some of the scientists, like Lew Allen and Jack Welch, wanted it for science as much as anyone else. It was in that atmosphere that it was born—before all the naysayers got a chance to stop it before it got started. They showed up a little bit later, and they began to question the rationality and the cost."