To Orion and Back

Spaceport America, the world’s first purpose-built launch station for commercial space travel, is now ninety percent complete�"with Phase One. Sometime in the year 2013, Richard Branson’s virgin project will begin to ferry astronauts back into the cosmic known of…low Earth orbit. In the years to follow, we will again begin to re-supply the International Space Station, otherwise known as the ‘S.S. Good-Money-After-Bad’, just in time for Russia to crash it into the Pacific Ocean. Soon after that, the sprawling complex under construction in the New Mexican desert will be able to speed our all-important business-class to boardrooms around the globe in less than an hour. Plans are also in the works for a Space Hotel, from where the super-rich will be able to watch from a safe distance the slow-motion social collapse they have selfishly wrought.

Forgive me if I seem overly cynical about this recent announcement, but forty years since landing on the Moon, unquestionably humanities’ highest achievement, the Universe’s infinite awe has been reduced to the occasional snapshot from a dying Hubble telescope and fond memories of the best hang glider that 70’s technology could muster. Hardly a source of inspiration deserving of a species that has always looked up for clues to our collective destiny, while seeing expansion and discovery as our ancestral birth right.

By 1958 the Atomic Age had already been sliced, spliced, split, spayed and fused back together again for about as long a time as it took to figure out how to get boot prints on the Moon. That year in San Diego, California, seven hundred and fifty-two miles from the Trinity test site, a small group of nuclear engineers working at General Atomic was planning the most ambitious expansion of human knowledge in our history. The plan, code-named Project Orion, was to bring human beings not just to our local satellite in a few hours, but deep into space, out to the moons of Saturn and Jupiter on a round trip that would last only a few short years. Orion was to use nuclear pulse propulsion to achieve ten percent the speed of light, or seventy million miles per hour, so that we could travel the Solar System with the ease of hopping aboard a Caribbean cruise ship. All the necessary hardware existed at that time and the complexities of the project have only gotten simpler since then. Half a century later, Orion is still the most economical and technologically feasible way for America to lead the world into the next phase of human exploration. The Apollo program, by comparison, was akin to Columbus landing in Haiti, deciding there was nothing else worthwhile to see in the New World, and instead going back home to explore the Mediterranean.

Still, better than nine out of ten American homes witnessed the Moon landing and at the time it was thought that Lunar bases, missions to Mars and the colonization of our galaxial neighborhood was just around the corner. Space was no longer the final frontier, only the next one in our long history of pushing boundaries and testing the human spirit. A way for us to put aside our minor Earthly differences and focus on the nobler quest to answer the deeper questions, such as where we come from and where our ultimate Fate lies. Yet it was those passing differences that killed the Orion project, eventually limiting the scope of vertical manned exploration to about the same horizontal distance as between New York and Boston.

Our planet is just one little blue orb floating around one average star amongst billions of solar systems where life and times pass without much notice. Somewhere out there are other beings asking the same questions, investigating the same science, suffering with the same oppressions and wondering who else might be out there trying to call out for answers. We are all extra terrestrials searching for meaning in the black holes of the deep unknown.

One day, human beings will match the ambition of our most lucid dreaming. One day we will become a civilization with intimate knowledge of our own tiny galaxy, because no matter how maddeningly slow progress might seem, civilization does move forward. From grass huts to bronzed chariots to jet planes and eventually on to Orion’s Belt. Regardless of how eager we are now to keep pushing that day off into an uncertain future, the only thing standing between imagination and actualization is the will to take the next small step. Or, as Neil Armstrong would call it, the next ‘giant leap for mankind.’

For more info on the life and death of Project Orion, click here

Author's Note

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Reviews

[Rick Puetter]

Dear Patrick,

This is an excellent write. Your comments are well thought out and you make a compelling case. There is a lot of merit in your words.

Now as an old seasoned, Ph.D. astrophysicist (I'm 59 yrs old), let me make some additional comments. Not everyone in my field agrees with what I am about to say, but I would venture to say that most do.

The Universe is so big! If we never discover a manner for trans-light travel, we are effectively stuck on Earth. Can we discover such a method? It certainly seems doubtful. There is so much understanding in modern physics that depends upon the speed of light being an ultimate velocity, that trans-light travel would mean we don't understand anything. And while people are quick to point out that there have been major revolutions in understanding, new discoveries have never swept away previous understanding entirely. There was just a deeper understanding. So am I say this just can't be? No, I'm not saying that. But what I am saying is that this would be a revolution in understanding that would be unlike anything we have yet seen. Could it happen? I suppose. But consider this. Most people believe that we'll be able to do this eventually because they would like it to be so. But the Universe doesn't care what people might like. It is the way it is. And this may simply be impossible even though we'd like it to be different. At this point, I would say physicists are not betting that trans-light travel is possible, and you can't imaging how much physical understanding would be swept away if this were possible. Literally, almost all of modern physical understanding would unravel, understandings that today can and did predict previously unmeasured results to an accuracy higher that can be measured. That's pretty heady stuff if it is now proved to be wrong. What an amazing coincidence that would be! Do you think that likely! I don't.

Okay, all that said, I still think that lots of what you say is right. So what if we can't reach the edge of the galaxy by starship? Does that mean we shouldn't go to Mars or perhaps the next star? I certainly don't think so. But this will now ultimately be a financial issue. This will take a lot of money. So when should we do it? And now, I think, we see some of the internal questionings in NASA, and even more so in Congress--although I don't think they really understand the major technical issues.

This is an interesting question, my friend. Many have said that big science is the luxury of a rich society. I have to agree with that. But what nobler human endeavor is there? Don't we strive to lift ourselves beyond our humble beginnings and raise our sights to the stars? I think we should. Otherwise we are doomed to mediocrity--a sad fate for a human race that could be so much more.

I have to give you very high marks on this write. It was greatly enjoyed and very stimulating.

Very best regards,

Rick