Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771  

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM 

Monday, March 17, 2003 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium 

George Dyson

ABSTRACT -- In 1957, a small group of scientists, supported by ARPA (now DARPA), launched a serious attempt to build a 4,000-ton (single-stage!) interplanetary spaceship propelled by nuclear bombs. The initial plan called for missions to Mars by 1965 and Saturn by 1970, in ships carrying 50 people and payloads of one thousand tons. After seven years of work, the project's technical challenges appeared surmountable, but political obstacles brought the effort to a halt. George Dyson's presentation will cover the technical and historical essentials of Project Orion, and will discuss -- but not answer -- two questions: What would happen if for some reason we had to build Orion today? What might have happened if we had built Orion in 1959?

SPEAKER --George Dyson, a research associate at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington, is currently Director's Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, for the academic year 2002-2003. His father, Freeman Dyson, was on the Orion team. George has spent four years gathering material for his book Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship (Henry Holt, 2002). He also published Darwin Among the Machines (1997) on the evolution of digital computing and telecommunications, and Baidarka (1986) on the history and prehistory of the Aleut kayak.