Vince Houghton - Nuking the Moon - And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board

Harsh but fair. Still, it didn’t work.

In July 1959, Herbert York, former Manhattan Project physicist, first-ever director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, first chief scientist for the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), and, in July 1959, the first Director of Defense Research and Engineering for the Department of Defense, was brutally honest in his assessment of the ANP:

The ANP program has been characterized by attempts to find short cuts to early flight and by brute force and expensive approaches to the problem. Thus we find that only a relatively very small fraction of the funds and energies applied to this program has gone into trying to develop a reactor with a potentially high performance…. As a result of this approach to the problem we are still at least four years away from achieving flight with a reactor-engine combination *** which can just barely fly [emphasis mine. *** in original].

Finally, in March 1961, the newly inaugurated President Kennedy took one look at the quagmirical money pit/dumpster fire that was the ANP and terminated the program. By that time, the United States had spent nearly fifteen years and more than $1 billion on the program (almost $8.5 billion today), with very little to show for the effort.

So why did this go so badly? What went wrong, and why didn’t someone from the government see this happening and stop it long before the program had spent one billion dollars ? True, the U.S. government spent millions weaponizing bats, but you’d think when it hit $500 million someone would have raised a red flag.

But therein lies the problem, not just with the budget but with the entire program: No one was really paying all that much attention. Sure, fourteen separate government reviews of the project were made from 1955 until the cancellation in 1961—but by fourteen different review groups, all temporary, with little continuity in membership among the groups, and the reviews themselves based on brief visits to the contractors’ plants and briefings and discussions in Washington, rather than in-depth and comprehensive study. Nine of the fourteen review groups were ad hoc—temporary and hurried.

Not exactly vigorous oversight.

For example, the review group that issued the first report, in April 1955, based its findings entirely on information received during an inspection trip on which they spent a single day at the General Electric plant, and a single day at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. These were followed by a one-day meeting in Washington with the Technical Advisory Panel on Atomic Energy.

The review group that wrote the June 1955 report based its analysis solely on meetings in Washington, and did not even visit the contractors’ locations. A group that completed its review in April 1957 spent more time both in the field with contractors as well as in meetings in Washington (one day each at GE, Pratt & Whitney, Convair, and Lockheed, and five days in DC), but the overall mission of this group (also ad hoc) was to evaluate the entire ANP program, analyze the objectives and soundness of the technical approaches to the problem, and advise as to the future of the ANP program.

This was several months worth of work shoved into a couple of days. No wonder no one knew what the hell was going on.

While the ANPwas trying to bring nuclear energy into the wild blue yonder, another extraordinary government program was aiming for the stars. The conceptual basis for Project Orion can be traced to the hallowed laboratories of the Manhattan Project. Polish American mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, one of the men most responsible for the development of the hydrogen bomb (along with Edward Teller), first conceived of the idea of using nuclear explosions to propel an object through space (a concept known as nuclear pulse propulsion) after witnessing the testing of the atomic bomb in July 1945.

Have you ever bounced on a pogo stick? I know “kids these days” have their video games and smartphones and Candy Crush, but back in my day if we really wanted to have fun—and a chance to severely injure ourselves—we’d grab the good ol’ rusty pogo stick from the garage and bounce on it three or four times until we lost control and flew into the bushes. Good times. If you know what I’m talking about, you’ll have no problem understanding the concept behind Project Orion. If not, use your personal Google machine to look it up. This story will make a lot more sense.

Orion was a spacecraft that would essentially chuck out nuclear bombs behind it. The bombs would explode, and the resulting shock wave would hit Orion and propel it forward. Do this a couple hundred (or thousand) times, and you can really get your spacecraft moving—enough so that you can quickly and easily visit other planets, or even take a trip to another solar system.

There’s a little more to this concept, of course. When the bomb exploded (about fifty meters or so from the ship) it would create a shock wave of high-velocity, high-density plasma that would hit a massive pusher plate at the stern of the spacecraft (some of the specifics are still classified). The pusher plate would weigh as much as a thousand tons, and would be coated with what’s known as an “ablative” plastic (like what is used on a space capsule’s heat shield) to protect it from the flurry of nuclear blasts. Each detonation would add about 20 mph to Orion’s velocity, and since it would be traveling through the frictionless vacuum of space, this acceleration could continue until Orion ran out of bombs.

But if that’s all there was to the pusher plate, it would not keep Orion safe for human occupancy. The reason: The acceleration from the shock wave of a nuclear blast at that distance would be somewhere in the ballpark of ten thousand times the force of gravity (10,000 g). That’s a lot—and it would happen over and over again, each time another nuke went off. Most normal humans can only take about 5 g without experiencing serious medical problems. To make it safe for humans, Orion’s pusher plate was attached to the body of the spacecraft by gigantic springs that served to absorb the force of the nuclear blast, reduce the acceleration forces to a comfortable 4 g, and then transfer that energy into forward motion—like a nuclear-bomb-powered space pogo stick.

(And yes, physicists, I know I am stretching the living bejeezus out of this metaphor. But for the layperson, please continue to play along.)

The idea for this kind of vehicle was codified by Stanislaw Ulam and Cornelius Everett in their 1955 report titled On a Method of Propulsion of Projectiles by Means of External Nuclear Explosions. At that point it was just a concept paper, but after Sputnik, esoteric scientific concepts began to move quickly from the minds of scientists to development in the real world. Project Orion was formally proposed as a serious program in 1958 by a team of scientists and engineers at the General Atomics Division of the General Dynamics Corporation. Many of those working on the program were veterans of the Manhattan Project, and looked forward to finding new ways to use their wartime invention toward peaceful pursuits. That same year, governmental support came in the form of funding for a feasibility study from the newly established Advanced Research Projects Agency, which didn’t really make a ton of sense since ARPA was a Department of Defense agency and required that all sponsored projects should have a military application. The scientists and engineers working on Orion weren’t thinking of their work in terms of military uses, but they were certainly happy to have the financial support. No one was going to look the gift horse in the mouth.

This is especially true considering that no other government agency wanted anything to do with Orion. NASA, which had also been formed in the wake of the Sputnik launch, did not see Orion as a practical means of space exploration. Perhaps it was too forward-thinking. At this time, NASA was still trying to figure out how to get a small satellite and a chimpanzee into space. The U.S. Air Force was not interested either, although it had taken over many (if not all) of ARPA’s military space projects. Orion didn’t fit squarely in this category, and the Air Force rightly concluded that the program was unlikely to produce any tangible military benefits. Orion was going to take us to Mars, or to the moons of Saturn. Or even to another solar system. Unless there were aliens to fight, this wasn’t a military mission.