I have, and have read, the book Project Orion, about the Orion nuclear-powered spacecraft project headed by Dr. Theodore B. Taylor, and including Dr. Dyson in the 1960s (and incidentally, written by George Dyson, Freeman’s son). It’s a fascinating book about a genuinely amazing proposal, that seems crazy- propelling an interplanetary spacecraft by detonating small fission devices behind it. But it worked in scale models, and would have worked for real, as well, but the Test Ban Treaty and later treaties banned the detonation of nuclear devices in or above the atmosphere.

One of the often-overlooked advantages of such a craft is that your velocity is limited only by the number of “bomblets” you can carry along, and how much “banging” your aft pusher plate can take. As Carl Sagan pointed out (in Cosmos), While Taylor, Dyson, & Co. were thinking of Orion purely as an interplanetary vehicle, with enough “crackers”, it could achieve up to 10% of the speed of light. While that’s slow by Star Trek standards, it makes unmanned probes to the nearer stars (Alpha/Proxima Centauri, etc) quite feasible, with results available via telemetry within a human lifetime. Sagan also pointed out that of all the theoretical interstellar drive systems (Bussard ramjets, etc), the Orion is the only one that has been proven to work, and that we could build right now. (And he said that back in the 1980s.)

Like I said, Project Orion is a fascinating book about a fascinating project, and man.

cheers

eon