Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship.

GEORGE DYSON 

While most people feared nuclear blasts early in the Cold War, a small group of scientists working and living in La Jolla, Calif., had a different attitude. In the 1950s and 1960s, they saw nuclear explosions as the promising means to sending a spaceship to another planet. Led by physicist Theodore B. Taylor and including the author's father Freeman Dyson, Project Orion was the attempt by these scientists to create a spaceship fueled by explosions that could release a million times the energy of a conventional rocket. These men spent 7 years trying to get the project off the ground, struggling both in the lab and through the maze of political bureaucracy. Shooting way beyond the moon, their goal was to send a 4,000-ton spaceship to Mars by 1965 and Saturn by 1970, but the political obstacles became too daunting. Government leaders just couldn't advocate nuclear blasts in space. Dyson deftly weaves this story from accounts relayed to him by his father and other scientists who made up the inner circle of the project. Recently declassified documents add further insight. H Holt & Co, 2002, 345 p., b&w photos/illus., hardcover, $26.00.