George B. Dyson |
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In 1957 a small group of scientists launched a secret US Government-sponsored attempt to build a 40,000 ton manned spaceship. The Orion team included some of the most brilliant minds of the time and has become one of the most tantalizing ‘what if’ stories. George Dyson talks exclusively to Penguin about what drove him to write Project Orion, the mystery surrounding the project and what effects he hopes the book will have on the future of space exploration.
What made you decide to be a writer?
I’ve always considered writing to be a tool to be used as sparingly as possible. Explorers, scientists, or historians do not have to be good writers, but it helps. My three books: Baidarka (1986), Darwin Among the Machines (1997), and Project Orion (2002). Were written not because I wanted to write, but because a subject existed that was not captured in any existing book. I’d much rather read books than write them. But because I’ve always made things, from treehouses to boats, it was probably inevitable that sooner or later I’d make a book. If there was a defining moment, it was when Kenneth Brower published The Starship and the Canoe in 1978. That’s when I thought, "That doesn’t look so difficult, he’s just putting words together, and I could do that myself." Then I learned that it is much more difficult than it looks.
Why did you want to tell the story of Orion and what brought you to write the book?
First of all, I wanted to find out what had happened and how the ship would have worked (or not worked). Ever since being told, at age five in June of 1958, that my father was planning to explore the solar system in a spaceship driven by nuclear bombs, I had been intensely curious about the project. For thirty years I had been keeping track of the unclassified literature, but it did not answer my questions, and my father could not really fill in the details of what had happened after he left the project in 1959. For years I tried to get someone else to write the book. Every time I met a non-fiction writer, I would show them my collection of Project Orion material and try and arouse their interest. I believed that I was too close to one of the principal characters to give an objective account and that the book should be written by someone else. But, due to the age of key participants, time was running out. In 1997 I passed all my material to Matthew Lyon (Where Wizards Stay Up Late, a history of the origins of the Internet) who made contact with Ted Taylor and was all set to go until his publishers decided that since the project had been unsuccessful, they would not support the book. This argument seemed so unreasonable to me that (with thanks to a contrary opinion from Penguin) I decided to undertake the effort myself.
How did the continued secrecy of so much Orion material affect your ability to give a complete account?
If the project had not been kept so secret, or had been given a comprehensive declassification review in recent years, then I expect someone else would have written the book. To me, the continued secrecy made the project more intriguing, somewhat like viewing a beautiful object in dim light: you sense the overall form but you cannot focus on the inevitable minor flaws. Many once-secret details of Project Orion such as plans for doomsday weapons, interplanetary missions, or a retaliatory Deep Space Force are obviously still classified only as a result of regulatory inertia and would be declassified if the surviving literature were given a technical review. In general I found most of the people I interviewed were quite willing to talk about these things. As far as the technical details that are still active military secrets miniaturisation of nuclear explosives, effects of directed-energy weapons, etc. It became as important to note what certain people would not say, as what they did say. It’s like trying to guess the shape of a sculpture from the chips of marble that were left out.
Orion is a great story, but what about the dark side?
The dark side of Orion remains darker than ever: fallout and bombs. Obviously, in an age when you cannot get on an airliner with a pair of scissors, no one is going to launch a spaceship carrying 2,600 nuclear bombs. But, on the other hand, it might take a dream like that of the original Orioneers; to apply our stockpile of nuclear weapons to exploring the solar system or to eventually transcend some of our conflicts that are increasingly earth-bound. As to the dark side of Orion in terms of the proposals once made to turn Orion into a weapons system to end all weapons systems I could not find anyone willing to admit to having seriously believed in this at the time. Although General Thomas Power (commander of the US Strategic Air Command) did say, after being briefed on Project Orion, that "whoever controls Orion will control the world." All the Air Force officers I interviewed were much more interested in Orion’s potential for peaceful exploration of the solar system than in whether it could be used as a battle platform to defeat our enemies on the ground.
What effect(s) do you think (or hope) the book will have?
First of all, I hope the book reminds us to use our imaginations and think big. The story of Project Orion is a marvellous example of how a small, loosely organised group of creative people can do something great under those ideal conditions, when they are supported by the resources of a larger organisation or institution but not yet stifled by the bureaucracy that so often follows. Second, I hope that the book will directly or indirectly encourage the US Government to undertake a full declassification review of the surviving Project Orion literature, and make the full record publicly available (minus a few sensitive details) for the first time. Hopefully while some of the original participants are still alive. Finally, although I do not entertain any realistic hope (or fear) of anyone using the book to build anything like Orion, I hope the account may play a background role in helping to keep the dream of large-scale space exploration alive. Some day, if and when there is a manned voyage to the outer planets, I hope there will be a copy of Project Orion on board.
