Project Orion: Secret Mars Mission Powered by Nuclear Bombs
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- čas přidán 24. 07. 2018
- Project Orion was a Supper Heavy Lift Spacecraft intended to be directly propelled by a series of explosions of atomic bombs behind the craft. This is a 10 Meter version with Eight astronauts, with around 100 tons of equipment and supplies, which could have made a round trip to Mars in 125 days. The biggest design is the "super" Orion design; at 8 million tonnes, it could easily be a city.
and yes there is no sound in space.
Rocket launch sound from CocoaBeachProductions freesound:freesound.org/s/248111/ - Věda a technologie
Aliens: you put nuclear bombs behind your spacecraft and call it propulsion system?
Humans: hey, as long as it works
@The Student Official ever read footfall
Are you indonesian
@@tariqahmad1371 Yes!! Niven and Pournelle?
@born levensregt yes
Alien cocks an eyebrow. Human shrugs and adds, "We've got plenty of them lying around."
To everyone mentioning fairings:
The Saturn V stack minus the first stage weighed close to 700 tons, whereas a 10m Orion weighs about 500. This means the S-1C gets 20% more delta-V when launching an Orion. That's about 500 m/s of extra delta-V to counter drag. Furthermore, since the main objective of the S1C is to loft the Orion out of the atmosphere to reduce fallout, you can adopt a much steeper launch profile and lower the thrust throughout all parts of the launch to reduce aerodynamic drag and dynamic pressure, while still lofting the Orion high enough for it to power its way into orbit.
In short, launching it without a fairing is totally doable, you just need to change up the throttle profile and flight trajectory to make use of the S1C's increased performance.
Addendum: You can do this with the S1C stage because Orion is already overpowered enough to fly into orbit by itself with very little impact on payload, if it weren't for fallout problems.
Now that was called big brain
the real concept had a fairing
@@5000mahmud I know, but it doesn't necessarily need one, depending on what you want to do with it
@@dsdy1205 True.
*s c i e n c e*
"Just slap it on a Saturn V first stage, it'll be fine."
lol
It's what NASA does
The Drinker Recommends; Mars or nothing!
looks cursed with that
More like it'll need a sea dragon stage
"Nuclear Engines"
KSP Players: Nerv Engines
Me: *Project Orion*
Weird how people sometimes call both of them "nuclear engines" when they have completely different work principles... By the way, do you prefer the weak Nerv or this literal nuclear bomb blowup?
Meanwhile me: PROJECT SUPER ORION!
mods of ksp: SUPER ORION
ksp 2 players: both
@@edith8048 you copied meh?
I love the sound rockets make when they lift off.
ScienceIsTruth yes me too it is so Royal
I bet your speakers don't like it..
It's like rocket farting
This is my toilet bowl hear when it Tuesday
The Orion engine, on the other hand, is pretty terrifying ...
Rip aerodynamics
R.I.P. imagination. :D
@@petroscephasxd
Manovv Pathak aerodynamics are useless anyway
Aerodynamics are useless in space.
@@ChrisMontgomery-xtrmagamr I think he mean during lift off
1:33 R.I.P. stack separator
destroyed by nuclear bomb
Press f to pay respect
@@blazeyt7543 f
Campbell Mays yes it was the interstage of the Saturn v, they had to separately separate it because the j2 engines on the second stage couldn’t pass the interstage without hitting anything, they could have the engines on and then separate it. I’m surprised they would do the same with Orion because there is no engine bell
There should be a hold in middle of ablative plate for bomb release.
@@blazeyt7543 f
That Orion/Saturn V first stage stack would've been a sight to behold
The amount of work that actually went into that concept is incredible. Each nuclear charge would be be encased in a cannister with a tungsten endcap that would be pointing towards the pusher plate. The tungsten would then vaporize last, increasing the blast wave in that direction. So this thing would have been powered by shaped nuclear charges.
Loved the frequency/amplitude change in the Doppler effect. Nice attention to detail!
I never cease to be amazed by the very concept of a Nuclear Pulse Propulsion Drive. Seeing this so gloriously animated makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. Loved the way the whole stack reversed orientation so the NPPD could decelerate the Spaceship into Mars orbit! Exhilarating to see such detailed animations. Well done!!!
This single animation holds more valuable insight into the Orion Program than any professionally produced documentary on the topic. The details and implications of even your creative choices are amazing, reminding the viewer how close we came to building this very design. Bravo.
Weird that it has no fairing around it at launch.
Russkies don't use interstages. They have exposed engines that fire while the lower stage is still attached eliminating the need for ullage thrusters. It works.
Perhaps a fairing would simply be too heavy to properly surround the entire spacecraft.
When it gets up to speed(usually 15-30 seconds after launch), close to 40% of the total chemical fuel will be used just to fight the air, the difference between aero and non-aero would be dramatic, the outer shell shape needs to be optimized to cut through the air, such a shape can also reduce air turbulence to a controllable degree so it doesn't overwhelm the engines' gimbals(doesn't take much since most of them can only do 10 degrees); more aerodynamic = easier for the rocket to stabilize while transiting the atmosphere, jagged and square-y bits exposed to the wind just won't do.
The only reason that it uses a lower chemical stage is because NASA didn't want to nuke Florida multiple times on every Orion launch. A nuclear pulse drive has _way_ more than enough ∆V to stick something directly into orbit, but practically they needed to get it high enough first. With a payload that heavy, even a re-purposed Saturn V lower stage would have a hard time getting it up to speed; it would get it there, but it wouldn't get there fast. So, because it's flying much slower than most rockets, it doesn't build up enough drag to require a heavy streamlined fairing.
TL;DR: Rocket is too slow, fairing is too heavy, and don't nuke Florida.
it's just an artistic liberty so that we can see the orion. people are trying to rationalize it but the actual concept does have the fairing www.astronautix.com/o/orionsaturnv.html
Ah yes, the innovative nuclear fart rocket
Best animation I have seen of a NPP ship I've ever seen, this design is really underused in media which is a shame considering how technically feasible it is.
It doesn't appear in common media because most information about Project Orion is highly classified even today.
The whole concept makes my head hurt. Detonating consecutive nukes while traveling through the atmosphere would play havoc on radio communications, not to mention all the crap infrastructure that still hasn't been updated to protect against solar flares.
Also the propulsion nukes are not regular nukes, but specially designed nuclear shaped charges with low yield and designed to focus most of the energy at the pusher plate.
@@boymahina123 casaba howitzer
An air burst MIRV ballistic missile with it would be cool as hell
@@japzone Detonating consecutive nukes while moving through the atmosphere is an idiotic idea. Especially for those living even hundreds of miles from the launch site.
So awesome. Appreciate the level of work that you put into these animations, you deserve way more subs.
I am going to take a guess that the upper (especially the middle) section of the launch stack wouldn't be very aerodynamic, fairings to cover up the jagged and exposed bits would dramatically increase fuel efficiency.
Also thought about that since the whole goal of going into space is to minimize the drag on the spacecraft and so forth.
The real concept did have a fairing.
There is no drag in a perfect vacuum of space.
@@herbyg777 Yes, but you have to be very far away from Earth to experience a perfect vacuum.
@@ryanspence5831 True, but you only have to go up 60km to experience a vacuum good enough for practical purposes
It could damned well work. I understand that President Kennedy nixed the project due to a presentation of it as a future battleship of space. Theodore Roosevelt would have given it a green light for that reason alone!
It would need to start the nuclear engine _way_ past LEO, to avoid fallout.
you also get emps
Yeah true meaning it would have to have a Saturn v second stage as well as first stage to get it to LEO since the first stage doesn’t even take it to space. The rocket might be a bit too big though.
air burst nukes have very little fallout.
@@5000mahmud Yea, no kidding. There were a LOT of nukes tested in the 50's and 60's, most of which WAY higher yield than that proposed for Orion. And these are way up in the atmosphere with very little debris TOO fallout.
It's more about public opinion of anything nuclear than actual danger of fallout etc these days unfortunately. Unless Russia or China did it ;)
There's no keeping THAT a secret!
Sadly enough
The only thing that was tested was the mini propolsion system
The concept works though
@@koharumi1 With nuclear power, everything works.
1:50 awesome beats
For those interested, here's a link to some history on this
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)
Every single animation you make is like, 2x as good as the last one!!!!
Keep up the amazing work!!!
Thanks for this, excellent work.
It's great to see Orion visualised this way, keeps the dream of what might have been and still could be possible alive.
Cheers.
Great graphics, you put a lot of detail. Must have taken awhile. I'm impressed. Thanks, very cool.👍
Awesome animation! For some reason i was so mesmerized by the animation once the second stage engine started. Keep up the good work!
- How many nuclear bombs does it need?
- Yes
Next project: combine a 23 m diameter version of Orion as upper stage, with a Sea Dragon lower stage!
I wonder: shouldn't each of those detonation pulses be a blinding light? They are "mini"-nuclear explosions, after all.
So what if all electrical devices underneath the flight path are shut down by the EMPs...it would be EPIC! ;-)
Orion's drive bombs are too weak to generate any significant EMP.
Just to pass-on the advantages of a 20-m diameter Orion about which I've read: such a vehicle would have a 3,150-sec ISP, and a maximum velocity of 192,000 fps, which would permit a single-stage round trip to Jupiter, with a 20-man complement and 100,000 kg of destination
payload, in the duration of 900 days.
caav56: Your reply encouraged me to do research into the planned yields for the pulse units of the Saturn-lofted Orion design, and how much EMP such pulses would generate. It turns out, that's a very complicated issue to determine, as I'm finding! The pulse units contemplated for the Saturn-lofted Orion vehicle were expected to yield 15 kt. EMP does its damage by "peak electric field at ground zero" in units of volts/meter, which is dependent on multiple factors: (1.) "Prompt gamma input" in kt - NOT the same as total yield of the weapon. Depending on the design of the weapon (fission or fusion), prompt gamma input can vary from 0.115-0.5% of the total weapon yield - fission weapons produce higher prompt gamma input than fusion ones. "The EMP at a fixed distance from an explosion increases at most as the square root of the yield...This means that although a 10 kiloton weapon has only 0.7% of the energy release of the 1.44-megaton Starfish Prime test, the EMP will be at least 8% as powerful. Since the E1 component of nuclear EMP depends on the prompt gamma ray output, which was only 0.1% of yield in Starfish Prime but can be 0.5% of yield in low yield pure nuclear fission weapons, a 10 kiloton bomb can easily be 5 x 8% = 40% as powerful as the 1.44 megaton Starfish Prime at producing EMP." (glasstone.blogspot.com/2006/03/emp-radiation-from-nuclear-space.html). (2.) Altitude. For example, "To boost the EMP lethality of a simple one-kiloton fission weapon, it must be detonated much lower than the hundreds of km that would expose the entire continental US to harmful electric fields. In fact, the “sweet spot” for maximizing the EMP lethality of such weapons would be a detonation altitude of about 40 kilometers-significantly higher, or lower, and the peak fields at ground level will decrease." (www.thespacereview.com/article/1549/2).
Other factors include target distance, intervening geographical features, and local strength of the Earth's magnetic field (the latter, of course, depends on latitude). For reference: the Saturn V in its production design typically staged between its first and second stages at 36 nautical miles (67 km), and downrange of Cape Canaveral about 50 nautical miles (93 km).
All this to say: I hope you're right - but I would defer to somebody A LOT smarter than myself on that question! ;-)
You've missed one little thing - for atmo part of launch, Orion uses sub-kiloton bombs (0.14 or 0.35 kt, depending on version of Orion). The bigger nukes are only put to use, when ship is in high enough orbit.
I had not found that info! Can you recommend a source(s) which gives the yields of the pulse units for various periods of ascent/escape velocity profiles? I would love to incorporate such source(s) into my research. Many thanks for any guidance you can offer!
This is very nice but i have some points to make:
-Payloads must have fairings
-Mars still has a visible atmosphere
-Mars is a little bit too red
Overall I like you attention to detail! Awesome video!
Linecraftman
I think he didn’t include the fairing just to give us the look of it.
fairing separation would look very satisfying though
The swirling air would have ripped that craft apart. Great intentions but a bit ridic!
@@berylrosenberg704
In reality it would've looked something like this: www.astronautix.com/nails/o/orionsco.jpg
It's a shame that it never got built. One of these things could do a single stage mission to *Saturn* and back.
Mars should be that red.
There was also a plan for a trip to one of the moons of Saturn by 1970 (whereas this would take place in 1965).
I have all the conditions to go on that flight, 1 - I am an aviator with 4500 flight hours, 2 - I'm 70 years old, I've lived a whole life, it's okay to take life risks. 3 - On this flight it is possible for me to spend a weekend on Mars. excellent
I think a space agency should hire you for animation purpose ❤️
Nice beat
Nicely done! Always loved the Orion. Pity it never was made. I do have a question about the nuke detonations. Yes, they were designed to focus as much of their blast toward the Orion's pusher plate but I think there would still have been an overall explosion surrounding that charge. There'd have been that high velocity jet but there'd also have been a fireball around it. No way those propulsion charges could've contained the full explosive effect.
Great stuff though! Thanks for creating it!
It is very inefficient of the energy in the nuclear fuel, and a crude and wasteful way, but the amount of energy available in even a small blast is so much.
A spherical neutron reflector doesn't affect more than a few percent of the neutrons flying around, but the little bit they do is enough to make their inclusion into a bomb necessary. This then is similarly wasteful, but it works.
This small ship vaporizes a jet of ~half a ton of tungsten into a jet hotter than the surface of the Sun, before its own blast blows it apart.
@@JFrazer4303 The actual nuclear explosion only fissions about 5% (or so) of the available fissile material, so it's wasteful in that sense as well. Reactors only use up about 2% of the fissile material before it has to be reprocessed. I'm sure fusion reactors would only fuse about half or less of their material.
Just went though all of your vids and it is amazing to see the progress. Love the sounds and realistic camera placement!
wow!!! this was amazing. The acceleration between explosions blew me away
I don’t know why they abandoned this idea. It’s brilliant
It's not abandoned, it's still in theory just like time machine. Definitely inorder for longer traveling we will be needing this and people are working on it everywhere from every corner. Without nuclear propulsion we have no chance of going to even the nearest star system.
It's abandoned due to NTB treaty and Nuclear Non-proliferation agreement. This applies to all sea, land, air and outerspace.
@@Hannan_1325 welp. I guess we’ll have to just do it ourselves lol 🤷♂️
This Channel deserve at least 1 million subscribers...
I bet I'm not the only one who cranked up the volume and watched it about 20 times.
Very cool, about time someone did a good animation of this.
Using modern high-efficiency thermonuclear bombs the ship could achieve a certainly conservative fraction of the speed of light by 15% if it carried the right amount of thermonuclear bombs and could carry a useful load to another 10,000-ton star quietly enough for a mission. fully manned human crew observing an Isp of 1 million seconds. Because later projects considered Orion with a mass of 8 million tons, of which 3 million would be payload, a typical modern thermonuclear W-76 bomb weighs only 165 KG and can produce an explosive power equivalent to 100,000 tons of TNT the ship could weighing more than 100,000 tonnes with a portion of that mass in the oil-coated copper damper at each detonation the damper would be hemispherical and would have a huge mass to absorb as much as possible from each detonation with thermonuclear bombs designed to return at 10 kilotons. PU-239 ready for these pumps is not lacking today.
A pity because it is the most real project to travel long distances at high speed.
Yep. And killed by the atmospheric test ban treaty.
A damn shame because we could have colonized Alpha Centauri by now.
@@seen203 O O F
@@ryanspence5831 Big OOF.
We literally could have done so in that time frame.
Technically speaking.
Aliens visiting us will have 1960’s tech.
@@seen203 damn it we were supposed to be out there exploring damn
Excellent animation ~ would have loved to see more of the descent stage & landing on mars.
This vehicle wouldn't land, it would carry a separate lander.
The sound effects of the rocket engines in this video is just amazing
To quote the old film, "Fasten your seat belts...it's going to be a bumpy night."
To quote the book: "God was knocking and he wanted in bad"
@@sudragon2k3 Larry Niven's Footfall, right?
Could the exposed spacecraft withstand the max-q ?
probably not :D It's a *space* ship after all
Project Orion was an external nuclear pulse drive, it was designed to withstand sub kiloton nuclear blasts for propulsion.
The concept had a fairing I’m pretty sure he didn’t do one so we could see the space craft
@@johnwang9914 those blasts only be behind the shock absorber tho
Everyone:doesn't care about it
That one company:dibs
Awesome work. Like all the little detail you throw in there.
Omg the bass on this is sick! With dual subs it sounded immense!
Great production!
Absolutely love your work. It just keeps getting better and better!
I believe Stanton Friedman worked on this concept. Of course I could be miss remembering.
+Gun Slinger I think you mean Freeman Dyson as it was his son who put together the book chronicling it's development.
@@johnwang9914 Both Stanton Friedman and Freeman Dyson worked on the project.
incredible!
Make a video about missions to the moon europe: an ice dig, a submarine drone exploring the frozen ocean, would be even more incredible!
Environmental impact analysis may have killed at least one version of the nuclear rocket. More than 30 years ago I was working in Dallas and a colleague told me about the nuclear rocket program. His former company had done an environmental analysis for NASA - particularly about the possible impact of a launch failure. This was NOT the micro-nuke Orion project - but perhaps it could have some relevance. The nuclear rocket concept they analyzed used hundreds (thousands?) of pencil sized rods of plutonium to produce thrust - I think it was superheating water/some other element but I could be wrong on that aspect. The question they tried to answer was the potential impact if a nuclear-powered rocket exploded before achieving orbit - and they concluded the spread pattern of the fuel rods from a high altitude explosion would be a huge mess. I believe that was the fatal flaw that killed that version of a nuclear rocket at that time - there was simply no way to contain such an explosion. That does not mean the explosion would be a nuclear explosion - more like a dirty bomb where the nuclear materials would be ejected by a non-nuclear explosion. (I think the analysis was done in the 1970's, but that is just a guess). It is not as though rockets never explode when launched, so the risk was considered unacceptable. None of this was public, but the nuclear rocket program of that era just sort of folded - but not without reason. As for why it was not made public - I can imagine plenty of reasons including not wanting to publicize a "failure", not wanting the Soviets to learn anything whatsoever about the US space program, the nuclear industry not wanting the prospect of widespread radioactive contamination being splashed across the headlines (this was before the whole nuclear power industry pretty much folded) and, finally, not wanting the public to even suspect how far the program had advanced. Now I just hope I have not disclosed anything worth getting a visit from some three letter agency. Incidentally, I have not tried to keep this vague - my recollection simply IS vague. So using nuclear bombs (bomblets?) anywhere in the atmosphere or even low earth orbit would seem potentially reckless. We have a problem with debris in orbit around the earth now. Just imagine how much worse that debris problem would be if those debris included innumerable tiny nuclear bombs? It would be like having an orbiting nuclear minefield around the planet, with the added risk that inevitably some of those bomblet would de-orbit..
would be pretty sad if the ISS crashed into nuclear bomb debris, but its pretty sad as well that these rockets never made it, nuclear bombs can pack a lot of energy into small space, which is obviously nice for rockets. I saw some concept of a nuclear thorium powered car, but that's even more ridicilous, sure you would never have to fuel your car again, but you would get cancer just from being near it
Orion wouldn't have used fuel rods, it sounds like you are talking about the NERVA rocket programme.
Nice, I expected 2-3 bombs a second and a much brighter light. Aside from that, great work and love to the detail. Even a particle stream from the bomb to the pusher plate is visible (as should be due to the design of the bombs) - very cool!
Cavaron EV I remember they said “4 per second “ in the documentary.
@@dosomething3 And as far as the light, yeah it would be far brighter considering nuclear explosions are usually described as looking like small suns.
The real frequency of using the bombs would have been one every one or two seconds. You can't shoot them out that fast and the frequency of detonation is determined by the natural frequency of the three mass-two spring system of the pusher plate, shock absorber-legs and body of the space craft. You must use another bomb before the pusher plate becomes fully extended or you will have the ship being pulled backwards at like, negative 2 g's or something.
@@battleoid2411 I always wanted a son.
@@xrfa7422 The fuck
Such a cool visuilazion! Sure no sound in space but it would still resonate on the walls and the crew capsule is pressurized I'd imagine it would be very loud!
The debris hitting the pusher plate would transfer "sound". You'd hear it.
The original Project Orion project included studies on what it would be like for the crew and also the extent of retinal burns on any spectators on the ground. Basically, don't look at this ship when it's under propulsion.
I really like your videos! They are great for showing my friends how all these conceptual and real spacecraft work. I make sure to tell them you make really good videos too.
In case you are looking for suggestions... Dynasoar, New Glenn, or perhaps Nova?
Hats off to the artist(s) who made this. Superb and beautiful.
Please do a video for project Daedalus starship design.
Heh. Only other time I've heard of an Orion launching from ground was in the novel Footfall. Though, that one started out with a bang, if you will.
AMAZING VIDEO! Superb rending of Orion, thanks so much.
NerdNote: no sound in space vacuum. That being said: me with my headphones on and the volume maxx 🙉
How did you do that video ?! I never saw so much quality
An Orion firing *inside* Earth's atmosphere? It doesn't bear thinking about. Still, it's been done before: in "Footfall", by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, an Orion was secretly built in Bellingham's harbour to fight an invading alien species' home ship.
The Orion was built to launch directly from the harbour, so you can imagine how much, or little, of Bellingham was left afterwards...
It's not as crazy as you might think. You need some truly gargantuan bombs before you you to worry about any kind of long-lasting damage or damage anywhere aside from directly around the site of detonation. There's a lot of them but they're only the size of soft drink cans.
You wouldn't want to do it over a populated area or for takeoff but there's really no reason to not fire the engine inside the Earth's atmosphere as a second stage. No impact site means no fallout and they're only small bombs so it's not like radiation is a concern. Worst case scenario that interstage gets blown to buggery and nobody can clean it up for a couple of months.
Space based nukes generate huge EMP, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime and I doubt the radiation and fallout will NOT be a concern.
Starfish Prime was more than a megaton. Orion drive bombs are sub-kiloton. More than a thousand times weaker.
My father worked on project Orion when he was with the Defense Atomic Support Agency in the 50's and 60's.
BTW there are versions of the Orion Drive that can retract the shock absorbers for storage, so you don't need to have that awkward, aerodynamically worrying middle section.
The ring after first stage is not needed, considering the type of the second stage engine. The ring is designed to slightly accelerate the second stage so that the liquid fuel flows down and the main engines start working
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ullage_motor
@@chrisjohnston4445 this things on the ring? so i say.. they are not needed in this case
@@wingstrongwingstrong I know. Just trying to help you out.
@@chrisjohnston4445 ясно, понятно
Yeah, why did they need a spacer?
this thing reminds at the Movie Deep Impact
Ive read a book on this concept, and it seemed completely insane, its funny watching an animation of it, it actually seems a lot more viable and potentially a good idea for deep space travel. Maybe!
The graphics on you're videos are so good that it's almost too real
wow that nuclear detonation over the surface of the earth would be very dangerous
+Skiper747 Only to electronics and the power grid. The idea behind the stripped down 8 man NASA Mars mission version was to launch it into orbit on a Saturn V before using the sub kiloton bomblet propulsion units. Personally, I would've designed it with hexagonal blast plates so multiple units could be linked together for a greater cross section, the narrow version may be sufficient for a Mars mission but the spaceship will never return to the surface of Earth so why not build it up in modules over time since the number of propellent nuclear bomblets need not be increased as the mass of the ship is increased. It was the original three hundred man version that was to be ground launched with about a thousand nuclear bomblets into orbit, the first few bomblets might not be nuclear in order to reduce fallout but they had determined that a steel plate on the ground would prevent the bombs from blasting up the irradiated dirt as fallout. The impact of all those bomblets would still be less than the open air atomic tests of the fifties and only one launch would've been needed to place all the infrastructure and manpower needed for a permanent presence in space. Project Orion is still our best interplanetary and perhaps interstellar drive, however accumulating the thousands of nuclear bombs needed is not only a political impossibility but an impossible scenario to secure from theft and abuse.
Skiper747 that’s why it was canceled after nuke testing was banned.
Also the original plan had a larger Saturn V variant take it all the way to orbit then the Orion would use nuke propulsion.
Hello, they tested all kinds of nukes for decades.........we are all still alive.
@@uhvman War and famine has happened for tens of thousands of years and we are also still alive today.
Guess war and famine mustn't be that bad then eh.
@@adamanderson3042
War and famine are completely different. Nuclear weapons are never tested in massive population centres (exluding Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which weren't "tests" so to speak).
In my opinion project Orion represents the best possible use of nuclear weapons.
Was this floated as a option at the time?
At what altitude do you have the Orion stage starting?
Shouldn't that be above the atmosphere?
It is a good video, would have thought Orion would start after a second stage, to clear the atmosphere.
Brad Erickson It was and testbed vehicles were built that used conventional explosives. Orion on its own was SSTO+. The Saturn V first stage here is just to minimize fallout (and save some fuel pellets).
It was an actual US airforce project hence top secret and all the tests occurred on the planned timeline. What killed it was the anti-missile treaties which forbade orbital nuclear weapons. The original plan was for a 300 man bullet shaped spaceship launched from Coyote flats with over a thousand nuclear bomblets. This animation seems to be derived from NASA's 8 man Mars mission and 20 man Jupiter mission version which were intended to be launched into orbit by the Saturn V. The transfer from the airforce to NASA was in hopes of negotiating a civilian exception to the arms agreement, the Soviets would have none of that. President Kennedy was also horrified by the idea as the Airforce presented him with a six foot tall model covered with gun turrets. Nobody knows what happened to that model.
This was a serious idea for a long time in one form or another developed by the brightest minds in physics at the time.
This is awesome!
I Love this Idea...just might work!!!!!!
How safe can it be to have nuclear bombs set to detonate 1 second apart on board the space craft ? If something goes wrong with a loader or a ejector they could end up blowing themselves to smitherines.
That's the same with any rocket.
You'd really have to treat the bombs like fuel, make sure 50 or so are queued up on average, if it drop down to a couple bombs left, cut off the ignition of further bombs. This takes the load off off the ejector system., as it can shut down in the event of an issue. Also put in a few overrides just to be safe. Those can be system or human controlled.
Then, you'd really need to make sure those bombs only detonate at a fair distance, whatever that would be depending on the yield. There are many ways to achieve this, but it really comes down to a "Best design" principle and will likely be best achieved with many redundancies such as a gun type device which was seen in Little Boy (Think almost like a safety on a gun being one such redundancy) which also promotes the detonation being directed at the rear of the ship through a shaped charge. With the blast directed at the rear of the ship, you can make a smaller yield and carry more fuel.
And finally, the system in which you use to navigate while your tail end is pointed at your target when your slowing down needs to also be thought out well.
I mean rockets are just flying bombs anyway if anything goes wrong. Doesn't really matter if it's a nuke or normal then. The radiation damage would be relatively low. Nukes don't just simply explode eather.
Its not a nuclear bomb on a timer, its a pellet of dueterium. It goes boom only after being smacked by high intensity laser beams so all you have to do to avoid unwanted boom is shut the laser off.
@@tyson31415 uh no man Orion is fisdion bombs.
it reminds me of spore space stage.
That seems a better idea than a direct Orion launch, though I have always wondered why a booster powered by large yield non-nuclear explosives, like Lithium HYdride BLU -82s couldn't have been used in the atmosphere. Nice animation! Love the detail of the vapour coming off the Saturn stage.
Non nuclear explosions will have low specific impulse
@@TheAmericanCatholic Even lithium Hydride BLU 82s or FAE?
one of the rare videos that captures the ludicrous speed that spacecraft travel at
All that alien spaceships we found we still can't use that in space I know it's probably a newest technology but God we need to get there faster
What alien spaceships you talking about?
wait, why are there no fairings?
Really good work, bravo !
Your videos are superb...just excellent...makes you feel for a while you're there.
What could have been, what could have been! Read the book Project Orion. We would have been past Europa by now had this been completed in the early 1980's instead of the space shuttle fleet.
+jack kennedy Yes, it could've sucured humanity from global catastrophes forever. But at least we haven't died from nuclear war or terrorism, accumulation the thousands of small sub kiloton nuclear bombs would've been both a political and security problem.
@@johnwang9914
Yeah, it was scientifically very feasible but unfortunately politically infeasible. It would take a killer asteroid on approach to Earth to encourage this kind of development.
hardly secret. Dyson has been talking about it for decades
"Sir, how would you like to be the rocket like?"
"Bom"
Note that the SH+ upper stage lifts as much as the Saturn-V., vastly cheaper, if it works and note that SpaceX was underselling all launch services competitors before they'd landed a booster.
This was the "lofting" launch. The booster and the mission hardware each, would cost more than the engine or the hundreds of atomic-explosive driven pulse charges. (numbers from General Atomics, NASA, the USAF, DoE, and the White House OMB all agreed on that.) Presumably the way they were churning out "pits" for warheads back during the cold war, with zero thought to lapses like dumping contaminated trash in normal landfills. We'd need to clean it up and work on dealing with such wastes.
The better alternative was to break the 500+ton ship into parts that could be lifted to LEO by the boosters & uppers.
The first thing they needed to delete from this design was the launch escape rocket section & the crew's flight station/ landing capsule. It's a lot of dead weight you hope you'll never use, and which can't be used for anything else. You don't send crew up on a Saturn-V cargo booster which can be dumb and simple unlike the crew flights, which could go up on a Saturn IB.
Anything which would be the ship's EVA prep room and airlock would be the first thing inhabited, then attached to the habitat and supplies, and then to the rest of the ship.
The engine is stowed for launch with the shock absorbers compressed-in all the way. The pulse unit is shot out through the fixture at the center of the plate while the shocks are compressed. The ready-for-firing position is with the shocks maximum extended.
Some 75% of the mass that's thrown overboard is propellant, which might be Tu but could be anything from ices and plastics to stone.
An appealing mission proposal involved two vehicles to be assembled.
The unmanned cargo ship takes a long slow Hohmann transfer, but some 80%+ of what leaves LEO is payload in Mars orbit.
The crewed ship ignores minimum energy transfer curves and Synodic periods but to go when the 2 planets are physically closest, literally "jumping" out at cometary speed: 21 days into Mars orbit. (including starting and stopping, unlike projections for things like VASIMR, speaking of 39 days to Mars. No., that's a lie. That's the distance covered at mid-course cruise speed, without factoring in the time accelerating to that speed, or before you start braking into Mars orbit.)
Versions for post-Apollo 20 meter diameter boosters, could be anything from a bigger , multi-purpose ship like this for a 20 person crew to Jupiter's moons, to a 120+ km/sec delta-V engine and fuel load for a rapid trajectory to Saturn's moons in a couple of months, or a slow cargo run with thousands of tons payload.
For a space assembled ship, launched in sections, fallout is ignored because it can be fired above the Van Allen belts, if necessary (not likely).
Engineers like using the pulse engine only in space, because the timing is very much relaxed. >1 every 20 seconds, versus the rapid cycling action of the lofted version.
Not a bad idea. On a side note, about pulse engines - have you seen Moto-Orion concept?
Would really like to congratulate you on the video. My only question is whether the discharge of pellets in the upper atmosphere, creates radioactive pollution.
It would, which is one of the reasons why project Orion was abandoned
Orion used shaped-charge nuclear explosives -- not "pellets" -- you are thinking of Project Daedalus. Different system entirely.
"secret"
If that Orion mock craft accelerated like that for 7 months non stop it would be at least clocking in at 2% to 3% the speed of light by the time it reaches Mars lol. Nice concept tho. I like it.
Great Animation love every single one of them
It's a game
RIP astronauts. Killed by nuclear radiation.
Wrong. Why don't you people research anything before posting nonsense?
@@williamblack4006 Can you prove right here and now that radiation doesn't spread through space? Can you prove that detonating nuclear explosions behind the space craft won't create radiation? Can you prove that there isn't already a lot of radiation in space between here and Mars? Can you prove that Mars is protected from radiation assuming that this idea works and the astronauts somehow make it to Mars alive?
I'll wait.
@@williamblack4006 They just like being naysayers. The people that designed this thing knew everything about nukes and would put in the proper shielding.
the wear and tear on something like this would be devastating, which is why anything sent to space has little to no movement within the satellite or rocket..
best point in the comments.
The wear and tear would be similar to that of a car engine, where you have explosions in every cylinder driving moving parts. A tricky engineering problem for sure but not an unsolvable one.
Look up the documentary. They discuss this issue. You are all wrong. There was no wear and tear. Atomic explosions almost don’t harm steel. That was the discovery that sparked the whole project.
These clips are nice!
Gotta listen to that bang bang bang all the way to mars
Beautiful rendition -- BUT -- the pressure plate should've been glowing red hot after a few blasts. Even the shock absorbers would've been HOT.
What's crazy about the whole scheme -- many of its (atomic engineering) details are still top secret.
My other objection is that I can't imagine going to Mars -- solo. Instead, like Columbus, I imagine a trio of buddy ships.
Things always go wrong.
Lastly, I can't imagine ANYTHING landing on Mars until humanity has established an orbital platform around Mars so epic in scope that can serve as back-up for those actually landing. And, even before that, a space station in Earth orbit -- in geosynchronous orbit, to boot. You might as well do your business directly above Houston. Expense ? A Mars mission will be epic by any standard.
Some sort of artificial gravity will be ESSENTIAL for interplanetary transits. Our biology demands it.
Additionally, very hefty shielding must be provided.
That could entail setting up an artificial Van Allen belt around the spacecraft. Solar powered super conductors make that not such a crazy proposition.
>Some sort of artificial gravity will be ESSENTIAL for interplanetary transits. Our biology demands it.
Funnily enough, Orion has this part taken care of. For the duration of transit, it spins end-over-end, generating sufficient centrifugal gravity to prevent health problems.
This looks like a great torture device. The astronauts would all look like they are suffering from Parkinson's disease when they arrive at Mars.
Video: Secret Mars mission...
Nuclear Bombs: 🗿
If Mars were more like our Earth, and less like the stark, airless and barren MOON, maybe it would be worth going there!!!
Wow great animation
Project Orion was a study conducted between the 1950s and 1960s by the United States Air Force, DARPA, and NASA for the purpose of measuring the efficacy of a starship directly propelled by a series of explosions of atomic bombs behind the craft: nuclear pulse propulsion. Early versions of this vehicle were proposed to take off from the ground; later versions were presented for use only in space. Six non-nuclear tests were conducted using models. The project was eventually abandoned for multiple reasons, including the Partial Test Ban Treaty, which banned nuclear explosions in space, and concerns over nuclear fallout.
The Orion nuclear pulse rocket design has extremely high performance. Orion nuclear pulse rockets using nuclear fission type pulse units were originally intended for use on interplanetary space flights. Missions that were designed for an Orion vehicle in the original project included single stage (i.e., directly from Earth's surface) to Mars and back, and a trip to one of the moons of Saturn. Freeman Dyson performed the first analysis of what kinds of Orion missions were possible to reach Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to the Sun.
The Orion spacecraft would have been a massive structure, about the size of a football stadium. It would have been made of a thick steel pusher plate, which would have been propelled by the force of the nuclear explosions. The explosions would have been spaced evenly along the pusher plate, and they would have been detonated in a carefully controlled sequence.
The Orion spacecraft would have been able to reach speeds of up to 20% of the speed of light. This would have made it possible to travel to Mars in just a few weeks, and to reach Alpha Centauri in just a few decades.
Although Project Orion was never built, it remains a fascinating example of the potential of nuclear pulse propulsion. If it had been developed, Orion could have revolutionized space travel, making it possible to travel to distant stars in a relatively short amount of time.
I had my doubts but that was pretty cool video. I would expect it to be bright like a flash of lightning, but not sure if that would the case.
This video needs to be longer, I was expecting to see the landing on mars.