Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship George Dyson
The race to the moon dominated space flight during the decade of the 1960s. Yet, during the late 1950s and early 1960s, the US government sponsored a project that could possibly have sent 150 people on expeditions to Mars or Saturn. The codename of the project was Orion, and it centered upon the effort to develop a 40,000-ton, fast, manoeuvrable, nuclear-powered space vehicle for long-range voyages in space. Strictly classified, Project Orion ultimately failed. In this book, George Dyson, son of physicist Freeman Dyson, one of the original project team, tells his father's story.