Spaceship Mixup: Orion vs. Orion

Not so long ago, in a solar system really near you, the Supranational Authority was up to Hooda-knows-what. Let’s see if you can figure it out.

Some interesting nonsense that played out in three nearly sequential issues of Aviation Week & Space Technology recently involved confusion about a name, the designation of a current NASA project to build a spaceship of exploration called Orion and the name of a late 1950s/early 1960s program, also called Orion, to build a nuclear rocket with a payload on the scale of an aircraft carrier’s displacement, 100,000 tons vs. 100 tons for the proposed U.S. Space Launch System and 16 tons for the defunct Space Shuttle. Reader “A” in the letters column of June 30 offered an observation that, if the nuclear ship’s funding had survived the 1963 test ban treaty, it would have taken us “to Alpha Centauri and back twice by now.”

That’s a bit of poetic license, but it stirred the pedagogical instincts of a retired astronaut who replied based on the capabilities of the chemically-fueled spaceship, the other Orion (riding atop the Space Launch System), with its maximum velocity of 10 miles per second. His conclusion: it would take 55,800 years for the journey. We heard about it in the July 21 issue. Aviation Week went out of its way to emphasize the lecture with a halftone screen under the text and an actual algebraic equation and everything.

Finally, a reader from Hong Kong set the record straight in the July 28 edition with data from a 1968 Freeman Dyson article in Physics Today, pointing out the nuclear Orion’s 6,000 miles per second top speed. The article is available online at ow.ly/zt7jm.

In the middle ‘70s NASA made light of Gerry O’Neill’s space colonization ideas, citing the enormous mass that would have to be lifted into orbit. Of course, O’Neill had emphasized the need to obtain materials from the moon, not Earth. I have often thought that governments (and other devious types) intentionally introduce confusion about things they don’t want discussed. Now I think it again. Can you cite other instances of the same behavior?