The Point Loma Legacy

© Laurence B. Winn

Nov 1, 1998

In the Spring of 1974, I sat talking with Dr. Brian Dunne about the past and future, if any, of nuclear pulse propulsion. Dr. Dunne's front porch on Mt. Helix overlooked La Jolla, California, where all of the early work was done. He recalled the October day in 1957 when the first artificial earth satellite, launched by the Soviet Union and not the United States, rocketed into the American consciousness, launching the space race that would eventually take men to the moon and back. He said it had been his privilege to work with the likes of Theodore Taylor, who had helped make the first nuclear weapons possible, and Freeman Dyson, famed physicist and scientific visionary, who came to join the project from Princeton University's Institute for Advanced Study, where Albert Einstein spent his last years.

Taylor, Dyson, Dunne and others imagined huge rockets in the 10,000-ton class, flying cities that could rise straight up from the earth and travel the solar system at will. They said Mars by 1965, the outer planets by 1970. Some estimates put the cost of flights to the moon using this technology as low as $10 per pound, about the same as getting yourself from New York to Sydney, Australia by air.

From its start in 1958 to its termination in 1963, in what Dyson called "the first time in modern history that a major expansion of human technology has been suppressed for political reasons", the classified Project Orion was like no other space propulsion system imagined before or since. In some ways, its principles were counter-intuitive, because it relied on the thrust provided by detonating nuclear bombs in its own wake. As a nuclear system, Orion never got a test, but Dunne recalled flying a small "meter model" from Point Loma, San Diego using chemical explosives, and the model worked. It worked well enough to cause Werner Von Braun, the archetypal rocket scientist, to come right out of his chair, Dunne said, when he saw the film.

For all their size and grandeur, the Saturn vehicles that actually carried American astronauts into space in the 1970s were desperately under-powered. Only the cleverness of a descent from lunar orbit with a light-weight vehicle made the success of Project Apollo possible. It amounted to piling fuel on fuel to get a pea into orbit. It worked, but barely, and it produced nothing to carry space exploration into the future.

Crossing the Atlantic in the 15th century, and repeating the performance time after time, required what was then advanced technology, a special class of vessel that possessed excellent maneuverability and a shallow draft. Modern frontier-building requires a reusable launch vehicle to deliver what one organization, The Space Frontier Foundation , calls "Cheap Access to Space" (CATS).

NASA's answer is the X-33, Lockheed-Martin's VentureStar. The goal is to lower the cost from $10,000 per pound of payload to low earth orbit (LEO) to $1,000 per pound. Once in LEO, out of the deepest part of the earth's "gravity well", you are half way to anywhere in the solar system.

Some commercial ventures are looking at a more incremental approach. While the X-33 will be a single-stage-to-orbit vehicle, the Mayflower of the Civilian Astronauts Corps is pure tourism. It doesn't have the power to get into orbit, but it does afford passengers a view of earth from space and a few minutes of free-fall. The ship is advertised as a "water launched, water landed, rocket powered, state-of-the-art spacecraft." Flight membership, if you're interested, costs $5,000. We are to hope that market forces advance the technology of true space flight in due course.

It is not just a matter of cost and waiting for capitalism to work, however. Without a frontier, it is a distinct possibility that the human race doesn't have that much time left, at least, not as an advanced technological species, and maybe not at all. From earth orbit-crossing asteroids to deadly pandemics, from sociological decay to ecological disaster, the unpleasant possibilities seem real and immediate. Frontier theory teaches that they are real and immediate. Some risk-taking makes sense.

So I give you Orion, and I propose it as a means of bootstrapping ourselves into space. But I cannot make this proposal without pointing out that it does entail risks (as do steam-driven riverboats and narrow-gage railroads). I refer you to the anti-nuke crowd, although they tend to be unreasonably shrill in their protests, because only they are talking about the risks of nuclear propulsion. They use it as a means of exaggerating the dangers of the technology NASA uses on some deep space probes.

While you are thinking about this, I would just ask you to keep in mind that life, and its preservation, are not about eliminating risks, but balancing them.