Bear in mind this is TV sci-fi, so they probably assume that ships in space thrust until they run out of fuel, then stop. The point of no return is probably half way there, when they have to decide whether or not to put on the brakes and do a bootleggers reverse, and thrust back Home.
But 60s technology? I suppose Orion drives might be in range of 60s theoretical tech. Maybe. Could an Orion drive spacecraft be made that could make the journey to Alpha Centauri in a century?
Of course even if it could, the launch of an interstellar spacecraft capable of holding hundreds of people would be somewhat unsubtle. I wonder how they would explain nobody noticing?
Wikipedia's entry for Project Orion cites Freeman Dyson's calculations for a trip time to the Alpha/Beta Centauri system of as little as 133 years, so it's in the ballpark.
Keeping in mind of course that the entire Project Orion concept never left the realm of drawing-board theories put forth by people who badly wanted to make the idea work, which would suggest that the actual maximum speed of an Orion spaceship, if we were crazy enough to actually build one, would have to be less than half of what Dyson thought it would be.
I don't know...Ted Taylor was the one chosen to design the bombs. Based on his history that part would have been a lead-pipe cinch. The rest of it--well, as long as they avoided the giant-spring-looks-like-a-sperm interstellar version there was no Unobtanium in the design stuff I've seen. Now the test system NASA demanded before man-rating it? THAT would scare the shit out of anyone.
I strongly suspect that some mixture of wanting to make certain that the drive didn't blow up the ship or massively irradiate the crew with worry about the political implications of detonating dozens of nukes in orbit killed Project Orion. There's a non-zero chance that using Project Orion for a mission to Mars could have get of a nuclear war, especially after the SALT II treaty (1979), which prohibited orbital nukes.
I'm sure they could explain the launch as an H-bomb test, perhaps of an exotic kind. Perhaps launch it over the Pacific during the day so that fewer people will witness the strangely regular flashes of light as it climbs to orbit.
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james_davis_nicoll) wrote2014-05-16 06:14 pm
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But 60s technology? I suppose Orion drives might be in range of 60s theoretical tech. Maybe. Could an Orion drive spacecraft be made that could make the journey to Alpha Centauri in a century?
Of course even if it could, the launch of an interstellar spacecraft capable of holding hundreds of people would be somewhat unsubtle. I wonder how they would explain nobody noticing?
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Keeping in mind of course that the entire Project Orion concept never left the realm of drawing-board theories put forth by people who badly wanted to make the idea work, which would suggest that the actual maximum speed of an Orion spaceship, if we were crazy enough to actually build one, would have to be less than half of what Dyson thought it would be.
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OK, back to poking holes in Freeman Dyson's ad campaign for nuking the planet on the way out.
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