Your mission for today

[james_davis_nicoll]

Design a starship with 1950s and early 1960s level technology.

Comments

[heron61.livejournal.com]

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.