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Project Orion
The 1958–1965 attempt to build a spacecraft propelled by atomic bombs — Dyson's most direct experience of how brilliant engineering can proceed along trajectories that require catastrophic assumptions to reach their promised destinations.
Project Orion was a US government program, running from 1958 to 1965, to develop a spacecraft propelled by sequential atomic explosions behind a massive pusher plate. The design — originated by Stanislaw Ulam and Ted Taylor — promised to lift thousands of tons into orbit in a single launch and, eventually, to transport humans to Saturn within a decade. Dyson joined the project in 1958 and worked on it with enormous enthusiasm for two years before becoming the program's most prominent internal critic. The project was canceled in 1965 following the Partial Test Ban Treaty, which prohibited atmospheric nuclear detonations. Dyson later described Orion as the project that taught him the specific hazards of capability without wisdom — of engineering elegance that requires, in its execution, assumptions about fallout, safety, and political tolerance that cannot be reasonably made.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Dyson's account of Orion is central to his framework because it is an honest account of