Books Seeds of Story Not in My Atmosphere! — The Pitfalls of Project Orion Can a terrible idea for spaceship propulsion inspire exciting new science fiction? By Ruthanna Emrys | Published on February 10, 2026 Credit: NASA / Marshall Space Flight Center Comment 3 Share New Share Credit: NASA / Marshall Space Flight Center Welcome to Seeds of Story, where I explore the non-fiction that inspires—or should inspire—speculative fiction. Most weeks, I’ll dive into a book, article, or other source of ideas that are sparking current stories, or that have untapped potential to do so. But occasionally we’ll do a “retro edition,” looking at a seed where the science has moved on, or just moved in new directions. What was so appealing—and is there anything left to mine from these ideas? This week, I talk about a terrible idea for spaceship propulsion, and the tradeoff between achieving escape velocity and making the area around your launch facility uninhabitable. How It Started, How It’s Going I begin this column with the caveat that I am a cognitive psychologist, not a rocket scientist. There will be no equations and my ability to evaluate exhaust velocity versus thrust tradeoffs is limited. My ability to stare at an idea and go “What the hell were you thinking?”, however, is excellent. Project Orion was a 1950s DARPA (then ARPA) study on the feasibility of a nuclear-powered spaceship. If you’re picturing a nice, well-controlled nuclear power plant, think again: the goal was to launch enormous masses using nuclear bombs—a series of them, outside the ship, producing thrust against a metal “pusher” plate. In theory, you could get a ship the size of a small city off Earth this way, and then send it galloping around the solar system. Freeman Dyson led the project along with fellow physicist Ted Taylor. ARPA provided funding for only a year, from 1958 to 1959; work continued supported by other sources until 1964, its end spurred by the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963. You will be reassured to know that the idea was never tested with actual nuclear bombs. Tests with chemical explosions were used for proof of concept. The appeal, of course, was the sheer amount of mass that could be lifted this way. No more stress over every spare ounce of luggage! Big experiments! Maybe whole colony projects! My sources (Wikipedia, Stanford, StackExchange) range from dubious to optimistic about the whole idea, which clearly still appeals to a certain type of rocket scientist. Freeman Dyson calculated that the average number of deaths per launch would be under 1, an obviously worthwhile tradeoff for interplanetary colonization. I question this calculation because ’50s estimates of fallout danger tended to be low, and because his funding depended on a comfortable answer to this question. Several articles suggest that you could minimize the problem by launching from a relatively uninhabited polar area, which sounds particularly great when you recall that climate change now sends Arctic air spiraling down the North American coast on a regular basis. Of course, we’ve since had a small war’s worth of nuclear explosions, atmospheric and otherwise, from tests alone, with no spaceships to show for it at all. We did just set a record for longest period without such an explosion since they became possible. We should keep that up. Stories of Old Science I first encountered Project Orion in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s Footfall, which I’m afraid I read and enjoyed in college. Obviously when the alternative is alien elephants proving themselves dominant over humans, a completely improvised Orion spaceship—put together using heisted parts, if I recall correctly—is the way to go. It did make for a very exciting launch scene. And there’s a definite sense that the excuse was welcome… there is a certain sort of book that suggests that major crises (alien invasions, nuclear war, asteroid strikes) make the perfect excuses to put aside annoying luxuries like gender equality and long-term ecosystem viability. Project Orion also shows up in Heinlein’s first short story, “Blowups Happen,” which is notable for overestimating the stress and danger of working in a nuclear power plant. Project Orion fits with a long tradition of imagining wild ways to get off Earth, and of playing with the kinship between explosion-based weaponry and spaceships. There’s a reason Verne’s rocket was created by the Baltimore Gun Club. I remain extremely fond of Jordin Kare’s “Kantrowitz 1972 (HEL Crew’s Song),” and the risk factors for laser launches are probably lower than the risk factors for nuclear bomb launches. You want to be really careful about where you aim lest people start talking about death rays but, frankly, that’s true (if less cinematic) about most spaceship propulsion technology. Most stories about real (or real-life proposed) launch methods tend to favor those methods. Often, this includes bonus mockery of the short-sighted fools worrying about things like safety. But there’s also a long tradition of stories about bad-idea launch methods. For example, Alfred Bester’s “Adam and No Eve” involves a “catalyst in iron solution” propulsion that, um, destroys all life on Earth. That does seem like a worst-case scenario, until you consider that one episode when Star Trek suggests warp drives are breaking the universe, and then we never talk about it again. Digging for Salvage Orion-style launches have apparently continued to appear in occasional 21st-century science fiction (most of which I’ve managed to miss), including the Ascension miniseries, Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem, and Stephen Baxter’s Ark. It’s a good way to imply either extreme urgency to the launch, or very specific attitudes and capabilities related to cleaning up your messes. In the spirit of Sarah Gailey’s River of Teeth, though, there’s space wide open for an alternate universe in which the Orion Program continued—and caused all the problems you’d expect. A world in which we didn’t shut down Orion is also probably a world in which we didn’t scare ourselves off of saner nuclear power designs, so it might be a net gain, even with the cleanup program making for seriously chewy plot. In general, Orion seems like it ought to fit well with modern ecofiction. We’re much more willing to examine the downsides of our tech than we were in the ’50s, and to acknowledge that humans can throw an entire planetary ecosystem out of whack. We have a lot of Cold War stories about nuclear winter, but not a lot of 21st-century work about non-war-related nuclear alternate history. That video linked above gives a vivid sense of the ways that nuclear weapons can make (have made) a mess even if never used on another city. Why not give the EPA something more exciting to clean up than yet another chemical spill? In all fairness, I should note that some Orion proposals involve either getting your massive mass off Earth using non-nuclear means or building off of Earth entirely, and then using bomb propulsion in the safety of interplanetary space. This raises a whole separate set of issues—see A City on Mars for how badly this would tear up existing treaties and freak out whichever countries did not have orbital bomb-production facilities—but does avoid the immediate ecological problems. New Growth: What to Read Freeman Dyson’s son, George, wrote Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship. Get it from the horse’s mouth, or at least the horse’s kid’s mouth. Francis Spufford’s Backroom Boys plays with other rocket science futures that never were. If you’re trying to design (or write about) a ship that works, K.F. Long’s Deep Space Propulsion: A Roadmap to Interstellar Flight looks like a good introduction to physically plausible propulsion methods and their constraints, as does Eugene Mallove and Gregory Matloff’s The Starflight Handbook: A Pioneer’s Guide to Interstellar Travel. Iver Cooper’s But Will It Fly?: The History and Science of Unconventional Aerial Power and Propulsion looks fun if you’re trying to design (or write about) a steampunk ship. Want to argue for cinematic propulsion techniques or share anecdotes about Freeman Dyson? Join in the comments below![end-mark] The post Not in My Atmosphere! — The Pitfalls of Project Orion appeared first on Reactor.