Remembering "Saturn by 1970"

Project Orion, championed by the great Freeman Dyson, could have gotten us to Saturn by the time Apollo got us to the Moon. There were a few issues to be worked out....

Project Orion jumped a whole galaxy ahead of current thinking, all the way back in 1958. Freeman Dyson and Ted Taylor had bold dreams -- and the engineering necessary to make them real -- of sending nuclear-propelled spacecraft of thousands or even millions of tons, and city-sized groups of people, on deep space missions as early as 1970.  All of this was based on technology then available, with a price tag Eisenhower and Kennedy's America could have realistically paid. They designed these interplanetary ships, and even starships, while America’s space program was still struggling to launch satellites weighed out in kilograms.

Could Dyson have achieved his dream?  Well, there was this matter of nuclear fallout (though not so great a problem as to render the project impossible, especially today). But in the words of Arthur C. Clark: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right."

Consider Paul Gilster's post (reproduced below)…