From Today I Found Out.

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Imagine an enormous bullet-shaped spaceship, weighing 10,000 tons and towering 100 metres into the sky. Suddenly, there is a searing flash of light as the craft is enveloped in a giant atomic fireball. But when the light dims, the ship has not been vaporized; rather, it has been lifted several hundred metres off the ground. It hangs in midair for a split second before the sky is once again flooded with light, the blast lofting the ship even higher into the air. Another blast follows, and another and another, until the craft is rocketing through the sky at tremendous speed, sailing past the earth’s atmosphere and eventually its gravitational pull. While this scene might seem straight out of a particularly cheesy 1950s sci-fi movie, it came astonishingly close to becoming reality. For nearly a decade, a group of American scientists attempted to build a giant interplanetary spacecraft propelled by the detonations of thousands of atomic bombs. But while ultimately this effort never got off the ground, it was not nearly as insane as it might seem; indeed, even today so-called nuclear pulse propulsion remains our only practical means of overcoming the limitations of conventional rocketry and venturing out into the solar system – and beyond. This is the incredible forgotten story of Project Orion.

Author: Gilles Messier
Host: Simon Whistler
Editor: Daven Hiskey
Producer: Samuel Avila

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