Project Orion : the atomic spaceship, 1957-1965

The race to the moon dominated space flight during the decade of the 1960s.

Yet, during the late 1950s and early 1960s, the US government sponsored a project that could possibly have sent 150 people on expeditions to Mars or Saturn.

The codename of the project was "Orion", and it centered upon the effort to develop a 40,000-ton, fast, manoeuvrable, nuclear-powered space vehicle for long-range voyages in space.Strictly classified, Project Orion ultimately failed.

In this book, George Dyson, son of physicist Freeman Dyson, one of the original project team, tells his father's story.