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SPACE.com: How difficult was it to research Project Orion? Between the secrecy of the science behind the spacecraft - both then and now - as well as the aging and passing away of many of the principal participants, did you feel in anyway rushed or confined by these circumstances?
George Dyson:
Very difficult--everyone who worked on the project had Q-clearance and still has to be very careful in talking about it. For twenty years I kept trying to persuade someone else to write the history of Project Orion, which I felt should be written by someone unrelated to one of the principal characters. But time was running out and when another historian's proposal was rejected four years ago I decided to attempt it myself. Just in the nick of time--both because of recent deaths and illness among the Orioneers, and because the declassification process has now ground to a complete halt.
Project Orion, while wonderfully inventive, seems in retrospect to have been a frightening undertaking raising questions about its environmental impact if attempted and what impact it would have had on the Cold War. Do you yourself think the project should have been completed?
At that time we were exploding something like 100 megatons a year in the atmosphere and Orion would have added about 1 percent. And for good reason we decided even that was too much. It's impossible to say what the impact on the cold war would have been. In my view, what really won the cold war, in the end, was not Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, but the Interstate Highway System. Had we really gone full-speed and large scale into deep space, the cold war would have ended sooner, I suspect.
The project's leader, Theodore B. Taylor, talks in the book about visiting Moscow's Red Square 36 years after he held a job trying to figure out the maximum damage an American nuclear weapon could do to the city and seeing, almost for the first time, the everyday humanity of the Russian people. Do you think most of the scientists involved in America's nuclear weapons programs were "blinded by science"? Oblivious, in a way, to the ultimate ends of their work?
No. Most atomic scientists were all too aware of the ultimate ends of their work. It's a real problem, today, that we are losing that generation of nuclear weaponeers who actually saw these weapons explode, and chose, like Ted (and many others, including my father) to devote themselves to trying to ensure that these weapons would never be used.
What most upsets you about science or scientists? What is the most vexing question facing scientists today?
What upsets me are just the usual failings of human nature--greed, back-biting, adherence to dogma, and, especially in some fields, refusal to adequately credit predecessors and pioneers. But this is not unique to science. Obviously the most vexing question facing us today is what to do with the powers that the conjunction of genetics and computing are about to unleash. The cost of writing one byte to DNA is now below what one byte of core memory cost in 1959. And we know where costs went from there.
Who are your heroes?
They are covered pretty well in my three books: the Aleut seafarers who colonized the Aleutian Islands 10,000 years ago, the known and unknown pioneers of digital computing, and Ted Taylor and his gang of Orioneers. And lesser characters, like Jim Huscroft who lived on Cenotaph Island in Alaska and rowed to Juneau once a year, picked up the year's newspapers, and read one morning paper every day for the next year.
If Project Orion was revived, where in solar system - or beyond - would you most like to travel?
I'll take my father's word for it: "Enceladus still looks good." Beyond the solar system, Orion is much too slow.
What is the most beautiful aspect to space?
Never having been out there, I cannot say, but I would expect it's looking at Earth. From an Earth perspective, it's sleeping outside at high altitude, under the stars.
If you controlled a $1 billion foundation, what research effort would you fund?
For the good of humanity, I would put the money into a completely fresh approach to the problem of alcoholism--which is amenable to both treatment and prevention and exacts billions upon billions in costs. For my own curiosity--but with unpredictable results--I would put it into a fresh approach to artificial intelligence, or AI.
NASA is at a crossroads and the public's interest in space exploration appears to have waned since the heady days of Project Orion and then the Apollo missions. Why should we spend money on space exploration over say research into deadly diseases?
Clearly we should do both. Why do we always ask "over say research into deadly diseases"? How about "over say television or soda pop"? And money *is* being spent, it's more a question of whether we spend it on things like the space station and the space shuttle, or on really going to interesting places and in interesting directions in space.
