Jules Verne, Gerald Bull and The Orion Project Revisitied

The idea of using a cannon to fire payloads into space is by no means new and probably dates to the first fifteen seconds after the development of artillery proper. Most people are familiar with the concept through the work of Jules Verne in his "From the Earth to the Moon" published in 1865.

The idea of shooting men to the moon appeared in the campy French science fiction film "Le Voyage Dans La Lune" in 1902. This short film has an interesting story in its own right and you can view it free through the wonder of You Tube:



Skipping ahead about five decades, we come to the work of the Canadian ballistician Dr. Gerald Bull who worked on extending the range of artillery pieces and whose passion was gun launching payloads into space. Through the HARP Project and later at his Space Research Corporation in Barbados, Dr. Bull launched projectiles of increasing mass and sophistication to higher and higher altitudes.

Dr. Bull's 16 inch HARP gun in its heyday


The 16 inch HARP gun just before the turn of the Century
Dr. Bull eventually ended up dead outside his apartment in Brussels at, it is said, the hands of unsavory characters for, it is said, his associations with other unsavory characters but here is the contemporary report from the New York Times.

About the same time Dr. Bull was working on his big guns, brilliant physicist Freeman Dyson and a group of other equally brilliant folks at General Atomics
were working on nuclear propulsion for space craft. Dr. Dyson and his team mates were specifically developing nuclear pulse propulsion, an effort to move massive craft by having them pushed along by the shock waves of repeated nuclear explosions. This spectacular idea was undertaken as part of the Orion Project (not to be confused with NASA's current Orion C.E.V. effort).

The following excerpt from the very cool BBC documentary "To Mars By Atom Bomb" gives a good idea of how the Orion space craft was to be propelled:



Jules Verne was science fiction, Dr. Bull has turned to dust and the Orion Project never fully materialized so why am I boring you with all of this stuff on an odd Tuesday morning in the Troposphere? Simple: I was wandering the Blogosphere in my flannel robe and found a great proposal on the Next Big Future blog. The idea is floated as the "15o Kiloton Nuclear Verne Gun"
. The intent is to combine gun launching with the nuclear pulse of the Orion Project except to use one instead of many pulses with the hybrid answering the objections to both schemes.

Launch costs being what they are, I'm all for it!

--END--