The Golden Age of Atomic Power in Space

© Laurence B. Winn

Dec 1, 2000

Part I: Jackass Flats

Decades after beginning the human adventure in space, we still struggle with the first and most crucial step in opening the high frontier: cheap access.

For the moment, the available technologies appear to be confined to rockets, but there is evidence that chemical rockets can't do the job. They got us to the moon, barely, and with nothing to spare. And that access was not cheap. The math shows that only nuclear technology has the raw power needed to lift heavy payloads into space at reasonable cost, using what we know and can apply right now.

Recently, I came across an interview with Dr. Brian Dunne, chief experimentalist of Project Orion, that I taped while I was science editor for my college newspaper. I didn't mind meandering, and he didn't, either, so the interview, presented in two parts, had to be trimmed to the essentials. Part I, which follows, reveals some of Dunne's perceptions, and those of his era, about nuclear power. The scene opens at Jackass Flats, Nevada, site of NASA's nuclear engine for rocket vehicle application (NERVA) program.

Dunne: Jackass Flats was a separate facility used for the NERVA program reactor systems. These were, of course, the nuclear propulsion systems using hydrogen as a propellant. They had a huge aluminum shed to house the reactor, which could be rolled out on railroad tracks. One time they were very astounded because they had rolled this reactor out and left it with the core open. It has a big open core because of the tremendous throughput of gases. They were really shocked the next morning because they thought, well good God, if the rain had made it supercritical it would have blown it to a million pieces. Fortunately it didn't rain, but it really scared the hide off them. Water is a neutron moderator and it (the reactor) is pretty close to critical anyhow because it has to be.

It's a wasteland (Jackass Flats). We were looking at it as a potential test ground for Orion (nuclear pulse rocket) experiments.

LW: When was that?

Dunne: This must have been late 1958 or 1959. I remember the trip there with (Theodore) Taylor and (Freeman) Dyson especially because we were contracting with EG&G to do some instrumentation work for possible tests. They did a lot of support work out there, and they had a pretty big facility to cover the NERVA tests and huge tank farms, gas bottles, you can't imagine, just acres of compressed gas and manifolds. And all this was piped through the reactor. Tremendous hardwire instrumentation system back to this huge data recording facility they had.

It was quite an expanse of desert. I told Taylor, good Lord, we keep worrying about the scale of things and breaking things up and destroying things and changing the environment, but if you look at the vastness of this wasteland and you think about a test, it's a very small thing that doesn't perturb things very much. Of course, that was in an age when they were doing atmospheric tests and people really hadn't gotten worried about fallout or retention of radioactive material in the atmosphere. It was an era when there was a kind of casual and cavalier attitude about environmental effects. I guess my feeling was tempered a little bit by that.

When you see those tests, even 20 kilotons going off, after a matter of a minute or two the dust settles. Parked trucks get damaged. The towers are completely vaporized. I mean, they are really vaporized, except down at the base where you see a few melted and twisted girders. But really, as far as really upsetting anything, it didn't seem to us ... In retrospect, these biological effects, long term radioactive effects, may be important, and I think there was an era then when people just neglected to be interested.

The shock and the blast effects didn't really worry me. That was my interest. And I thought, well, we really could do some nuclear tests out here, and it wouldn't be all that hair-raising a thing to do. It's a bleak part of Nevada, I think to the north of Mercury a little bit, quite separated from Yucca Flats and Frenchman's Flats.

When you see these tests, atmospheric tests ... I now deal with some of these young fellows and they talk so casually about these things. It really is an impressive thing when you see one of these things go off in the atmosphere. It is a lot of energy. And it's particularly impressive when you see a weapons system before it goes off. There is this little thing in a cradle, the size of a watermelon.

LW: This is a fission device?

Dunne: Yes, a fission device. And you somehow can't imagine the energy in it. Now I'm used to high explosive. I've done a lot of work in high explosive technology. There's just a real lot of energy in that amount of high explosive, but when you see the effects of a nuclear explosion, it just astounds you. It astounds your imagination that there could be so much energy in such a small volume.That's the thing that takes some getting used to.

LW: When did you first meet Theodore Taylor?

Dunne: Caltech. Ted Taylor was in my class. This was 1941. We both enlisted in the Navy as seaman apprentice, and the Navy left us at Caltech in what was called the V-12 Program. We went through Caltech in three years instead of four without any vacations. So I graduated in 1945. Then we took a chair car train to Louisiana and up the east coast to Ithaca (Cornell University) where I went to midshipman school for three months and became what was known as a 90-day wonder. VJ Day happened just as we were graduating from Ithaca.

I met Taylor in San Francisco, where we stayed in this old German club that had been converted into a barracks for naval officers waiting for ships. Taylor and two other classmates and I got bored and decided we'd rent a car and go over to Yosemite in wintertime, in January of 1946. It was just beautiful. There was hardly anybody there.

I got a ship first. It was called the Goodhue, APA107. All those attack transports were named after counties.

LW: After the Navy you went back to school?

Dunne: I went to graduate school at UCLA. Got a masters degree there, and a PhD in Physics in 1955, specializing in shock waves. And I consulted on all kinds of things, like infrared cameras. I did consulting for the Navy in explosives, and that was quiet important because it got me involved with the phenomenology of explosives. At that time the field was still somewhat primitive, except in certain key areas. So I did consulting for about a year in these few areas.

And then I heard about this company starting up down in San Diego, called General Atomic. I found out my friend Ted Taylor was down there. We had just had Maya, my daughter, and we could see the smog creeping ten blocks per year toward Santa Monica, where we were living. I was getting caught in traffic jams going to my various employment. It sounded like an opportunity.

So, General Atomic. And they responded immediately. I had experience in explosives and shaped charges and they needed somebody with that kind of background.

Next: General Atomic and Project Orion.