The Orion team was bursting with ideas. Eager, dedicated engineers and scientists converged on the rapidly enlarging, fenced-off, high-security campus of buildings at the new General Atomic headquarters in La Jolla, north of San Diego. The schoolhouse used for TRIGA two years before was no longer needed.
It struck several participants that this new effort to harness nuclear power could and should be compared with the famous work done not so many years before in Los Alamos. The Manhattan Project had been completed very quickly, in a matter of a few years, under conditions of wartime necessity. Could Orion be completed as quickly? If Oppenheimer and his colleagues could hasten nuclear science from the level of tiny tabletop experiments to the level of a city-destroying weapon carried in the belly of a bomber, then why couldn’t Ted Taylor, Dyson, and their comrades take proven nuclear technology to the next level—providing planetary propulsion—over a comparable span of years?
Dyson was there to deliver numbers and to use his fertile imagination to spur discussion in startling ways. When the planning would bump up against the laws of physics, Dyson would be the chief problem solver; he would determine whether the obstacle could be surmounted. Dyson’s mind, Taylor suggested, was like Mozart’s in that Dyson could see the entire composition in one vision. He “saw more interconnections between more things than almost anybody. He sees the interrelationships, whether it is in some microscopic physical process or in a big complicated machine like Orion. He has been, from the time he was in his teens, capable of understanding essentially anything that he’s interested in. He is the most intelligent person I know,” said Taylor.9 Brian Dunne, an Orion engineer who knew of Dyson’s standing as a theoretical physicist, was impressed by how much engineering Dyson knew, electrical or mechanical. He went so far as to say that Dyson’s grasp of things was unnerving. His immense common sense was a valuable resource.10
Many of the Orion documents Dyson produced remain classified to this day owing to the nature of the fuel at the heart of the whole enterprise—nuclear bombs. However, an unclassified list of the report titles tells an interesting story about the problems Dyson was addressing: the stability and control of the craft, the shaping of the bomb blast so as to maximize thrust, Orion’s prospective itinerary to the outer planets and their moons, the shape of the plasma plume as it enveloped the tail end of the ship, the radioactive fallout from Orion as it plowed through the atmosphere, and the critical incineration, layer by layer, of the pusher plate coating in successive bomb blasts.
Freeman Dyson, the theoretical physicist, the former mathematician and student of G. H. Hardy (“I don’t believe in indulging in practical problems”), loved the practical problems he was allowed and encouraged to pursue. The designers’ ambitions and expectations flew along as rapidly as Orion itself: why couldn’t we reach Mars in years rather than decades? In overall ability, Orion outmatched chemical rockets, even if chemical rockets like Saturn V temporarily were receiving favored treatment by space planners.
And once you’re at Mars, don’t merely scoop up some soil and leave. Stay awhile. Enjoy the scenery. Dyson thought a four-year exploration of the Red Planet’s surface would be about right. Charles Darwin’s comparable sojourn on board the HMS Beagle had had an enormous impact on our knowledge of the living part of the cosmos. The theory of evolution sprang from Darwin’s fruitful voyage around the tip of South America. What might come of a landing on Mars and a pole-to-pole survey of the topography? Maybe we’d find in the orange sand something as revealing as the varieties of finch beaks on the Galápagos Islands, suggesting to Darwin the whole mechanism of evolution through adaptation to local conditions in the islands. On Mars fossilized life forms might be lying there in the ground. Even the discovery of micron-sized organisms would give us a new perspective on the universe. Imagine adding a whole new Martian limb to the diagrammed tree of life. And if we struck out on Mars, there would be other worlds to visit such as Jupiter’s moons Europa or Calisto, or Saturn’s moon Titan.
First you had to get from here to there. The most important part of this billion-mile trip would be the first quarter inch. The great test would be the liftoff from blueprint to construction.
Freeman Dyson loved Orion. As soon as he returned to La Jolla for the summer he could see that this was going to be much more all-encompassing work than TRIGA had been. He needed more time. He asked Robert Oppenheimer for the whole of the coming academic year off in order to concentrate on his rocket ship.
In laying out his case to Oppie, Dyson enunciated some of the themes that were to enter into his writings decades later. Since his childhood he had wanted to be involved in launching planetary expeditions; it is important, he said, for society that certain hardy individuals break free of existing rules by journeying past all frontiers; new things would be discovered by science but only if we actually took the trouble to venture out there. Dyson assured his boss that he still enjoyed the Institute connection but hinted that if Orion, as he hoped, took on the importance and size of the Manhattan Project, then he might have to shift his affiliation permanently.11 He’d been asked to become a vice president of General Atomic.12 The impact of nuclear explosives on national security and international diplomacy had been great. Wouldn’t the nuclearization of propulsion be just as great if it led to an era of planetary exploration?
SECOND MORTGAGE
The children were glad to have their mother back with them that summer of 1958. Verena had been away for a year. Esther, now seven years old, had come to suspect that the miscarriage had been behind the difficulties between her parents. She expected that when her mother returned from Europe she might be bringing a new baby.13 There was no baby this time.
Then in July, unannounced, Freeman turned up in Princeton, just when Imme was off on vacation in New England. When the children woke that morning they discovered both Freeman and Verena in the same house for the first time in a year and a half. She had to explain to them that, no, he wouldn’t be staying long. He had to get back to his new job in California.
Only a month before Verena had asked to be taken back. Freeman had said no. Here he was, reversing himself, asking Verena to rejoin the marriage. Now it was her turn to hesitate. She didn’t say no, but she did need time to think over the offer.14
A major complication now appeared, once again in the person of Georg Kreisel, who was returning to the United States to take up a post at Stanford University. Even though he and Verena had been apart for eight months, he gentlemanly proposed—as if it were the eminently practical thing to do—that Verena could make up her mind about her future by coming to live with him at Stanford, where she too could have a part-time mathematics job.
By early September, the issue had been settled. Writing from California, Freeman informed Oppenheimer that he had failed to persuade Verena to return to the family and expected a divorce within months.15
Without asking Verena, Kreisel consulted a lawyer on her behalf. Freeman himself now hired a lawyer, but then fired him. A plan began to emerge: Verena would spend a residency period in Reno, Nevada, which would facilitate the granting of a divorce request.
Freeman was committed to spending at least the coming academic year in La Jolla, and so the Princeton home would have to be rented out. Freeman asked Imme to fly out to California with George, while Verena would drive west in the car with Esther and Katarina. Imme thought this plan was unfair to Verena, so the two women and the three children all drove.16
What was the arrangement between Imme and Freeman? Back in the fall of 1957, Verena had thought it was proper to inform Imme’s father that she, Verena, was no longer in the Dyson household since this might make it awkward for Imme. The father’s response was that Imme was an adult and could handle herself. About this time too, Freeman had indicated in a letter to Verena that he was considering marrying Imme if circumstances permitted.17 In a letter to Oppenheimer he said that he expected Verena to become Mrs. Kreisel.18
Now in the fall of 1958, with the divorce of Ve
rena and Freeman in the works, the engagement of Imme and Freeman became a reality. Esther was unhappy when she spotted an engagement ring on Imme’s finger and understood the implications. Imme tactfully removed the ring.19 Moreover, to make things more seemly, Imme returned to Germany to visit her family.20 A new German au pair arrived to shoulder household duties.21
The terms of divorce were drawn up. Freeman was to have custody of Esther and George during the bulk of the year. Verena would have them during the summer and holidays. Katarina would of course remain with Verena.22
And the money. Freeman’s view: Verena’s lawyer was holding out for a ruinous payout from Freeman, an amount so large that he would probably have to sell the Princeton house.23 Verena’s view: all she wanted was to get back the money she’d contributed as a down payment on the home.24
Freeman wasn’t sure where he would come up with the money for the cash payment, but was rescued by Oppenheimer, who, on behalf of the Institute, offered Freeman a second mortgage for his house in the amount of $7,500.25 In response Freeman thanked Oppie and informed him of the secret news that he and Imme were to be married.26
The morning of the divorce hearing, Verena was in tears. She couldn’t go through with it. Of course you can, said Freeman. You’re strong.27 On November 12, 1958, the divorce was official. Verena moved to Stanford to live and work with Georg Kreisel. At a party one night, he introduced her to his friends as “my wife, Mrs. Dyson.”28
Freeman Dyson and Imme Jung were married on November 21, 1958. He was nearly thirty-five, she nearly twenty-two. The children had a good time at the event. The newlyweds hoped for a honeymoon in Mexico but Imme, at the last moment, noticed that her passport was expiring the next day. So they settled for a two-day swing up to San Francisco. For Freeman, life was about to start all over again.29
MAYFLOWER COMPACT
Freeman Dyson lived with his new wife and two children (and another one on the way) in La Jolla, one of the most beautiful places in America. He had a terrific job at the Institute for Advanced Study to return to, if he wanted it back.
Meanwhile, he was enjoying himself in California. Two years before he had, in his modest way, helped to fire up the early nuclear power industry. Now he was at work on Orion, a project just as important, or more so—developing a radical new technology for launching humans into space.
He and Ted Taylor saw this task in terms of a great competition between the Orion approach, which used nuclear power in the form of exploding bombs, and the Apollo approach, which used chemical power in the form of rockets, like Saturn V, achieved when oxygen and hydrogen were combined to create conventional explosive thrust.
NASA, born just the previous summer, was to be the civilian agency overseeing the trek into space. The competition between propulsion modes, Dyson and Taylor felt, would be settled soon, perhaps this very year, in 1959.30 They had this year to demonstrate that nuclear was the way to go.
Juggling numerous engineering parameters, the Orion team arrived at a standard-issue design. The total weight of the vehicle would be about 4,000 tons, or 8 million pounds, not much different from a fully loaded Apollo craft sitting on the pad. Of this about one-fourth would be for the pusher plate, one-fourth for payload (including the human occupants), one-fourth for the nuclear inventory of 400 nuclear bombs, and one-fourth for the rest of the craft. The thing would look like a rather blunt artillery shell, 135 feet wide at the bottom and about twice as tall. A typical launch would require a succession of shots of the 5-kiloton Hiroshima class, with larger blasts to follow once the craft cleared the atmosphere.
Who would be strapped in when this behemoth heaved off? We now have a dedicated corps of astronauts, mostly daring test pilots who, along with a few payload specialists, are the ones who go up into space. But the Orion designers had no intention of staying behind. Freeman Dyson anticipated going. Longingly viewing the sky as a marvelous-but-fictional realm wasn’t enough for him. No, he would actually go there. Ted Taylor not only planned to go but wanted to take his young son with him. This was part of the fun. Who else in history—certainly not fictionalists like Jules Verne or H. G. Wells—had been in a position to dream about space and do something about it? Dyson and Taylor would personally venture forth. The two of them had sat together in Taylor’s backyard, sipping cognac while gazing at Jupiter through a telescope.31 They just might be in a position to do what backyard astronomers had always dreamed of doing—going in person to those distant spots in space.
Dyson would outdo his 1933 childhood Erolunar fantasy. He would become Sir Phillip Roberts. He would not bother to stop at the Moon. With Orion’s propulsion you could think much more grandly. “Saturn by 1970” became the motto. Dyson would be on board when Orion swung past the glorious system of rings; they had made sure to include expansive windows for viewing.
The voyage of Orion would be many things: exploration, adventure, science, and redemption. Dyson prepared himself mentally for the trip by drafting a Space Traveler’s Manifesto. In this little document we see that the Orion project would not only match the excitement and achievement of the Manhattan Project. La Jolla would also be atonement for Los Alamos. “Our purpose, and our belief, is that the bombs which killed and maimed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki shall one day open the skies to men,” said the document. From the time he was a lad Dyson had been convinced “that men would reach the planets in my lifetime, and that I would help in the enterprise.” It was essential for humans “to escape from their neighbors and from their governments, to go live as they pleased in the wilderness.”32
This was the language of the Pilgrims, who, before leaving the Mayflower, swore a pact concerning the government for the forlorn outcrop of North America now known as Massachusetts. This was the aim of the seventeenth-century Puritans who left England to escape the problems of their ancestral home. They and their twentieth-century counterparts wanted to set things right.
With the voyage of Orion the new land was going to be not the sandy beaches of New England but the moons of Jupiter or Saturn. It’s interesting to ponder the pioneer sentiment of Dyson’s manifesto, considering that he was an Englishman born, a graduate of Cambridge, a son of the director of the Royal Academy of Music, and a man who for much of his career had studied nature only theoretically from an office perch in Princeton. Here he was propounding an updated sailing of the Beagle. More than this, future Orion missions would carry forth colonists to establish new civilizations. Orion would be another Mayflower. Gliding up beneath the rings of Saturn, the spacecraft of 1970 would, like the Pilgrim vessel hoving up offshore Plymouth in 1620, offer the chance, at least in Dyson’s estimation, of restarting civilization. Only a small portion of this attitude made its way into official Orion documents. The rest was in the minds of the Orion fraternity.
Could it happen? A proposed nuclear trip to Saturn and back lasting three years was all in accord with the known laws of physics. The wildest plans drew upon aerodynamic or nuclear technology that was either available then or was expected to materialize after not too many years.
In the case of Orion, what was the grandest scenario? First, there was standard Orion. This would transport humans to Saturn by 1970. Much less likely, but delightful to contemplate, was Super-Orion. This was a craft some 400 meters in diameter, a fourth of a mile wide, and weighing 8 million tons. Assembled in Earth orbit and set in motion, it might eventually reach speeds of hundreds of km/sec by firing megaton-class hydrogen bombs out the back. At full performance, it would be able to traverse the solar system in about a month. With a dedicated crew, resigned to leaving Earth forever, along with their children and grandchildren, and confronting the sort of posterity faced by Polynesian explorers long ago heading out into the open Pacific, Super-Orion would be able to reach the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, in about 150 years.33 Wilderness indeed.
Outside La Jolla, talk like this was understandably viewed with some skepticism. Aside from the cost of realizing these schemes, two large impediments to nuclear
propulsion loomed: bureaucratic inertia and nuclear squeamishness. First, bureaucracy. Although associated with several government agencies, Orion had been the undertaking of a private company, General Atomic, a subsidiary of General Dynamics, under contract to ARPA, a subsidiary of the Department of Defense. Orion needed a permanent home and official status.
It was unlikely that NASA, AEC, or the Pentagon would welcome the orphan. Even though Wernher von Braun had come to see some virtue in the nuclear propulsion concept—a round-trip to Saturn in three years he found impressive—NASA didn’t like the bomb detonation aspect, and so it declined to take possession of Orion. NASA would stick with its chemical rockets. The AEC was already in the bomb design and detonation business, so Orion’s bomb load didn’t worry them. But Orion’s chief function, providing Greyhound bus service to the planets, stood pretty far from AEC’s own mission. Besides, the AEC already had three nuclear installations of its own: the labs at Los Alamos, Livermore, and Sandia (just outside Albuquerque).
Then there was the Pentagon. Would the U.S. Air Force take possession? Those air force officials who had themselves been scientists liked the project. Dyson, Dunne, and Taylor went to New Mexico to brief them. The air force researchers were impressed, but their superiors, mostly combat veterans, had difficulty justifying support for a ship with few military attributes. In summary, Orion was a promising but unloved foster child.
Just as worrisome was Orion’s nuclear debris. Even if the bomb blasts did no lasting harm to ship or crew, where exactly did the radioactive spewings go, as Orion struggled against gravity on its way through the atmosphere? This problem had not eluded Freeman Dyson. In fact it was one of the issues uppermost in his thinking. First, as Dyson was to remind people for years to come whenever the subject of actually deploying Orion came up, in these years of the 1950s open-air testing of nuclear weapons by the U.S. and the USSR was common. An estimated 1,000 people a year died from illnesses related to the extra radiation from these tests.34
Maverick Genius Page 16
