Syfy’s ambitious 6-hour series Ascension is about a gigantic, nuclear-powered starship launched in 1963 to send hundreds of people on a 100 year trip to Proxima Centauri. It sounds like something straight out of a science fiction novel, but it’s based on a very real, very secret project that came close to becoming a reality.
Project Orion, started in 1958, was launched by physicists Ted Taylor and Freeman Dyson. The concept was to use nuclear explosions as a means of propelling a ridiculously large spacecraft to the far reaches of our solar system and beyond. The thing about using nuclear bombs as a means of thrust is it’s far more efficient than using standard chemical rockets and it could all be built using technology of the era.
The Orion-class “Ascension” as depicted on Syfy’s site.
If it weren’t for the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 the space race could’ve looked very different. Giant nuclear-powered ships traveling the solar system wouldn’t be a thing of speculation, it’d be an every day reality. That’s one of the things that makes the premise of Ascension so exciting; it could’ve actually happened.
The show takes you into an alternate timeline where we moved ahead with Project Orion and built a gigantic starship to colonize another solar system. I like to imagine that the government secretly went forward with the plan and there’s about 600 people halfway to the nearest star system right now. My only wish is that I were one of them.
Orion concept rendering by Adrian Mann of bisbos.com
In the video at the top of this post, George Dyson, son of Freeman Dyson, presents a TED talk on the project his father co-launched. He’s got a ton of information about the project, but one of the more interesting things I took away from it is that a lot of the documentation on Project Orion is still classified. With many aspects of the project still considered secret by the government it kind of makes Ascension feel more like a documentary than science fiction. That’s a bonus layer of realism for the show’s premise of a secret starship project.
From NASA archives: A basic Orion concept diagram
If you’re still not convinced a spaceship can be powered by a series of explosions take a gander at the video below. It’s a clip from the 2003 BBC documentary To Mars by A-Bomb that shows a scaled down rocket using conventional explosives to prove the concept actually works. Even Arthur C. Clarke believed in the idea.