#propulsion

Nuclear Pulse Propulsion and Project Orion: A Star Drive That Almost Was

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a group of physicists at General Atomics designed what remains the most powerful spacecraft propulsion system ever seriously considered: a ship that would ride a series of nuclear explosions to velocities capable of reaching other stars within a human lifetime. Project Orion was cancelled in 1963. Its physics still works.