Happy Birthday

Updated Sunday 15 May, 2011 12:18 PM

America Celebrates Nuclear Space Age’s 40th Birthday.

Time Magazine, August 15th, 2003

We have all seen the historical photos; The great ships drifting across the heavens, Neil Armstrong taking his first steps on Mars, and every day millions look up to see the drifting shadow of Space Station Freedom. On this occasion, let us go back and look over the course of events that allowed America and Humanity to realize its greatest adventure. From the rings of Saturn to the brink of annihilation, it all began with one man...

For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond... It is with those words that in 1962 President John F. Kennedy inspired a nation. He challenged us to go to the moon, to reach beyond the stars. With this speech Kennedy began a new space initiative, but he would never see it bear fruit. On the tragic morning of March 3rd, 1963, President Kennedy lost his lifelong struggle with Addison’s disease, an illness he had kept hidden his whole life. Doctors deemed the stress of the Presidency had been too much for his weakened form. But this tragic death would not be in vain, for it served to galvanize the nation’s resolve, to inspire more daring projects than had ever been attempted.

The Orion Program had been in development well before its official commissioning in 1958, competing with the lesser-known Apollo program in its goal of reaching the moon. When President Johnson was shown the prototype rocket, the 18-foot “Put-Putter” test and its test-firing in June of 1963, he was an immediate convert to the nuclear-pulse crowd. Far more efficient than chemical rockets and capable of launching payloads hundreds and thousands of times that of the experimental Saturn V rockets, they were exactly the tool Johnson would need to explore a new frontier.

And so in August of 1963 Johnson worked to have the landmark Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT) amended to permit nuclear explosions for “non-weapons research.” It was not a significant change to the Soviet negotiators, but Article I, Clause aI of the LTBT has come to be the foundation on which the American Space Program and the development of the interplanetary infrastructure.

With the treaty firmly in place, Johnson began his “Great Endeavor.” While he and the rest of the world worried about Vietnam and tensions in Asia increased, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) which ran Orion was folded into NASA to create a new space agency. In a top-secret meeting, Johnson placed Ted Taylor as the head of the National Space Initiative with James E. Webb and Freeman Dyson as his lieutenants. The proposal Johnson laid out was a great one. He wanted by the end of 1964 a fully stocked Orion ship ready for a massive tour-de-force on the moon. The proposed ship would be massive, over 150 feet high with a living space the size of an eight-story hotel. It was to take a crew of 30 for a one month expedition where they would send landers, gather samples, and set up observation posts before returning to earth. In an understatement to be remembered in history, Taylor looked at the proposal and said to Johnson “It’s a big ship, alright.”

In absolute secrecy the ship was built in pieces. At the time the Soviet Union had no idea of the potential of Orion ships, and the government wanted to keep it that way. Much was needed, not just computers and steel, but water, food, fuel, and the 2000 nuclear pulse units that would power the ship. NASA was building a ship so large it could lift 6000 of the old Gemini capsules, and do it easily. The massive kickplate of the ship was almost thirty feet across, and every year millions see it on display at the Smithsonian. Even with the eventual cost overruns and logistical difficulties, the ship was assembled in a massive hanger in western Oklahoma.

To prepare the nation and to test designs, a 1/6th size ship was built and launched in October of 1964, just four months before the expected launch of the Lunar Mission. On October 4th, 1964, just seven years after the Soviets launched their Sputnik I into orbit, a white light bloomed in the early morning hours on the Oklahoma panhandle, as the unmanned Prometheus I rose into the sky. Three weeks later, the first manned Orion launch took and the Prometheus I and its crew of eight away from earth Their mission was a five day journey to the moon, led and navigated by Freeman Dyson. They would circle the Moon, photograph it, and return to earth. On November 1st, the Prometheus astronauts returned to earth as heros.

On March 5th, 1965, after some last minute repairs that could have spelled disaster for the Orion Program, the Prometheus II launched under full fanfare. Some 20,000 people had gathered at the one-mile perimeter around the launch facility, and millions of people worldwide watched it climb into the sky. Three massive Saturn V rockets lifted the Prometheus high into the atmosphere. At the top of its arc, a flurry of nuclear pulses rocketed it into the skies and heaved it into space, and it was on its way. Every second of the mission was monitored by the American public, because at Johnson’s insistence a television crew and 58 year-old Walter Cronkite accompanied the mission.

Navigating with paper and a sextant, the crew of 33 astronauts and scientist voyaged into the unknown. For four weeks Prometheus orbited the moon, its four landers constantly traveling back and fourth to the ship ferrying astronauts to the surface and their samples to the laboratories to be studied. When the first lander touched the soil and the astronauts stepped out it was Gus Grissom, the first man on the moon, who said the now famous quote. “Here are we, the first among many. What a wondrous new world we have been given.” And he was right. Over the next eight years subsequent Prometheus missions would bring over five hundred civilian and military astronauts to the moon, with only twenty-seven casualties on the infamous Prometheus IV.

A World Shocked Silent. To say that the world was shocked by what America had done would be an understatement. Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and even China saw what the Orion rockets could do and vowed not to be outdone. In just five years the Soviet Nova took to the skies, rising from Mongolia to join the Prometheus IV and the USS Sumter, the first specifically designed American Space Fortress. The Soviets sent their expeditions to the moon, taking samples and expanding their base of knowledge. But the Soviets had a surprise in their second expedition. In 1972, while the American Mars project was still in development, the Russian Zvezda ve Lenin not only landed on at the southern pole of the moon, but deployed as a permanent installation. It was later revealed that what was thought to be a high-altitude Soviet nuclear test in 1971was in fact an abortive Orion launch which ended the lives of eighty cosmonauts.

This infuriated both the Americans and British, and so not to be outdone in 1970 the newly established International Space Defense Directorate sent their own settlement ship, the Columbus, to the lunar North pole. Several NATO countries, including France, England, and West Germany were a part of this alliance, to shoulder the cost of launching such ships with thousands of nuclear bombs. In light of this development the nations of the ISDD, China and the USSR were forced to sign the Space Settlement Treaty with the ISDD nations, whereby a nation could claim any territory within one hundred miles (160km) of a permanent settlement on a planet or moon as their sovereign territory, and could claim in its entirety any celestial body once settled which had a largest dimension of no more than 100km.

But settlement was still a decade away in 1970. To establish a strategic presence in space, the US Air Force, and later the ISDD began to construct a number of Star Fortresses. These revolutionary ships were to end the threat of an accidental holocaust as feared during the Cuban Missile Crisis by placing strategic nuclear weapons at a distance, either in high earth orbit or near the moon, where there would be time to evaluate a nuclear strike. This not only protected nuclear arsenals and removed them from population centers as ballistic missile submarines had, but guaranteed to American enemies that any nuclear attack would come only in response to a similar attack, since any launch of missiles would be detected long before they came.

By 1975 a full dozen Star Fortresses were protecting the skies above, with four ships hovering close over Europe and North America as missile defense batteries, and another eight circling the moon, being periodically refueled from Columbus base. The courageous men of the International Space Forces defended freedom from their revolving fortresses and there were new stars gleaming in the night sky.

Tragedy and a Grand and Terrible Voyage. The first mission to Mars was plagued with delays, pushing it from 1972 all the way to 1974. First was the tragedy of the Prometheus IV, when a meteoroid holed the entire lower section, exposing twenty-seven American and British scientists to the vacuum of space. The Prometheus IV managed to insert itself into orbit, and the remaining astronauts were rescued. As a result, new safety features were implemented in all ISDD ship designs. Additional delays came in part from building the Columbus, America’s first permanent Lunar settlement. After assistance from the UK as a part of the ISDD, the spaceship Lewis and Clarke was launched from the new launch facility on the salt flats of Utah on June 18th, 1973. Almost 500 feet tall and carrying a crew of two thousand, the Clarke was a whole new concept in nuclear pulse rockets, and the design was dubbed the “super-Orion” by its builders, but officially the new class was to be the Cronus class after the king of the Titans who conquered the sky.

Learning lessons from the tragic explosion of the Atlas II and the partial decompression of the Prometheus IV, the new ship was double hulled with redundant safeguards on the nuclear pulse drive. A rotating interior ring would provide a hydroponic farm in space where food could be grown to supplement the three year voyage. The Clarke would make a tour of the solar system, dropping off scientists and researchers on Mars, Callisto, Ganymede, Titan, Enceladus and in the asteroid belt before beginning its return trip. President Nixon in his second inaugural address called the mission “A new proclamation of our manifest destiny to reach out into the stars.”

For three years the crew of the Lewis and Clarke traveled further from earth than humans had ever traveled, bringing back stunning pictures and a wealth of scientific data that would take a decade to process and fuel a renaissance in the way humans thought about and looked at space. But while peaceful exploration and settlement was progressing in the frontier of the solar system, a new crisis was happening in earth’s backyard.

The Lunar Blockade. Ships of exploration were not the only kind being launched in the early years of space travel. Launched in 1972, the USS Constellation was the first ship in the newly-established U.S. Space Force. Loaded with missiles and six rocket-powered fighters, it was launched in response to the Soviet withdrawal from the LTBT. The Constellation patrolled the skies over the earth, serving as both an observation outpost and a weapons platform to protect the orbital installations which had been placed into orbit. By 1975, both the ISDD and the Soviets had a handful of these armored behemoths drifting around the earth-moon system, but something was about to change all of that.

China, at that time was a very junior partner in a Sino-Soviet space effort. The PRC was largely a contributor of resources and manpower, while the Russians provided the expertise. Before 1975, only three Chinese-run Orion missions had been launched, including the ill-fated 1971 Emperor mission to Titan, which claimed the lives of all 227 crewmen. For the most part the ISDD viewed China as a “little brother” to Russia and paid very little attention to their efforts. It was this inattention that allowed China to build a Lenin-type battleship, the Mao-Tse-Tung, fill it with nuclear missiles, and send it to the moon to establish a base. Only excellent work on the part of England’s MI-6 gave America advance warning of the imminent delivery. With such a vessel China, which had not been asked to sign the Free-Moon Treaty of 1972, would be immediately able to assert total dominance over the moon and its 12,000 inhabitants. President Nixon was not about to allow this to happen, and so ordered a blockade of the moon. The Soviets claimed to have no knowledge of this at the time, but later declassified reports prove that the Mao was in fact a cooperative effort between the two states. Fortunately, secrecy was to be maintained, and the Soviet Space Command declared that it would not interfere, but that if the Chinese vessel was destroyed in an unprovoked attack it would respond in kind against orbital, though not lunar, targets.

On September 22nd, 1975, three US and one British battleships arrayed themselves in a picket line thirty-thousand miles from the moon. For four days, the world watched as the Chinese ship came closer and closer with its deadly cargo. Negotiations and diplomacy were used as weapons in the battlefield of the UN, with furious deals, agreements, and counter-agreements were made in a seventy-hour session of the UN Space Council. The Chinese were left holding the bag by the Russians, but weren’t ready to let go of it themselves.

At 3 a.m. Eastern time on September 27th, the Mao-Tse-tung met the fleet. It fired its breaking rockets, and launched a screen of its own space fighters. For four tense hours the ships faced off like a group of angry beehives, and around the world people hunkered down in shelters as they had 13 years before. At 7:21 a.m, the Mao-Tse-tung turned back to earth. But the Lunar blockade would have lasting effects, and in 1978, the Space-Disarmament Treaty was signed by twenty UN nations, including the US, UK, USSR, China, Canada, France, and Australia. Over the next ten years, nuclear armaments in space would be reduced 90%, while nations developed new missile defense systems to protect their own borders. Space was now safe for the masses.

Freedom and Prosperity. When the Lewis and Clarke set out, it had one important thing to bring back; an asteroid. From the asteroid belt, a team of American engineers landed a large chemical engine and habitat onto a mostly metallic asteroid, number 1685-B. After six years of travel, it arrived in a geosynchronous orbit above Montana in 1979 and became known as Space Station Freedom. During its long voyage, engineers and automated mining machines converted the thirty mile-long asteroid into humanity’s largest space station. Designed to serve as a transfer point to the lagrange points, the moon, and beyond, it is a sort of reverse Ellis Island. The new generation of Canadian-designed Phoenix orbital insertion vehicles were able to bring up dozens of colonists and equipment to move to larger pulse ships. This system worked so well that it was adapted by the Soviets and the Chinese as well, which allowed the Atmospheric Nuclear Pulse Ban Treaty of 1986. This treaty ended the common practice of using nuclear pulses in the atmosphere, and reduced annual fallout generation by 2 megatons.

During this time, a number of settlement ships were sent to Mars, and almost a dozen were sent to the outer planets. It should be noted, that of the fifty-seven settlement ships launched to date, only two were lost. But this new wave of expansion was in remarkably good hands. A few settlements left behind a decade before by the Lewis and Clarke and a few other expeditions provided the framework for settlement of additional worlds in our solar system. Over the fifteen years between 1974 and 1989, almost twenty-thousand humans were settled on Mars, Ganymede, Callisto, Europa, Titan, and the moon, as well as a few dozen asteroids. Prominent settlements took hold, and human civilization began to creep across the faces of these new lands. Even South Africa and Brazil joined this age of expansion, by sending their own Orion ships into space in 1984 and 1985.

Now installed with powerful computers to regulate onboard functions, Orion ships continued to define a new military frontier, serving as observation posts, communications relays, maintenance stops, and even weapons platforms. The last time battlecruisers were used in large-scale conflict was during the 1987 Soviet bombing of Afghanistan. For two weeks in the summer of 1987, Soviet weapons pounded the eastern mountains to destroy tenacious Mujahedin encampments, but eventually Russia bowed to diplomatic pressure to stop, and in December of 1987 began its withdrawl from Afghanistan.

Limited use of Orion ships assisted the US coalition in the Gulf War, allowing them to target and destroy Iraqi targets with a then-astonishing 60% accuracy rate. Saddam Hussein was quoted as saying “The infidels may hold the stars above, but Allah has given us the earth.” The coalition considered it an even trade and drove the Iraqis from Kuwait.

There were conflicts out in the new colonies to be sure, the worst of which were the infamous Raider Skirmishes of the late 80's, where rogue settlers on the Martian frontier attacked the permanent settlements, leading to the destruction of Independence Colony when its habitats were vented into space by gunfire. The terraforming initiative was temporarily put on hold for a time, but a colonial militia supplied by the members of the new UN Space Directorate soon brought peace to the world. Terraforming of Mars is expected to be completed by the beginning of the 22nd century. Unfortunately, only a few years of peace would reign in space before a new danger would threaten the whole of human expansion.

The Red Star Falls. Even the golden age of space travel was not enough to keep the stunted Soviet economy from disaster. In February of 1990, the Soviet Union was dissolved. Though many on earth rejoiced, dancing on the Berlin Wall, there was trouble in the stars above. At this date there were 14,000 soviet citizens scattered over thirty different settlements on seven different worlds, and no one knew who they owed allegiance to. Some of them wanted to remain loyal to the new Russian government, some to their ethnic nations, and still others wanted to declare independence.

Many of the Martian colonies banded together to declare a new Soviet nation, though this did little at first except deny them Russian aid. The lunar settlements were stable in their transition, and earth was safe, and so were most of the outlying colonies, though a few sold their charters to corporations or other nations. But Mars was simmering. A few unscrupulous nations had been supplying arms to the Martian Soviets, who did not intend to give up their independence. When UN-backed Russian settlers came in 1994 to reclaim the lost colonies, they resisted. Flying the flag of a five golden stars in a red circle, the Soviet Republics of Mars turned back the settlers shocking the world. Many called for peace and negotiations with the fledgling nation, but the Russian Federation was eager to save face. They sent two battleships and a battalion of soldiers outfitted for the riggours of Mars. In a violent clash which lasted from August 1995 to April of 1996, the Russian troops defeated the soviets.

A Bright Future. Today space is a more peaceful place. The extraterrestrial human population is approaching 100,000m and space tourism is doubling every two years. Massive spaceliners are taking not only wealthy but average people on luxury cruises to the moon, and extended voyages to Mars in the grand style of the ocean liners of the 1920s.

Manufacturing facilities in orbit have allowed scientists to make remarkable leaps towards nanotechnology and innovative computing technologies. New innovations in spaceflight have drastically reduced the global economic dependence on nuclear material, causing an economic boom amongst spacefaring nations. Though nuclear pulse rockets are gradually being replaced by new ion engines, they are still the best and most efficient way to reach the outer system. Plans are also underway to create a network of orbital skyhooks to allow high-altitude planes a safe place to unload their cargo at the edge of space.

And who knows what may be next.? Currently new developments in space technologies are opening up the door to other solar systems. Perhaps in a hundred years, when a blue sky blankets Mars, a new wave of human discovery will begin. The mighty ships of Ted Taylor and Freeman Dyson may indeed go the way of the Spanish galleons of old, but like those galleons, they charted a new world and brought back untold riches to those who had sent them. In the past forty years, man has visited and landed on over twenty worlds and moons in our solar system, and our civilization now spans over a billion miles. And for that, we wish Orion a happy birthday. Forty years of charting the unknown, and doing it in style.