I'm still devouring the literature on the bomb-hurled spaceship slowly, a few chapters a day, and it continues to be a great yarn. It's a story of temptation and redemption and falling again for the scientist set: The researchers from the Manhattan Project get together again, this time to spread life and intelligence to distant worlds. But the only people they can get to sponsor them is the Air Force. Even while many struggle to keep the project advancing peace and humanity, the space-exploration side of the project gets cancelled and the weaponizable subsystems get continued outside of Orion. This is the story of dozens of the brightest minds, from the greatest generation, having their best work twisted into devices for slaughter.
This is a tragedy worth retelling.
But for now, I'm just geeking out on the taxonomy of goofy code names that got slapped onto horrific parts of the project.
"Casaba Howitzer" was the designation for a weapon that spun off of the project. The core notion of Orion was a spaceship propelled by nuclear blasts. The trick was getting the blasts to be the right size and shape: The Orion researchers wanted to get past the poor energy density of chemical fuel that makes it prohibitively expensive to explore far beyond earth. But moving to nuclear power overshot the answer at first glance: A normal atom bomb would be overpowered, crushing the passengers on the ship with the force of impact. So first they had to develop smaller bombs. And rather than have most of the force be lost, they wanted to shape the blast, so most of it would point back to the starship and push it along. "Casaba Howitzer" is what they called it when you took this small, directed atom bomb that you'd turned into a starship thruster, and turned it back into a weapon. Even after Orion was cancelled, research on "Casaba Howitzer" continued. The details are very classified, but the implication is that the system was built and test fired at least once.
The 'Starfish' event was a test of setting off a hydrogen bomb in near-Earth space. Bomb tests were done in batches, and this one was off to a bad start: the previous missile had been destroyed after launch, rather than let it detonate in the wrong place when its rocket went off course. But code-name Starfish was triggered as planned, and then detonated larger than the researchers had expected. The fireball was so bright that some watching from the test zone below were blinded, and the initial flash lit up the night sky for more than 1,000 miles in any direction, and the fireball could be seen for minutes afterward. Radiation belts were created in low orbit that disabled as many as one third of all satellites there, some of them permanently.
The fireball, as caught by a photographer in Honolulu, 900 miles away.
I'd like to craft this all into a horror/tragedy RPG scenario, if I can make it fit.
Ateh - no telling the Huntsvillians. I'd like to pull the story out on them first. It should be especially poignant for them, since their city plays in that story.
Wait, which cake looks good?