One interesting tidbit toward the end is that the author thinks building this ship is feasible within 200 years of the writing, with a cost estimate of $10^11 in 1968 dollars, assuming a 4% GNP growth rate. I haven't calculated what $10^11 would become in 2021 dollars, but growth hasn't been that high since the 90s, and it wasn't sustained growth, even then.
There is a very interesting book about Freeman Dyson and his son George Dyson.<p>While Freeman was building starships to escape civilization into the stars, George was building massive spaceframe canoes to escape civilization into the wilderness.<p>Both are very interesting men in their own right, and George is still building canoes and kayaks out of his shop in Bellingham, WA
The postmortem was a great read too: <a href="https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.691.3128&rep=rep1&type=pdf" rel="nofollow">https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.69...</a>
More details and sketches of potential designs: <a href="https://newatlas.com/orion-project-atom-bomb-spaceship/49454/" rel="nofollow">https://newatlas.com/orion-project-atom-bomb-spaceship/49454...</a><p>One thing I'm sure I don't understand: from a material science perspective, how would you produce shock absorbers capable of repeated and sustained shockwaves at 100 second intervals from h-bombs? It seems like any material you select, as exotic as it may be, will degrade pretty quickly. Doesn't seem like 200 years will solve this problem.
Maybe this is outside the scope, but one thing I’m really curious about —- what about the radiation!?<p>I’m guessing the payload could be sufficiently shielded and/or would just outrun it. But would there be any eventual issues with blasting out tons of radiation all over space wherever it went? In particular, this seems like a big problem during take-off from Earth…
also see <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...</a>
Seems like there might be but wondering if theres any overlap here with the frozen brain solar sail nuclear bomb space detonation acceleration idea from Liu Cixins Dark Forest romance novel?
Weirdly I asked hn about this yesterday not sure what happened to the thread but I’m super glad someone else picked up from there it’s been a great read thanks !