Orion I, or, Jeb owes me a new spacebar

[Paul Drye]

So sarcastically I said to Jeb, 'If you like explosions so much, why don't you just make a ship that runs off them?' and he got this real thoughtful look.

We tried a stack of nothing but stage decouplers but you can't fire them fast enough to build up any real speed. And the nuclear charges aren't due until next week, so we had to use a bunch of Sunday Punch's escape towers in series:

The ship is:

- Parachute

- Pod

- Sunday Punch's 4 coupler

- Four stacks of four escape towers with stage decouplers underneath them, repeated six times

- Four more escape towers at the bottom just for lucky seven.

Launch this puppy quick 'cause she tips over after a few seconds of sitting on the launch pad.

On a perfect run I can get 'er up to 2500 meters and a smidge over 150m/s, but most of the time it's...less than perfect. It's a bad day when everybody dies, though, and they often end up landing on the beach by the KSC so they go for a swim after.

A typical flight:

[Heimdall]

So sarcastically I said to Jeb, 'If you like explosions so much, why don't you just make a ship that runs off them?' and he got this real thoughtful look.

We tried a stack of nothing but stage decouplers but you can't fire them fast enough to build up any real speed. And the nuclear charges aren't due until next week

wait... WHAT ?

(seriously, i we ever got some kind of explosion drive, i'm gonna get all over it.)