Is the ol' Boom Boom overpowered?

[Temstar]

On 18/12/2015 at 7:56 AM, wumpus said:

Note the [fallout] analysis is from George Dyson's book "Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship".  I'd assume that it was being more than fair to his father's space ship.

AFAIK Dyson himself is saying by his calculation each Orion launch will cause somewhere between 0.1 to 1 additional death per launch globally. He considers this to be unacceptable and said maybe if the bombs could be made clean enough so that they can get less than 0.01 death per launch then he would consider it.

1 death for 1500 ton payload is interesting because it might not be that bad. I wonder if it's possible to put together "death per ton to orbit" for chemical rockets like say the Proton over its history.

The shaped charges Orion is suppose to use produces a cigar shaped fireball instead of the usual sphere so it's more efficient. The same technology is also behind the Casaba nuclear howitzer which fires a nuke that then explode into a spear of nuclear flame. This is why Project Orion is still highly classified: the technology behind its fuel can also be used to create highly destructive directed nuclear explosions.