The e-Magazine of the British Interplanetary Society

Odyssey: The e-Magazine of the British Interplanetary Society: Issue 47 www.bis-space.com 1

The e-Magazine of the British Interplanetary Society

The Depths of Space

Welcome to Odyssey 47, how fast the year is going. I have opened this edition with a

short story entitled The Colony which I hope you will enjoy. Once again we are pleased to have another poem from Grant Sorrell, and John Silvester reviews the second book of Ruth Wheeler’s new science fiction trilogy as well as another book in Springer’s series of science fiction books written by scientists themselves. Richard Hayes has written his regular Radical Vectors column with some thoughts on the harsh realities of space flight, and he also reviews Alex Storer’s exciting new music album Infinity of Space.

To ease us into Grant’s poem, Richard has written an article on the subject of whether there could be a “time before time”. Very interesting – this will have you thinking about the whole idea of oscillating universes and whether it could be true. And if it is, how many times has it happened before? In the next issue, we have another poem by Grant Sorrell, and I’m delighted to say that we will have another short science fiction story from one of the contributors to Visionary. However, I’ll keep that under wraps until you get the chance to read it for yourself. John will be reviewing the last book in Ruth

Wheeler’s trilogy and another of the Springer novels written by scientists. Richard will be returning to his explorations of space and science fiction artwork, and will also be looking at one of the most well-known ideas for enabling humans to travel vast distances to the stars, in both fact and fiction – suspended animation. What better way to while away a journey for many years than peacefully asleep? Having read what Richard has to say, you might think otherwise, but that’s for next time.

Terry Henley FBISEditor, Odyssey

The Colony by Terry Henley FBIS

Arnack slowed his ship down as he arrived at his destination. His ship was small, what the

Colonists called a Cone; the sub light engine at the rear was sealed and never broke down. The front of the Cone could be made translucent so he could see everything around him as he sat in his command chair. The ship was only 10 metres long and 3 metres high and the main ship Aronaught could hold twenty of these craft inside its hull along with eight shuttles and ten Sentry craft.

Arnack had been in this position at least twenty times before, on every occasion a planet where life had taken form. The Colony consisted of over fifty thousand major planets and five thousand minor races which lived on small moons and asteroids. All of them had agreed to live under the rules of the Colony. Should any person or persons attempt

to do harm to another or to a complete Colony, they were dealt with swiftly by the closest Sentry. In nearly every instance it meant certain death.

The planet below which Arnack was now orbiting had started out very well. The people had listened to the Angel Guides who had landed in the most populated areas and taught the species how to build dwellings and even larger halls for various projects they were being taught. The Angel Guides even gave them advanced tools to help them move forward at a fast pace. The leaders, High Priests and Thinkers, those that understood the knowledge they were given, were taken into orbit and then to their nearest moons and other planets in the solar system.

As was normal practice, the Thinkers were given instruments and knowledge

of the stars in the hope that, in time, the species would swell and finally join the Colony when they would share in its knowledge and commence investigating space projects, and eventually help other beings on planets that had formed in the ‘Life Zone’.

On the planet below, the species had not grasped everything the Angel Guides had said and had used the tools they were given to overpower the leaders and kill them. They then took the tools they had stolen and used them to build their own cities and make slaves of the people they gathered. This left the Sentry which remained on the planet no option but to destroy the city and those species that had attacked the Thinkers and High Priests.

As always, the city and species were annihilated by a thermonuclear


explosion which wiped out their life’s work. Those that survived the assault on their village or city were shown by the Sentry what would happen if they chose the line of breaking the laws the Angel Guides had given them.

As time progressed, the Thinkers had been given more tools to help them and the Sentry had taken them deep into space, yet the Queens and Kings of the planet had demanded much more of their species. Despite the Thinkers warning them of the actions the Sentry could do, they very often did as they wished. On numerous occasions, the Sentry, who had taken up residence on a high plateau overlooking the species, went down to talk with the Thinkers and leaders.

Sometimes, a number of controllers, who had been put in charge of work parties, were executed on the spot as a warning to others who would soon take the demised person’s place. Punishing helpers was not allowed; they were housed and fed and taken care of for their loyalty to the Head of the City. Hard wearing clothes were made from replicators which had been given to workers which also created their specialised tools and cutters. These could gouge designs in the huge stones before they were erected by gravity waves into their exact positions. Some members of the species, though, had remained good and treated everyone fairly.

But a severe problem further out in space had changed the course of events. All the Sentries of the Colony had been called to help wipe out an invading species from another galaxy.

Over thirty thousand ships had arrived through four wormholes, and they destroyed twelve planetary systems before they were slowly brought down in numbers, and several years passed before the last of the invaders were killed. A special force of Sentries was created and a new system made to detect wormholes.

Hundreds of planets had lost their Sentries but enough Sentries had been created to protect everyone from a further invasion. A fleet of special warships was made and people from every planet occupied them and learned to fight as one. This supported

the Sentries and the warships helped protect the worlds that were in harm’s way.

When a new Sentry had taken up residence on the planet that Arnack was now approaching, he had found they were always at war or fighting each other. It was so bad, a special commission was sent to investigate this species and, over five years, a number of the species had been abducted and taken aboard their mothership. By now, the species had occupied their moons and planets and had sent spy satellites into deep space which informed the species of where it was and what it had found. The species had discovered light speed and some of their scientists were working on creating wormholes. Fighting was still rife on the planet and it had even started on three of the moons. Crime was everywhere and, after all the data had been analysed, Chief Appraisal Officer Arnack had been sent there. He travelled to the surface and moved slowly over the land observing the species. His ship was invisible, but he could hear and see everyone and was shocked at what he saw. Trade was carried out to gratify pure greed with no regard for the suffering it might cause. Some even killed their own species as if they were animals. In one city, he watched people kill others and then blow themselves up, killing even more of their own kind.

Arnack sighed and took his ship back into orbit. He travelled to each of

the moons and the planets that the species had occupied. It was the same wherever he went and he knew the committee was right, but it was now down to him; he was the appraisal officer. The members of the species that had been abducted had begged for their lives, but when they told the committee what they did to each other and how they treated their own kind, many of the committee had burst into tears and could not understand how any society could live like this.

Arnack sent a message to the new Sentry on the surface. He could not understand how the species could live like this when their own Sentry had given his life to protect them from the invaders. When the committee members had started their investigation into this species, they had been appalled at what they had seen and had requested four more Sentries to cover the system. A special war fleet had come as well using wormhole technology and their ships had detected the position of thirty spacecraft of the species that were already out of the system on their way to the stars. The spy satellites had been found and a Colony ship was following each of them.

At the designated time, Arnack pressed a control button that set in motion a number of explosions. The Sentry boarded his ship and flew into the air; his ship was visible to everyone on the planet and within a minute, aircraft and rockets were being fired at it. From orbit, satellites turned around and commenced to open fire

Spacecraft image by Adam Kop.


Richard Hayes FBIS reviews Alex Storer’s album Infinity of Space

on the Sentry’s ship. Arnack could see the committee had been right in their decision. A few million kilometres away, another explosive force had started and throughout the star system Moons and Asteroids commenced to explode. The spy satellites were destroyed by the war fleet, as too were the thirty ships which were heading for two populated star systems.

Arnack watched from his ship as the planet below commenced to break up;

molten lava from deep underground broke through the planet’s crust, which was now being dissolved by the extreme heat from the molten centre of the planet.

The Sentry sent a short message to Arnack as his ship left the planet.

“This is for the best, we could not allow these people to destroy what we have strived so hard to create. The people of Earth would have brought our peaceful

civilisation to an end.”

Arnack nodded in silence and moved away from the burning planet. As he turned his ship around, he could see the Earth, Moon and Mars, as nuclear explosions consumed the people and the land they lived on. “If only they had listened to our Angel Guides,” he replied and followed the Sentry out of the solar system.

Our lasting images of space travel are indelibly linked with vast reaches of emptiness, and the

utter silence of the vacuum of space. So whenever film-makers seek to depict such scenes, they frequently choose as the background highly evocative music which gives an impression of the immensity of the universe around us.

This was done effectively in Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke’s 1968 masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. As Heywood Floyd and his colleagues travel over the surface of the Moon to visit the site of the mysterious monolith in the crater Tycho, we hear elements of György Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna, giving a sense of their isolation in the lunar landscape. Later in the film, as we are introduced to astronauts Bowman and Poole going about their daily tasks aboard the spacecraft Discovery on their way to Jupiter, the loneliness of deep space travel is given a strong impact by the use of the calm and flowing adagio from Aram Khachaturian’s Gayane ballet suite.

There is little doubt that an appropriate use of musical style can evoke images in our minds of the depths of the cosmos as we journey into the unknown, and Alex has achieved this excellently in his latest album Infinity of Space, which has been produced in support of the Initiative for Interstellar Studies. The overall concept is based around movement through space, rather than arrival at a destination, and we experience the emotions that would almost certainly be felt by travellers in the interstellar void.

The opening sounds of the

Background image from NASA/Hubblesite.org.

imaginatively named first track Macrocosm take us immediately into a place where we are surrounded by the uncertainties anyone would feel when alone in the vastness of space. But it soon resolves into a rhythm that shows our determination to move onwards as part of some mission to the stars.

From then on, the pace picks up as Cruise Velocity, possibly one of Alex’s best tracks, develops the dynamic beat which indicates the excitement that astronauts venturing into new territory would find. In turn, we identify something strange in the path of our journey in First Encounter, though the speed of interstellar flight allows no time to investigate, and we return to a yearning for home – inevitable on any trip where the homecoming will be a long time coming, if it ever does – in Absence.

A mechanical beat in Construct brings out memories of the construction of our starship – a very positive flow that demonstrates the pride that our travellers feel in the spacecraft on

which their lives depend. And we come back to our drive to explore in Pioneers, a fast moving track which indicates that we are breaking new ground, followed by a rather more questioning feeling in Destiny. But we cannot escape the Longing which is summed up by the track of that name.

The closing tracks again emphasise ideas of the depths of space. Expanse suggests the endlessness of what surrounds us, and the sharper staccato start of the final track Infinity leads to an increasingly positive progress towards our eventual destination. The concluding chords, though, again provoke feelings of the true infinity of space, reminiscent of those we experience at the conclusion of the Neptune movement of Gustav Holst’s Planets suite – drifting away through the empty light years.

Alex’s album gains considerably through the addition of guitar themes by Peter Rophone on several of the tracks. The overall effect is bound to appeal to any enthusiast for space travel – these are the very concepts and images, conveyed through music, that our descendants may encounter for real.

And for those of us who are unlikely to experience the wonder – and the perils – of space travel for real in our lifetimes, it is through media such as music that we can gain an impression of what it might one day be like.

The album is out now as a digital download priced at £7.99 and comes with an illustrated PDF booklet https://thelightdreams.bandcamp.com/album/infinity-of-space.

https://thelightdreams.bandcamp.com/album/infinity-of-space




The idea of a bouncing universe initially sounds a bit ridiculous, but it’s been a serious

consideration ever since the Big Bang theory in cosmology first took off.

In September 1956, Scientific American devoted a landmark edition to the subject of the universe, including the article The Evolutionary Universe by George Gamow, then Professor of Physics at the University of Colorado. He explained the various theories as they then stood, including that of a “pulsating” universe; “when the universe has reached a certain maximum permissible expansion, it will begin to contract...it will shrink until its matter has been compressed to a certain maximum density...then it will begin to expand again – and so on through the cycle ad infinitum.”

Professor Gamow observed that, at that time, there were tentative findings that the expansion of the universe might be slowing down, which could confirm that we live in a pulsating universe.

As we now know, contrary to expectations, the expansion is actually accelerating. Well, at least for the time being – the very long term future may hold yet more surprises. But the idea of a cyclic universe has not gone away.

As I mentioned in a recent Odyssey webpost – The One and Only – the 2015 book The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time by Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Lee Smolin provides a revolutionary approach. They argue against the existence of the multiverse and instead suggest that there is only one succession of universes – one after another but only one at a time.

The Big Bang “is not the first moment in time, but a passage before which the universe existed...possibly under different laws.” The laws, symmetries and constants of nature which seem so “fine tuned for complex structures such as longlived stars, spiral galaxies and organic molecules” – in other words, for life itself to exist – change at such major transitions.

Richard Hayes FBIS Considers Time Before Time

To some extent, it goes against the grain. Professor Unger admits that many scientists “have claimed that the immutability of the laws of nature is a premise of the work of science”, which we tend to take for granted. But his co-author considers it a fallacy to assume that the methodology we apply to local scientific investigations necessarily applies at the universal or cosmological level.

What is being proposed is no less than a form of cosmological natural selection. Our life-friendly universe, with its seemingly arbitrary constants of nature, has not developed by pure chance, but through a kind of

Darwinian evolutionary process, having been causally connected to many previous versions of the universe which went before. Professor Smolin refers to certain models which are used to investigate the implications of a merger of quantum physics and general relativity – so-called “bounce solutions” – which show that the universe was contracting before the Big Bang. So it may have been in the past, and so we might expect it to be in the future, even given the current evidence of accelerating expansion going on forever. Our universe may bounce back again, as seen in several science fiction stories such as Poul Anderson’s 1970 novel Tau Zero, where occupants of a spacecraft travelling at near the speed of light see aeons pass by whilst they barely age due to the effects of time dilation. They have no choice but to travel to the end of our universe...and beyond.

Anderson gave a similar challenging view of universes yet to come in his earlier 1950 story Flight to Forever, where time travel proves to be one way only – into the future. But, in this case, a pulsating universe is even more cyclic, simply repeating what has gone before. No chance there of cosmic evolution, just endless recapitulation of the same sequence of events. Which, in its way, can be either rather satisfying or deeply depressing depending on one’s outlook on life.

Then suddenly, a single point in space explodes

in every direction, unravelling its heat, cooling into rock and dust.

Wait long enough, the long-dead lights will slow to a stop

in the distance and return with warmth. I combine

with you once more— a singularity in nothing,

waiting to explode all over again.

Oscillation Theory by Grant Sorrell

http://www.bis-space.com/2017/02/28/18453/the-one-and-only



John Silvester FBIS reviews Do Aliens Read Sci-Fi?

This is the title of volume two of the story of 18 year old Tom Bowler’s life on the planetoid

Truxxe, in a nearby galaxy. Once more the author Ruth Wheeler’s huge imagination bursts forth like an exploding firework, in her uniquely humorous fashion, but trampling over the bounds of scientific fact when it proves to be necessary.

This time Tom is joined by his friend from Earth, Nathan, and their adventures take them to the prison planet Porriduum, which has a molten crust and is in orbit around an ion star, and where the residents are doomed to eat porridge for their entire sentences. The prison on Porriduum houses criminals from 5000 civilizations through two galaxies. The planet even has different atmospheres for different types of prisoners.

The pace of the story never lets up, and as usual is full of new ideas. There is the device called a compositor, which uses perception altering technology. She introduces us to the new sport of watching raindrops fall down a window pane, which is even enhanced by using nanobots to secretly remove a hydrogen atom from each molecule and thus make them lighter and more likely to win. An amazing idea.

There are also carnivorous, radioactive dragonflies to deal with, that have propellers instead of wings. Tom finds himself imprisoned on Porriduum, and effects an ingenious escape only to learn that the Radiakkans planned to invade Earth, cue for the third book in the trilogy. Ruth Wheeler’s books can be purchased from the author’s website, www.truxxe.com

Cover artwork & design by Robert Hammond.

Radical Vectors: Richard Hayes FBIS Looks At Some Harsh Realities of Spaceflight

It’s often the little things that people mention which give you the true impression of what it’s like to be

where they’ve been. A friend of mine served on oil tankers sailing up the Mekong river during the Vietnam War. He once told me that, when they approached the Mekong delta, the first thing they did was to open every door and hatch on the vessel – otherwise, if they hit a mine, the explosion, no matter how small, would twist the entire ship very slightly and every door would be jammed in its frame. Not helpful if you needed to abandon ship quickly! A little thing like that tells you a lot. Of course, when you’re in a submarine or in space, you might do exactly the opposite since you want to keep the outside environment well away from you, not be able to rush out into it.

We’ve been intrigued by the same kind of detail from many of Tim Peake’s observations of life on the International Space Station, as well as in previous talks to the BIS by Julie Payette and by Tim himself on his preparation to go

there. For example, in zero gravity you can tell when someone’s really asleep lying on their back because their hands drift up from their body. If you drop something and can’t find it, look for the extraction fan since it’ll turn up there sooner or later. However, as the commanders of the Russian Mir space station found, loose items tend to make their way to the air vents and rapidly clog them, so they’re best cleared up fairly quickly.

But some of the day-to-day activities in space can be decidedly frightening. Pavel Vinogradov on Mir managed to keep remarkably cool when he felt something feathery and light brush against his forearm inside his spacesuit as he waited for depressurisation of the chamber around him – it meant there was a leak in his suit. And the feeling of water filling Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano’s helmet, covering his eyes, nose and ears during a spacewalk outside the ISS in July 2013, when he then had to find his way back to the airlock in the dark, must have been truly distressing.

There are also the negative effects of space sickness, which can involve severe headaches and vomiting and is more common than we’d like to think. It’s believed to have affected about half the people who stayed on Mir. And, in zero gravity, an unconscious person simply floats, so you don’t know whether they’re in trouble unless you’re close to them. Descriptions like that, unfortunate though they are, can really give those of us back on Earth the feeling of being there.

But one thing which more than any gives the impression of really “being there” in space is a description of what you see from the portholes of a spacecraft or space station. Both Tim and Julie have given some great examples of views from the ISS, and those of us who heard the crew of Apollo 8 broadcasting from lunar orbit at Christmas 1968 – the first time anyone had left Low Earth Orbit – are unlikely to forget their descriptions of the lunar surface.

Once we try to imagine what

http://www.truxxe.com


interplanetary, or even interstellar, travel is likely to be really like, though, we have to be a bit more speculative. What might we actually see from the portholes of a spacecraft travelling at a significant percentage of the speed of light?

This was discussed by Stimets and Sheldon in The Celestial View from a Relativistic Starship (JBIS, March 1981). Perhaps surprisingly, there are no views of stars hurtling by outside as we often see in Star Trek, nor the “starbow” or similar effects much beloved of science fiction movies such as the original Star Wars. Instead, they conclude that, once the speed of light is approached, the effect of factors such as aberration and Doppler shift results in an intense point of light directly in front of the vessel, and otherwise total darkness. It’s a bit boring, perhaps, but that’s reality for you.

Once you travel faster than light, though, imagination becomes your major tool. In Larry Niven’s Known Space stories, what you see outside your ship in hyperspace is, in effect, nothing at all – not even the blackness of empty space. And that can lead to insanity.

Sadly, though, it’s the problems, and even the disasters, of space travel which tend to define the moments which become etched on the memory, and thus provide the most lasting

as we might like it to be. In his 1966 novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein suggested that one thing you’d dread in a lunar station (or a space station for that matter) is hearing a distant ‘chuff’ sound followed by a gentle draught, since it means there’s an air leak somewhere. Yes, the most frightening thing in space could be a refreshing breeze on your face!

The sudden explosion of a space habitat in the 2015 film The Martian sums up well the catastrophe that could result from loss of pressure in such an alien environment. And the 2013 film Gravity rapidly became iconic in describing a collision between a Space Shuttle and space debris during a spacewalk, and the immense problems of surviving the aftermath.

As so often, Arthur C Clarke comes up with descriptions which bring home the potential realities. In Breaking Strain, his 1949 short story which appeared in Expedition to Earth, one of his earliest collections, a meteor hits an interplanetary space freighter and the reserve oxygen supply is lost – “the oldest terror of the spaceways”. There isn’t enough oxygen for both of the crew members to complete the journey. It could be precisely the kind of dilemma which future astronauts may face.

Spaceships will eventually take humanity through the galaxy, but it won’t all be plain sailing.

Problems up above. Published by HarperCollins 1998. Cover design by Marc Cohen. Cover photograph courtesy NASA.

Harsh realities from Arthur C Clarke. This edition published by Pan Books 1966.

impressions of what it might be like to “be there”. We must all be very grateful that we will never know what it was like to be in Challenger or Columbia in the last moments of those Shuttles, how Vladimir Komarov felt when the parachutes of Soyuz 1 failed to deploy properly and it crashed in 1967, or what the three cosmonauts from the first Salyut space station experienced when all their oxygen leaked into space on re-entry in 1971.

Those tragedies occurred during the acknowledged high-risk periods of take-off and re-entry. In a sense, things going wrong at other times, when astronauts are perhaps feeling more comfortable about life in space, are even more sinister. How the Apollo 13 astronauts felt and acted during their near-catastrophic mission is now so well recorded that we hardly need mention it.

But again it’s the little things which say so much. In Bryan Burrough’s 1998 book Dragonfly, we have some excellent descriptions of what actually happened during the crises on the then-ageing Mir space station in 1997. A fire in zero gravity can’t burn “upwards” like a flame on Earth, and expands in all directions like a burning ball. But, in the terrifying fire on board Mir in February 1997, pressurised oxygen actually caused flames to shoot out much as they would on Earth. The fear of that fire burning through wall panels and depressurising the station, and the fact that it was ablaze between the cosmonauts and one of their Soyuz escape craft, was genuinely frightening.

And a few months later came the memorable collision of an unmanned Progress cargo ship with the station. A sharp tremor, and Mike Foale felt his ears “pop” as the hull was punctured. A hissing of air being lost into space. The impossibility of closing a hatch against the rush of escaping air. The alarm sounding, making it difficult to hear anything else. It’s the stuff of nightmares.

Without wishing for one moment to trivialise those tragic events of the past, some of the better science fiction enables us to envisage life in space in future, and particularly when things go wrong. It can tell us about space travel as it might really be, rather than just


John Silvester FBIS reviews Time Machine Tales

The late Victorian world where H. G. Wells first introduced his ideas on space and time travel would

have treated his two works The Time Machine (1895) and The First Men in the Moon (1901) equally as “scientific romance”. But whereas space travel came of age years ago and has become routine, leaving Wells’ primitive ideas far behind, the concept of time travel remains firmly where he first planted it one hundred and twenty-two years ago, namely a subject for philosophical discussion.

Perhaps this is why Paul J. Nahin in his book Time Machine Tales still seems to have some respect for Wells and his idea of time as the fourth dimension, describing him as “the literary pioneer of time travel”. The book is an updated version of the author’s original of 1993, and incorporates much new material. It is not only a broad overview of time travel in science fiction, it also examines its philosophical implications. It is a dense, tightly packed volume, but if you are fascinated by the idea of travelling through time it probably contains all you need to know on the subject.

The author reckons that the majority of adults would respond positively to being asked the question does time travel interest you? As he says, “time travel is the ultimate fantasy”. Perhaps its popularity has something to do

with a deep-seated longing in all of us to go back into our personal histories and with hindsight try and undo the mistakes of our lives. Maybe there could also be a longing to witness personally the great events of history, perhaps visit the world of Rome, and warn Julius Caesar just before that fatal blow is administered, or have a grandstand seat at the Battle of Waterloo.

The author acknowledges the importance of H. G. Wells’ literary

Published by Springer ISBN 9783319488622.

contributions to the idea of time travel, and he devotes quite a few pages to his seminal ideas. As already mentioned Wells put forward the idea of time as a kind of fourth dimension. As he points out, Wells’ machine, as described in the story as that “glittering metallic framework” with its parts of “ivory, nickel and rock crystal”, did not actually move, it always remained in the spot where the time traveller left it, in effect travelling through time not leaping over it.

This of course introduces all sorts of paradoxes. The time machine heading into the past would collide with itself at the moment before the lever was pulled, and therefore since this happens before the time traveller pulled the lever, how did he manage to pull it? Another problem with Wells’ machine is that since it travelled through time it would always be located in the same place and for those observing it outside it would inevitably occupy that spot for a very long time, their whole lifetimes in fact. Another paradox would arise if someone decided to travel back through time and shoot their younger selves.

I shall return to this fascinating book in the next edition of Odyssey, but if you can’t wait its ISBN number is 9783319488622, and it is available in paperback as well as Kindle.

Nuclear power is an obvious source of propulsion for large vessels at sea. Using a nuclear

reactor to produce heat, powering steam turbines and generating electricity, allows a craft to travel away from land for long periods with minimal need to return to port to refuel. Unsurprisingly, it’s the chosen propulsion system for the submarine fleets of countries such as the USA, the UK and Russia, and aircraft carriers for the USA and France, as well as for some civilian ships such as Russian icebreakers.

demonstrations showed how a chain reaction from fission of uranium could be controlled, and the first reactor was built at the University of Chicago in 1942, that serious development of nuclear reactors got under way. Then, along with their vital contribution to creating an atomic bomb in 1945, their use for power stations and submarines in the 1950s followed on.

The American NERVA (Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application) program in the 1950s and 1960s took the idea of nuclear thermal rockets a long way,

Fission Improbable: Richard Hayes FBIS Thinks About Atomic Spaceships

So, at first sight, it would seem to be a sensible power source for interplanetary spacecraft as well. Some science fiction writers have certainly taken that view. When Garrett P Serviss envisaged a journey to Venus in his story A Columbus of Space back in 1909, at a time when the potential of what would one day be called nuclear power was first being contemplated, he described what might well have been an early version of an atomic-powered spaceship.

But it was not until practical


Editor: Terry J. Henley

Assistant Editors: John Silvester, Terry Don and Richard Hayes

Design and Layout: Ben Jones

Distribution and web support: Ralph Timberlake

Odyssey is published six times a year by the BIS and circulated by email. Feedback on the e-magazine is welcome, including suggestions for future issues, via [email protected]

even planning for a manned landing on Mars in the 1970s and a permanent base on the Moon by the early 1980s. In this concept, a small nuclear reactor would be used to provide thrust with considerably more efficiency than chemical rockets through heating propellant, probably liquid hydrogen, to high temperature.

On the other hand, Project Orion developed the concept of a different form of nuclear propulsion through detonating a series of atomic bombs behind a rocket – a theory which led to the nuclear pulse propulsion favoured by future feasibility studies such as the BIS’s own Daedalus when envisaging an unmanned interstellar probe.

In his 2002 book Project Orion: The Atomic Spaceship 1957-1965, George Dyson explains how that project was conceived and developed, and how it might have worked; enthusiasm was undoubtedly there. But it was not to be, not least since the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty prohibited tests of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere and outer space – and, as most would agree, with good reason.

The Orion concept features occasionally in science fiction, an early version being the nuclear pulse rockets that appeared in AE van Vogt’s 1957 novel Empire of the Atom. In a future world, long after a nuclear holocaust has devastated the human race, the atom gods are worshipped and served by temple scientists who have the virtual monopoly of atomic energy. Arthur C Clarke said that a nuclear pulse propulsion system may have been originally intended for the spacecraft Discovery in the film of 2001: A Space Odyssey, though the director Stanley Kubrick didn’t favour it. Dyson reports Clarke saying that Kubrick had probably “had enough of atomic bombs” after making his earlier film Dr Strangelove in 1964.

Frankly, it’s hard to envisage any

significant public support for testing rockets based on detonating atomic bombs in space anywhere near the Earth for the foreseeable future. Nuclear thermal rockets on NERVA lines may still be feasible but, even then, launching a nuclear reactor into space carries its own risks. It’s bad enough when a conventional rocket fails, or even explodes, in the atmosphere, but it could be so much worse if a containment breach resulting from such a failure spreads radioactive material far and wide across the Earth.

Now, these nuclear reactors would be nowhere near the size of those used in power stations on land, and would be designed to operate in stressful and highly adverse conditions. So the sort of potential disaster brought to public consciousness in the 1979 film The China Syndrome would not be occurring in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Also, fuel elements and pieces of

reactors dispersed after a rocket failure would be relatively small items that will more than likely land in the sea or unpopulated areas. Even so, I wish anyone the best of luck trying to reassure the general public when radioactive debris is flying around somewhere over their heads.

And then there would be the problems for the crew of a manned atomic spacecraft after a reactor containment breach. This was demonstrated effectively in the 2002 film K-19: The Widowmaker, based on a true incident in 1961 when the reactor cooling system failed in a Soviet nuclear submarine. Crew members worked in a high radiation environment in order to prevent a reactor meltdown, sacrificing their lives and subsequently dying of radiation sickness. That was terrible enough on Earth where help was eventually at hand – but it would have been catastrophic for the crew if it had occurred in space. Astronauts could be confronted with a steadily deteriorating reactor breach, yet have to face the possibility of no hope of rescue within a realistic timescale.

Of course, sensible spacecraft design could save the day. Placing the reactor a long way from the vessel’s living quarters, as suggested by Clarke in his article The Shape of Ships to Come in New Worlds science fiction magazine in 1949 when explaining the advantages of nuclear propulsion, and much as we see in images of the Discovery in the film of 2001, could help. But even so, the inhabitants will feel far from comfortable being located so close to a disaster zone after a major failure has occurred, with possibly a substantial part of their voyage yet to complete.

No, we may expect that atomic spaceships will not be the mode of transport of choice for some time to come. Fission improbable? More than likely.

It might have been. Published by Allen Lane The Penguin Press 2002. Cover design based on an original illustration by E Freixas for the Spanish edition of ‘From the Earth to the Moon’ by Jules

Verne, published 1936.

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