Mark Carroll's Journal

Some years ago Weds and I saw, quite unexpectedly, George Dyson (who had just written a book about Project Orion) interview his dad (ie Freeman Dyson) about Project Orion. Fascinating stuff; Freeman said at one point that when they came up with the idea "the US had several thousand nuclear weapons already, and no-one else had thought of any use for them at all". They wanted to send a manned mission the size of a hotel to Jupiter; Orion is the only high-TWR high-Isp drive invented AFAIK.

Political considerations aside, various nuclear-thermal rocket designs looked promising, too... although these days in space it might be better to bring a reactor and use it to run an ion drive, now that ion drives are getting quite good.

Oh er space aside, I agree, nukes please but not this nuke. A modern design would be an excellent national infrastructure research-and-construction project.