Closed petition ORION NUCLEAR PULSE SPACE ROCKET - 10,000 tons to orbit, "Mars by 1965, Saturn by 1970"

Closed on 21 November 2012

The Orion nuclear pulse rocket was first proposed in the early 1960s. It would have been able to put 10,000 tons of material in orbit at a tiny fraction of the cost of the Shuttle. Their motto was "Mars by 1965, Saturn by 1970". British born Freeman Dyson, who worked on it as a young man and is now arguably the greatest living physicist has confirmed it would still work.

It was costed then at $100 million annually for 12 years. With inflation now £450 million annually. We now spend this on the NERC quango annually (one of several whose main function is "raising awareness" of "catastrophic global warming"). The ideal launch site is South Georgia or one of the South Sandwich Islands, British territory. This is because they are not only thousands of miles from inhabited land but the wind pattern, eastward round and round Antarctica, would mean radiation release anywhere inhabited would be less than 1,000th of natural background radiation.