Right Before This image is s part of my Historical Project Orion series, see part one here. Imaged: two 4,000 ton ground-launched Interplanetary Orion prepped for launch. Dimensions 131 feet in diameter, 196 feet tall. Payload to 300 mi LEO: 1,600 tons. Payload to Moon (soft landing): 1,200 tons. Payload to Mars Orbit (Return): 800 tons. Crew: 50 Orion received initial funding from Defense Research Agency through 1960 as a black-budget NSO program -- yet developers knew if the system was to see full application far more funding would be required. Without direction from the National Security Office, or an explicit Congressional and White House mandate, NASA, as a civilian space agency, was reluctant to champion a project so directly under military purview, so General Atomics took their case to the Air Force where they found people sympathetic to the programs goals. In the BBC documentary “To Mars by A-Bomb,” Freeman Dyson has said that the Air Force knew Orion was not a weapons system but among the top brass were those who understood that development of such capabilities would be a boon to mankind. Then there were those who saw a weaponized Orion as the penultimate trump-card in any potential nuclear show-down -- which was a viewpoint that would eventually spell the doom of Orion. Consider the implications if the program directors had been free to take funding to the private sector: Orion, with its heavy lift capability, might very well allow the resource exploration which would pave the road for real economic returns. Freeman Dyson labored exhaustively to define the fallout consequences of large scale Orion launches – he found that every Orion launch would add the risk of approximately 10 deaths to the world’s yearly potential total of radiation-exposure related cancers, and insisted that the propulsion units be made cleaner. In principal there is nothing we do as a technological civilization which does not impart risk (indeed far more people die in automobile accidents and air-plane crashes – as compared to the potential risk Orion adds). Freeman Dyson believed that if the potential risk could be reduced to 1/100th of this factor there should be no actual problem with large scale atmospheric launch – or, we might presume, commercial application of the system. Today, reduction of risk to this level is easily attainable. Rare Flight test footage along with Freeman Dyson and Arthur C. Clark speaking about the value of Orion can be found here in an excerpt of the BBC documentary To Mars by A-Bomb. I also highly recommend the entire seven-part documentary, part one here: Project Orion- To Mars by A-Bomb-Part One. As always, thank you all for your thoughtful comments, interest, and encouragement.