Now the rest is up to us:
There’s a future to be won!
We must turn our faces outward,
We will do what must be done.
For no cradle lasts forever,
Every bird must learn to fly,
And we’re going to the stars,
See our fire in the sky
Yes, we’re going to the stars,
See our fire in the sky!
A fitting fragment from Project Orion:
The ship masses range from 300 to 8,000,000 tons. "It is clear that the larger sizes of the Orion system have immense promise for the future," Freeman explained. "A ship with a million-ton payload could escape from Earth with the expenditure of about a thousand H-bombs with yields of a few megatons. The fuel cost of such a mission would be about 5 cents per pound of payload at present prices. Each bomb would be surrounded by a thousand tons of inert propellant material, and it would be easy to load this material with boron to such an extent that practically no neutrons escape into the atmosphere. The atmospheric contamination would arise only from tritium and from fission products. Preliminary studies indicate that the tritium contamination from such a series of high-yield explosions would not approach biologically significant levels.
Once you start to imagine launching a million tons into orbit, it is no longer an impossible leap to start thinking about building really large vehicles that could operate in deep space but would never get off the ground. "Freeman gave a talk about what's the largest thing you can do, never mind the engineering details," remembers Harris Mayer. "So this was a spaceship propelled by megaton hydrogen bombs. The pusher was made of uranium, and the neutrons on the uranium would make plutonium, so when you got to Alpha Centauri's planet, if there was one, you would just take the pusher off and build a nuclear reactor so you could have a colony. We thought this was absolutely marvelous, even though we weren't going to do anything about it. But the atmosphere encouraged us to do things like this. And Freeman did not work in a vacuum, he was interacting with all the people, including Ted Taylor, who was saying, 'Calm down, calm down.' "
