Project Orion Research Paper

Ascension is a sci-fi show about a giant nuclear-powered spaceship built in the 1960s that’s been flying towards the new solar system for 50 years. How amazing is that?!

During the 1950s, US scientists on something called Project Orion. The idea was to build a spaceship that would use explosions of A-bombs to propel itself through space. Project Orion was an awesome insanity, something straight out of Fallout computer games. Naturally, the project was cancelled. Something about the ship’s nuclear fallout raining all over the planet. Stupid sensible people with their sensible precautions!

Well, in the SyFy miniseries Ascension, Kennedy administration actually builds this monstrosity and launches it with the entire families. Their century-long trip will take them to a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri. That way, at least some remnant of humanity can survive if the Cold War escalates.

50 years later, 600 crew members aboard USS Ascension are mostly descendants of the original crew. Their society still mimics the early 1960s, both in fashion and attitudes. There is a strict divide between the experts working on the upper decks and the manual laborers toiling near the nuclear reactors below. Even though Captain William Denninger (Brian Van Holt) and his scheming wife Viondra (Tricia Helfer) maintain order, everyone aboard the

The show takes the tropes of noir fiction and mixes them with a retro-futuristic dystopia similar to Joon-ho Bong’s 2013 film Snowpiercer. There are shades of Twin Peaks as well, with the murder of a young and beautiful girl exposing corruption hiding underneath a small community – except, this time, instead of small-town Americana, we get a utopian society straight out of a 1950s sci-fi magazine. Some reviewers referred to the show as “Mad Men in space”, but the far better comparison would be 2007 computer game Bioshock, in which the player explores a 1950s underwater utopia torn apart by the civil