This image gives a good perspective, I assume, on the distances I would have had to cover. As the image illustrates, the planet Mars is a lot closer to Earth than Jupiter is to Mars. And then I went past Jupiter to Saturn. I don't have any idea how far past Saturn I went, but I think I began traveling upwards after Saturn. It is almost a billion miles to Saturn traveling in a straight line, according to information on the internet, so I must have traveled a great deal farther than that. This image seems to illustrate the density of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:InnerSolarSystem-en.png
This is a neat little application I found on the internet. This particular image illustrates the configuration of the solar system on 6/7/1976, which is the day I recognize as my landing on the Saturn moon Phoebe.
http://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/Solar
Solar System: Mon 1976 Jun 7
As I understand it, all the planets of our solar system are basically on the same flat, plane as they travel around the Earth. That is what I refer to as the ecliptic plane, although I think I was calling it the elliptic until I realized I had it wrong. My thoughts suggest that I traveled on a straight line to Mars along that flat plane, then as I left Mars, I traveled upwards and outwards on my way to the outer solar system to my next stop at Saturn. I traveled upwards to avoid the asteroid belt because I was traveling at an extremely high rate of speed and any object I hit was going to cause damage to my ship. My thoughts suggest that happened anyway and I hit something, not unlike a bug splattering on the windshield of an automobile, and I lost a lot of my oxygen supply. I had enough to make it back to Earth for repairs but I made the decision to continue my mission and not take a risk on hitting the comet when it was much closer to Earth. If my thoughts are correct, then that was the correct decision because the ordnance I used only fragmented the comet and if I had been closer to Earth, those fragments would have all impacted the planet. As it was, the force of the detonation, combined with the distance from Earth, resulted in a deflection of the comet and its subsequent fragments. I have been thinking those fragments eventually became widely separated and are now known as Comet Hyakutake and Comet Hale-Bopp.
http://www-spof.gsfc.nasa.gov/stargaze/Secliptc.htm
The Ecliptic
The path of the Sun across the celestial sphere is very close to that of the planets and the moon. After clocks became available, it was a relatively straightforward job for astronomers to relate the path of the Sun in the daytime to the one of stars at night, and to draw it on their star charts. Because of its relation to eclipses, that path is known as the ecliptic.
The significance of the ecliptic is evident if we examine the Earth's orbit around the Sun. That orbit lies in a plane, flat like a tabletop, called the plane of the ecliptic (or sometimes just "the ecliptic"). In one year, as the Earth completes a full circuit around the Sun (drawing above), the Earth-Sun line and its continuation past Earth sweep the entire plane. The far end of that line then traces the ecliptic on the celestial sphere; if you have a star chart handy (it is often included in an atlas), you will find the ecliptic traced there, too.
In this following article about the Project Orion, which I assume is all correct, the part about the test ban treaty didn't apply to my ship because I didn't engage the nuclear propulsion until I was well away from Earth. Some of the original Project Orion designs I read about were designed to detonate a nuclear bomb underneath the ship as it was on the Earth's surface, which would then propel it into orbit, but generate a tremendous amount of nuclear fallout in the atmosphere. My Project Orion ship was launched into orbit and beyond by the Saturn chemical rocket, or so my thoughts suggest. The date 11/5/1975 shows up sometimes as I am re-discovering my clues so that might have been the day I engaged the nuclear impulse propulsion system. I wish I could remember that moment I pressed that button to detonate a nuclear bomb at the stern of my ship. It's just like something out of a "Road Runner" cartoon, which I observed in my journal quite a few years ago and I sensed that had been noted.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propulsion%29
Project Orion was the first engineering design study of a spacecraft powered by nuclear pulse propulsion, an idea first proposed by Stanislaw Ulam in 1947. The project, initiated in 1958, was led by Ted Taylor at General Atomics and physicist Freeman Dyson, who at Taylor's request took a year away from Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study to work on the project. The first such think-tank of its kind since the Manhattan Project, Project Orion is recalled by many of its team as representing the best years of their lives.
By using energetic nuclear power, Orion offered both high thrust and high specific impulse — the holy grail of spacecraft propulsion. It offered performance greater than the most advanced conventional or nuclear rocket engines now under study. Cheap interplanetary travel was the goal of the Orion Project. Its supporters felt that it had great potential for space travel, but it lost political approval because of concerns with fallout from its propulsion. The Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 is generally acknowledged to have ended the project.
Stanislaw Ulam realized that nuclear explosions could not yet be realistically contained in a combustion chamber. Such a project did briefly exist, named Helios, but its theoretical performance was so poor that it never got beyond the drawing board.
Instead, the Orion design would have worked by dropping fission or thermonuclear explosives out the rear of a vehicle, detonating them 200 feet (60 m) out, and catching the blast with a thick steel or aluminum pusher plate.
Large multi-story high shock absorbers (pneumatic springs) were to have absorbed the impulse from the plasma wave as it hit the pusher plate, spreading the millisecond shock wave over several seconds and thus giving an acceptable ride. The long arm pistons proved one of the most difficult design features but many members of the team said that this seemed solvable. Low pressure gas bags were also proposed as a primary shock absorber. The two sets of shock absorption systems were tuned to different frequencies to avoid resonance.
One aspect of the proposed vessel seems counter-intuitive today; because of the force involved in the thermonuclear detonations and the need to absorb the energy without harm, large, massive vessel designs were actually more efficient. Early designs had crew compartments and storage areas that were several stories tall, as opposed to contemporary chemical rockets whose height was almost all multi-stage fuel tanks with relatively little payload.
Reaction mass for Orion would have been built into the bombs or dropped between 'pulses' to provide thrust. Polyethylene masses, garbage and sewage were all considered for use as reaction mass.
The smallest 4000 ton model planned for ground launch from Jackass Flats, Nevada had each blast add 30 mph (50 km/h) to the craft's velocity. A graphite based oil was to be sprayed on the pusher plate before each explosion to prevent ablation of the pusher plate. This sequence would be repeated thousands of times, like an atomic pogo stick.
Orion's potential performance was stunning, at least compared to today's chemical or even other nuclear designs. Jerry Pournelle, who is acquainted with the project and its ex-team leader Freeman Dyson, has been quoted as saying that a single mission could have provided us with a large permanent moon base. Alternatively an Orion could reach Pluto and return to Earth inside of a year. Single stage to Mars and back also seemed to be possible.
