Project Orion?

"Robert" > orion was the name the guy that created the idea of using nukes for
>propulsion gave it. not nasa. nasa does not have a project that uses
>nukes for propulsion.

That was the name that the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, now
known as DARPA) gave it, when they first funded General Atomics, who ran the
program (pulled the name out of a hat, apparently). NASA partially and
briefly underwrote it, as did the USAF, before the Test-Ban Treaty killed
it.
NASA recently gave the concept a new look, calling it EPPP for Externally
Pulsed Plasma Propulsion (thus removing all references to nuclear energy, as
in the former term Nuclear Pulse Rocket). They drew together all similar
concepts, like those known as Daedalus (from the old BIS concept for beam
compression initiated micro-fusion burst propelled star probes) and ACMF
(antiproton catalyzed micro-fission/fusion).
They gave them all, under this EPPP umbrella term, the name "Gabriel".
Their Mark-1 proposal was something very like the later Orion idea, to build
a 10 meter diameter ship and use a HLV to loft it above the atmosphere, or
to lift it in sections to be assembled in orbit, and fire the nukes only
above the Van Allen belts to remove all concerns of fallout contamination of
the atmosphere. They stated that the performance could be bettered a great
deal beyond even the original, still with no fundamentally new inventions,
and this "Atom-Bomb driven ship" (my favorite descriptive term) can
revolutionize what we could do.

Lucio wrote:
>http://www.space.com/news/060720_cev_orion.html
>No, sir, I didn't like it. Everyone knows that Orion is a spaceship
>propelled by nuclear blasts.

I don't know why you don't like it, and I'm not sure if it is similar to my
own dislike of it: the old Orion was distinctive. Anybody who heard of it
knew immediately what it meant.
Are they running out of imaginative and evocative names? "Prometheus" might
do, but they're using it for future nuclear power units for space
applications; I guess that fits. "Icarus" might do for the CEV, but
Constellation was as good as any. (They'd better save the name DC-3 for
something really good...)
What's with the fetish with changing the names of project ideas? How about
some progress in the projects themselves? Could we have a rollout of the
first boilerplate CEV test model instead of spending time and money
shuffling names around?

I'll have to dig around later, for a source for this full paper:

External Pulsed Plasma Propulsion
And its Potential for the Near Future
J. A. Bonometti, P. J. Morton and G. R. Schmidt
NASA MSFC, TD40
Alabama, 35812