During a critical phase of the Cold War, NASA launches a mission which culminates decades of clandestine development of a nuclear pulse-driven spacecraft-a super-rocket propelled by atom bomb explosions. Held back by the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, Orion is revived in secret and launched in 1973 under the guise of a Skylab supply mission.What really happened to the mission described as the worse disaster in the history of NASA ? What role was played by the pilot Jack Trew, vilified as the Herostratus of the American space program ? Who were the personalities behind the ill-starred Orion Project? Perhaps most of all, what are the values in the name of which we reach for the Moon and, in the near future, Mars?
