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For years, beginning in the early 1950s, Taylor designed nuclear bombs for the Pentagon until he began to doubt the motives of the Defense Department. He left government service, at least officially, and joined General Atomics in San Diego, the nuclear division of defense contractor General Electric. There, he began designing nuclear-powered spaceships. But to build a spaceship that could get to Mars required federal funding, and in 1958 General Atomics presented the idea to President Eisenhower’s new science and technology research group, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA. The agency had been created as a result of the Sputnik crisis, its purpose being to never let the Russians one-up American scientists again. Today, the agency is known as DARPA. The D stands for defense.

At the time, developing cutting-edge space-flight technology meant hiring scientists like Wernher Von Braun to design chemical-based rockets that could conceivably get man to the moon in a capsule the size of a car. Along came Ted Taylor with a proposal to build a Mars-bound spaceship the size of an office building, thanks to nuclear energy. For ARPA chief Roy Johnson, Ted Taylor’s conception was love at first sight. “Everyone seems to be making plans to pile fuel on fuel on fuel to put a pea into orbit, but you seem to mean business,” the ARPA chief told Taylor in 1958.

General Atomics was given a one-million-dollar advance, a classified project with a code name of Orion, and a maximum-security test facility in Area 25 of the Nevada Test Site at Jackass Flats. The reason Taylor’s spaceship needed an ultrasecret hiding place and could not be launched from Cape Canaveral, as other rockets and spaceships in the works could be, was that the Orion spacecraft would be powered by two thousand “small-sized” nuclear bombs. Taylor’s original idea was to dispense these bombs from the rear of the spaceship, the same as a Coke machine dispenses sodas. The bombs would fall out behind the spaceship, literally exploding and pushing the spaceship along. The Coca-Cola Company was even hired to do a classified early design.

At Area 25, far away from public view, Taylor’s giant spaceship would launch from eight 250-foot-tall towers. Blastoff would mean Orion would rise out of a column of nuclear energy released by exploding atomic bombs. “It would have been the most sensational thing anyone ever saw,” Taylor told his biographer John McPhee. But when the Air Force took over the project, they had an entirely different vision in mind. ARPA and the Air Force reconfigured Orion into a space-based battleship. From high above Earth, a USS Orion could be used to launch attacks against enemy targets using nuclear missiles. Thanks to Orion’s nuclear-propulsion technology, the spaceship could make extremely fast defensive maneuvers, avoiding any Russian nuclear missiles that might come its way. It would be able to withstand the blast from a one-megaton bomb from only five hundred feet away.

For a period of time in the early 1960s the Air Force believed Orion was going to be invincible. “Whoever builds Orion will control the Earth!” declared General Thomas S. Power of the Strategic Air Command. But no one built Orion. After atmospheric nuclear tests were banned in 1963, the project was indefinitely suspended. Still wanting to get men to Mars, NASA and the Air Force turned their attention to nuclear-powered rockets. From now on, there would be no nuclear explosions in the atmosphere at Jackass Flats—at least not officially. Instead, the nuclear energy required for the Mars spaceship would be contained in a flying reactor, with fuel rods producing nuclear energy behind barriers that were lightweight enough for space travel but not so thin as to cook the astronauts inside. The project was now called NERVA, which stood for Nuclear Engine Rocket Vehicle Application. The facility had a public name, even though no one from the public could go there. It was called the Nuclear Rocket