Cassini was great, but we could do better if America wasn't the fussy superpower We could have had Americans orbiting Saturn by 1970, but we gave up.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds | Opinion columnist

Show Caption Hide Caption NASA’s Cassini spacecraft gets operatic send-off NASA’s Cassini spacecraft disintegrated in the skies above Saturn in a final, fateful blaze of cosmic glory, following a remarkable journey of 20 years — but not before a hilarious opera send-off by Robert Picardo. (Sept. 15)

The long-running — and highly productive — Cassini mission to Saturn came to an end last week, with the Cassini probe gathering data until the last on a fiery plunge into Saturn’s atmosphere. People are already talking about sending another probe, but that’s not likely to happen for a decade, at best.

But as interesting as Cassini was, thinking about it kind of makes me sad. Because we could have been to Saturn a lot sooner, if we’d done things differently.

Over the weekend I was rereading John McPhee’s book about nuclear weapons designer Ted Taylor, The Curve of Binding Energy. Taylor was a renowned designer of nuclear devices, with a particular expertise for making them ever smaller and more reliable.

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But for a while, as McPhee’s book reminded me, Taylor spent some time working with other famed physicists such as Freeman Dyson on something peaceful: The Orion spacecraft, a rocketship designed to be powered by nuclear explosions. Yes, you read that right. Some experiments on nuclear weapons effects demonstrated that graphite-coated steel objects could survive within a few yards of an exploding nuclear bomb, protected from being vaporized by a thin layer of stagnating plasma.

Thus, the Orion concept: Essentially, a big coated-steel pusher plate, some pretty intense shock absorbers, and a crew cabin up front. In back, behind the pusher plate, nuclear bombs would be detonated. As you might expect, when an atomic bomb goes off just a few yards from an object, that object will move pretty fast in the opposite direction. These bombs would be special, low-powered and clean and designed to give the best push possible. (That’s where Ted Taylor came in.)

Though the concept originated with Stanislaw Ulam, a theorist essential to the development of the hydrogen bomb, in 1948, a decade later Taylor and Dyson and an entire team of scientists and engineers at General Atomics were working on the designs for a 3,630-ton spacecraft using the Orion concept. The technologies involved were pretty well understood. We knew a lot about atomic bombs by then, after hundreds of tests, and the spacecraft design itself was forgiving because it didn’t require the weight-paring that chemically-powered spaceships do; in fact, the Orion design made heavier ships easier to build, in many ways. And the Orion ship would be fast, much faster than the chemically-powered rockets we’re still using today, fast enough not to have to wait for planets to line up just right so ships could use a minimum-energy trajectory to travel between planets. A working model, powered by high explosives, flew perfectly and captured the interest of Wernher von Braun.

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Freeman Dyson’s son George wrote a book about the project, Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship. And one of the things he tells us is that the unofficial motto of the project was ... “Saturn by 1970.”

And the scientists and engineers who worked on it were confident. As one project alumnus interviewed by George Dyson said: “It was dead serious. If we wanted to do it, if there were any good reason for wanting to have high specific impulse and high thrust at the same time, we could go out and build Orion right now. And I think it would make a lot of sense.”

I think it would make a lot of sense too. Orion foundered because it lacked enough institutional support: The Air Force, which supported the project, wasn’t really interested in traveling the Solar System, and the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 banned nuclear explosions on the surface of the Earth.

So the Cassini mission was nice, but it would have been a lot nicer to go there — in a big spaceship full of people instead of via a small robot — half a century earlier. As well as to Mars, the moon and everywhere else.

It’s hard to imagine the United States doing anything like this today. For better or worse — okay, for worse — we don’t do the kind of frontier-busting programs we did in the 1950s and 1960s anymore. But I can imagine some less-fussy rising power, China, or maybe even India, say, deciding to pursue Orion. If we could design such a spacecraft with slide rules and calculators in the 1950s, surely they could do so with supercomputers in the 21st Century.

Saturn by 2030? Maybe for someone else, if not for us. We may be sorry we let this opportunity slip by.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.