Having been developed from nuclear-weapons research, pellet propulsion could have a stunning application for the high acceleration of interstellar-travelling vessels, for instance. Its premise is simple: every few seconds, a fission nuclear bomb is released from the starship and detonated a short distance behind it. The vessel is equipped with an enormous metal pusher and shielding plate attached to the ship into which vaporised debris from the explosions slams.

The idea of such an “atomic drive” was a science-fiction cliché by the 1930s, but it appears that Stanislaw Lem and Frederick de Hoffmann conducted the first serious investigations of atomic propulsion for spaceflight in 1944. The research culminated in the “Orion” project whereby a prototype vehicle was propelled to an altitude of 100 m by six detonations in a ground test in 1959 in the United States. At a time when the US was struggling to put a man on the Moon, science-fiction authors and a group of visionary engineers had laid out the propulsion technology for interplanetary and even interstellar travel. The project was later cancelled for political reasons.

Another modification would be to use other forms of pellets, e.g. nuclear particles accelerated by magnetic fields or through a mass driver. By positioning fuel pellets along the trajectory of the vessel, the launch mass could be drastically reduced.

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