If Area 51 had a doppelg?nger next door at the test site, it would certainly be Area 25, which encompasses 223 square miles. The flat, sandy desert expanse got its name during the gold rush when miners used to tie their donkeys to trees in the flat area while searching the surrounding mountains for gold. Like Area 51, Jackass Flats is surrounded by mountain ranges on three of its four sides, making them both hidden sites within federally restricted land. Unlike Area 51, which technically does not exist, Jackass Flats in the 1950s and 1960s maintained a polished public face. When President Kennedy visited the Nevada Test Site in 1962, he went to Jackass Flats to promote the space travel programs that were going on there. Richard Mingus was one of the security guards assigned to assist the president’s Secret Service detail that day. Photographs that appeared in the newspapers showed the handsome president, wearing his signature sunglasses and dark suit, flanked by aides while admiring strange-looking contraptions rising up from the desert floor; Mingus stands at attention nearby. Next to the president is Glenn Seaborg, then head of the Atomic Energy Commission and the man who co-discovered plutonium. But as with most nuclear projects of the day, the public was only told a fraction of the story. There was a lot more going on at Jackass Flats behind the scenes—and in underground facilities there—about which the public had no idea.
Area 25 began as the perfect place for America to launch a nuclear-powered spaceship that would get man to Mars and back in the astonishingly short time of 124 days. The spaceship was going to be enormous, sixteen stories tall and piloted by one hundred and fifty men. Project Orion seemed like a space vehicle from a science fiction novel, except it was real. It was the brainchild of a former Los Alamos weapons designer named Theodore Taylor, a man who saw space as the last “new frontier.”
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.