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 Test Facility at Jackass Flats. A joint NASA/Atomic Energy Commission office was created to manage the program, called the Space Nuclear Propulsion Office, or SNPO.
For T. D. Barnes, working on the NERVA nuclear reactor was a bit of a stretch—his area of expertise was missile and radar technologies. But when things got slow over at Area 51 in the late 1960s, Barnes, a member of EG&G Special Projects team, would be dispatched over to Area 25 to work on the NERVA program. Even though NERVA had been sold to Congress as a public program, all its data was classified, as were the day-to-day goings-on in Area 25. Barnes’s workstation could not have been more hidden from the public. It was underground, built into the side of a mountain that rose up from the flat desert landscape. Each morning Barnes and his fellow Q-cleared coworkers who lived in and around Las Vegas parked in employee parking lots down at the entrance to the Nevada Test Site, at Camp Mercury, and were then shuttled out to Jackass Flats in Atomic Energy Commission motor pool vans. “Some of the people working on NERVA lived in Beatty and Amargosa Valley and drove to the tunnel themselves,” Barnes adds.
All NERVA employees entered work through a small portal in the side of the mountain, “shaped like the entrance to an old mining shaft, but spiffed up a bit,” Barnes recalls, remembering “large steel doors and huge air pipes curving down from the mesas and entering the tunnel.” Inside, the concrete tunnel was long and straight and ran into the earth “as far as the eye could see.” Atomic Energy Commission records indicate the underground tunnel was 1,150 feet long. Barnes remembered it being brightly lit and sparkling clean. “There were exposed air duct pipes running the length of the tunnel as well as several layers of metal cable trays, which were used to transport heavy items into and out of the tunnel,” he says. “The ceiling was about eight feet tall, and men walked through it no more than two abreast.” There was also a tarantula problem at Jackass Flats, which meant every now and then, Barnes and his colleagues would spot a large hairy spider running down the tunnel floors or scampering along its walls.