Interplanetary Applications
The Orion nuclear pulse rocket design has extremely high performance. Orion nuclear pulse rockets using nuclear fission type pulse units were originally intended for use on interplanetary space flights.
Missions that were designed for an Orion vehicle in the original project included single stage (i.e., directly from Earth's surface) to Mars and back, and a trip to one of the moons of Saturn.
One possible modern mission for this near-term technology would be to deflect an asteroid that could collide with Earth. The extremely high performance would permit even a late launch to succeed, and the vehicle could effectively transfer a large amount of kinetic energy to the asteroid by simple impact. Also, such an unmanned mission would eliminate the need for shock absorbers, the most problematic issue of the design.
Nuclear fission pulse unit powered Orions could provide fast and economical interplanetary transportation with useful human crewed payloads of several thousand tonnes.
Read more about this topic: Project Orion (nuclear Propulsion)