What should be obvious to any engineer is that the Nuclear Pulse AutoGyro can be very lightweight. It's use of reaction balls, with large deflection angles and centrifugal force, would absorb and counteract the forward thrust of each detonation as easily as a massive pusher-plate would, but with far less mass. As anyone in the space industry knows, the heavier your spacecraft is, the higher the launch costs. Orion, with its huge brute-force pusher-plate and shock absorber design, is so heavy that it would probably bankrupt the world just to launch the components into orbit, and hence it would never get built. In contrast, the Nuclear Pulse AutoGyro is so lightweight that it could conceivably be launched fully assembled on a single rocket.

The Nuclear Pulse AutoGyro is eminantly testable. The physics is mature and known. It can be modelled easily with a computer. Very small non-nuclear models can be built and tested in low-earth orbit for verification. All you would need is a small version of the rotating tether system, with pulsed thrusters substituted at the ends to simulate the dynamics in a microgravity environment. Stability & control is the only challenge here, and this is a mature science, not an emerging one. The technology could be developed quickly.

Testing the nuclear pulse reaction balls is again something that can be simulated with supercomputers. Such simulations are currently used to verify the function of nuclear weapons without underground testing - in accordance with the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Verification of simulations might require a single reaction ball and nuclear device, launched away from the Earth, with onboard systems & telemetry to measure the effects of the forces on the reaction ball during/after a nuclear device is detonated nearby. Again, this can be done inexpensively with a single rocket launch.

Altogether, the Nuclear Pulse AutoGyro is a smaller, lighter, faster starship design. The physics is known and easily modelled on computer. It is scalable and modular, such that small physical prototypes can be built and parts tested separately to verify function. The full-scale version is also relatively inexpensive to build.

I would also like to state that I invented this design on the 4th of July 2009, and have offered it freely to whomever may choose to pursue it's construction for the benefit of mankind. As a payload, my personal preference would be to launch synthetic aperture telescopes into deep space, to create an array of interferometers with lightyear-sized apertures for imaging extrasolar planets anywhere in the galaxy and beyond. But really, the Nuclear Pulse AutoGyro might be used for anything. This is for people who can dream of greater things.