NASA Breakthrough Propulsion Physics program overview
Marc G. Millis
Summary and citation · read the original at the source
In one page
In 1996 NASA set up a programme with an unusually blunt charter, and Marc Millis, who led it at the Lewis Research Center, wrote this report to explain how it worked. Breakthrough Propulsion Physics had three goals and no smaller ones: propulsion that needs no propellant, propulsion that reaches the maximum transit speed physically possible, and new modes of onboard energy production to power both. The topics it put on its own list were the coupling of gravity and electromagnetism, vacuum fluctuation energy, warp drives and wormholes, and superluminal quantum effects. Millis is careful about method. The programme does not promise the breakthroughs; it promises measurable progress toward them, every proposal must name a discriminating test, and a negative result counts as progress. He then reports the August 1997 Cleveland workshop — 84 participants, fourteen invited talks from established physicists, and about eighty candidate research tasks — and sets out which next experiments the field itself picked out.
Why it matters hereThis is the document where a space agency writes down, in its own words, the three problems chapters 4, 6 and 8 exist to solve; and its prioritisation criteria — cite the data, compare with the incumbent approach, name a discriminating test — are the direct ancestor of the evidence ladder in chapter 1.
What it claims
01NASA established the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics program in 1996 to seek three specific breakthroughs: propulsion that requires no propellant mass, propulsion that attains the maximum transit speeds physically possible, and breakthrough methods of energy production to power such devices.Abstract; Section 3.1, Program Goals
Published and peer-reviewed02The programme’s own declared topics of interest are experiments and theories regarding the coupling of gravity and electromagnetism, vacuum fluctuation energy, warp drives and wormholes, and superluminal quantum effects.Abstract; Sections 6.1–6.3
Published and peer-reviewed03The rationale is that rocket technology is reaching the performance limits of its underlying physical principles at the same moment as recent experiments and quantum theory reveal that space may contain enormous levels of vacuum electromagnetic energy — which raises the question of whether that energy can serve as an energy source or as a propulsive reaction mass.Section 3, Program Foundations
What to watch04The programme’s credibility method is explicit: concentrate on credible empirical data rather than on current theory, compare a new idea’s value against existing approaches, require that the idea can be put to a test, and require a discriminating test aimed at the make-or-break issue. Success is defined as learning more about reaching the breakthrough, and negative test results count as progress.Sections 4.1–4.4
Published and peer-reviewed05The August 1997 workshop in Cleveland brought together 84 participants — 26 from industry, 18 from universities, 12 from six government labs, 16 from five NASA centres and 12 students — around fourteen invited presentations including Puthoff on engineering the vacuum for spaceflight, Haisch and Rueda on the zero-point field and inertia, Forward on cyclic manipulation of Casimir cavity dimensions, Milonni on the Casimir effect, Koczor and Noever on rotating YBCO superconductors, and Miley on anomalous energy in hydrogen and deuterium loaded solids, and generated about eighty candidate research tasks.Section 5, August 1997 Workshop; Section 5.1
Published and peer-reviewed06The report names the next measurements the field selected: continue Casimir-effect experiments using micromechanical structures whose dimensions match those the effect requires, use the strong magnetic fields momentarily generated by chemical and nuclear explosions and by lasers to test the space-warping effect of magnetic fields, repeat the photon barrier-tunnelling experiment with matter instead of photons to test the information transfer rate unambiguously, and search astronomically for the specified signature of a negative-mass wormhole.Sections 6.1–6.3, candidate next-step research
What to watch
The way in
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19980201240A work of the US Government, marked at NTRS as public with no distribution limits and public use permitted, and free to read in full there. It is carried here as a summary so the page stays a way-in rather than a mirror; the complete report is one click away at the NASA link.
How to cite it
Marc G. Millis (1998) NASA Breakthrough Propulsion Physics program overview. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19980201240
Where it sits in the curriculum
The evidence ladderThe metric, warp drives and wormholesEnergy from the vacuumInertial mass reduction and transmedium craft