Historical research guide · 0056 · 1998
NASA Breakthrough Propulsion Physics program overview
Marc G. Millis
In one minute
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.
Connection
This 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.
From the source
NASA 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
The 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
The 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
The 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
The 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
The 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
The way in
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19980201240How to cite it
Marc G. Millis (1998) NASA Breakthrough Propulsion Physics program overview https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19980201240