Historical research guide · 1050 · 2008
New frontiers in space propulsion sciences
Glen A. Robertson · Paul A. Murad · Eric W. Davis
In one minute
Glen Robertson, writing from NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, with Paul Murad and Eric Davis, put this survey into a mainstream energy journal in 2008, and its argument is simple: if you want the stars, stop carrying your exhaust. Almost everything that flies today works by throwing mass out of the back, which caps how far a ship can go before the tanks decide the mission. So the three authors go looking for propulsion that needs no propellant, and they collect the candidates in one place — traversable wormholes, Krasnikov tubes and the Alcubierre warp drive from Einstein’s own theory, spacetime curvature engineering, superconductors, electromagnetic field propulsion, and hybrid schemes drawing on what is presently understood about zero point fields. They are honest that most of these are immature theories built on highly advanced concepts, and they say plainly that some of them raise questions about conservation theorems and about which governing laws still hold. That honesty is the point: this is a map of where the work is, written to tell engineers where to push.
Connection
Chapter 8 is propulsion without reaction mass, and this is one of the few places where that whole family of approaches is laid out together, by a NASA engineer, in a peer-reviewed energy journal rather than a conference hallway. Chapter 4 gets the wormhole, Krasnikov-tube and warp-drive part of the map, and chapter 11 gets the superconductor part.
From the source
Mankind’s destiny points toward a quest for the stars, and the obstacle the authors name is architectural rather than incremental: today’s propulsion science for the most part requires massive amounts of propellant to be expelled from the system, so creative approaches are needed to reduce or eliminate the need for a propellant altogether.Abstract, sentences 1 to 3
Many researchers have already identified several unusual approaches — immature theories based upon highly advanced concepts — and the authors’ case is that these theories and concepts could create the enabling technologies and the forward thinking needed to develop genuinely new directions in space propulsion science.Abstract, sentences 4 and 5
The concepts examined include approaches built on Einstein’s general theory of relativity and on spacetime curvature, and the survey names traversable wormholes, Krasnikov tubes and Alcubierre’s warp drive as the specific solutions it carries.Abstract, sentences 6 and 7
Superconductivity is one of the families of approaches surveyed alongside the general-relativistic ones, which places the superconductor weight-change and gravity-coupling experiments inside the same propulsion programme rather than off to one side.Abstract, sentence 6
The survey ends on electromagnetic field propulsion, with possible hybrid systems that incorporate what the authors call our current limited understanding of zero point fields and quantum mechanics — the vacuum treated as a propulsion resource rather than as background.Abstract, final sentence
What to watch: the authors also carry the newer ideas where questions are raised regarding conservation theorems and whether some of the governing laws of physics as we know them could be violated or are even valid. The measurement that settles that class of question is a laboratory force or weight change that survives an independent rebuild with the thermal, magnetic and buoyancy paths characterised first — which is exactly the discipline the propulsion pages of this site follow.Abstract, sentence 6
The way in
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enconman.2007.10.013How to cite it
Glen A. Robertson, Paul A. Murad, Eric W. Davis (2008) New frontiers in space propulsion sciences doi:10.1016/j.enconman.2007.10.013