Propulsion research goes into hyperdrive

Room for surprises
A healthy dose of skepticism is key, said John Cole, formerly in the Advanced Space Transportation Project Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

Cole worked over the past several years in the Propulsion Research Center at Marshall supporting several advanced propulsion concepts and experiments, and is now reassigned to support work for NASA's Crew Launch Vehicle.

Regarding new propulsion ideas, Cole said there's room for surprises. He said that novel concepts presented at STAIF are the by-products of people wanting to help move humans beyond Earth's environment out into the solar system.

"If we ever want to get to the stars … we can't do that with chemistry," Cole told Space.com.

Similarly, there are also drawbacks to nuclear systems, even fusion concepts, Cole said, for pushing humanity outward toward the stars. "If you are going to do that in a reasonable amount of time, something exotic has got to be found," he advised.

Not enough signal in the noise
Cole said that those at STAIF presenting exotic ideas are racking their brains, finding "little niches or peculiarities" in the hopes of insight and possible breakthrough. "But they are advocates ... so it's hard not to drink your own bathwater."

Scientific rigor is important, Cole said, and repeatable experiments must rule the day.

"Right now, there's not enough signal in the noise to be convinced that there's anything there. One has to be strongly skeptical of all these kind of things," Cole said. "But you have got to be open-minded too. Maybe somebody will find something. But if they do, it has got to be solid."

No stranger to ground-breaking ideas is Bob Cassanova, director of the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts in Atlanta. NIAC is steadfast in its search for revolutionary aeronautics and space concepts that could dramatically impact how NASA develops and conducts its missions.

One new NIAC-supported concept, for instance, is building large, massive structures in space simply by using radio waves that create force fields to move materials and assemble them into various structures.

"It's important for people to get together and expose their ideas to the scientific community ... and get back credible feedback," Cassanova said. While he didn't experience any "aha" revelatory moments at STAIF, brainstorming and open discussion is key, he said, to help flesh out a sound idea from speculation.

But Cassanova cautions: "Just because you can write an equation that describes something ... doesn't mean that such an equation describes the real physics that are going on."

Cassanova noted that a number of the STAIF-presented concepts have not been confirmed experimentally. In some cases, requisite power and massive pieces of equipment, as well as adequate funding are unavailable to researchers in order for them to carry out a cutting-edge experiment.

Oomph and might
NASA's own Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project was axed in late 2002.

That fact ties into the NASA of today, which has slid back to heritage technologies, observed Davis of the Institute for Advanced Studies. The ability to put some "oomph and might" into expanding humankind's presence into the solar system has been "thoroughly destroyed by this heritage concept."

"We can pick ourselves up off the ground and start using advanced, high-efficiency, high-powered, high-speed propulsion," Davis said, "to make access to space much more effective and much easier to do."

Be it laser beam propulsion, gravity modification, extracting energy from a vacuum, or traversable wormholes and warp drives — these and other concepts deserve attention, Davis said.

"It's important," Davis concluded, "because the future is everything."

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