Secrets of Antigravity Propulsion (51 page)

Figure 12.16.
A test of the rotating Lafforgue thruster carried
out by Jean-Louis Naudin.
(Photo courtesy of J.-L.
Naudin, from his website,
http://jnaudin.free.fr/
)

Table 2 on page 375 compares the thrust-to-power ratios of various field propulsion technologies to those of conventional jet and rocket propulsion techniques.

Lafforgue’s equations indicate that thrust should scale in direct proportion to the capacitor’s dielectric constant, in direct proportion to the capacitor’s length (e.g., plate area), and according to the square of the applied voltage.
This K- and V-dependence is essentially the same as what Brown found in testing the performance of his asymmetrical capacitor, as disclosed in the “Electrohydrodynamics Report,” discussed in chapter 3.
Scaling Naudin’s experiment up to a K = 6,000 capacitor measuring 33 centimeters long with slightly different electrode curvatures and energized at 100 kilovolts, we find that thrust increases by a factor of more than 100 million, projecting a thrust of about 3 metric tons!

In another experiment, Naudin placed two 0.5-millimeter-thick epoxy dielectric Lafforgue thrusters at opposite ends of a rotor arm, as shown in figure 12.16.
²⁵
When energized with 15 kilovolts, the apparatus began rotating, reaching a top speed of 40 rpm.
It would continue to rotate as long as 0.18 watt of power was supplied to maintain the capacitor’s charge.
The thrust was not attributable to an ion-wind effect, since the electrodes were shielded to minimize any ion emission.
Hence, Naudin’s experiment confirms that the rotation arises from the creation of action without reaction, a clear violation of Newton’s third law of motion.

There is no indication that anyone has conducted high-voltage tests of a Lafforgue thruster made with a high-K dielectric such as barium titanate.
One electrogravitics researcher, Anthony Colacchio, reported having constructed a Lafforgue thruster made with a low-tomedium-K dielectric consisting of barium-titanate powder mixed into an epoxy matrix.
²⁶
Such a mixture would typically have a K-value of about 30.
He tested his thruster at a potential of 100 kilovolts but says he found no indication that any thrust was produced.
Given that his thruster was forty times thicker than Naudin’s, used a dielectric having an eightfold-higher K-value, and was tested at a voltage about tenfold higher than Naudin’s, one would expect a thrust about 35,000 times greater.
Hence, this experiment should have produced about 1 kilogram of force if the scaling relations are correct.
Perhaps Colacchio observed no force because he applied DC to his capacitor.
The dielectric’s tendency to create an electric dipole moment directed in opposition to the applied electric field may then have negated the thrust effect.
Recall that such was the case in Brown’s gravitator experiment.
Thus, perhaps better results might be achieved if the voltage is applied to the capacitor as a pulse rather than as steady DC.
Naudin, for example, was pulsing his epoxy dielectric Lafforgue thruster with a 5 percent duty cycle.
Clearly, more research needs to be done on this design before it can be said to be ready for commercial application.
Again, a word of caution: Experimenting with high-voltage capacitors can be lethal.

13.1 • THE SPACE EXPLORATION OUTREACH PROGRAM

On July 20, 1989, President George H.
W.
Bush proposed that the United States undertake an ambitious mission of manned and robotic exploration of the solar system that would include building a permanent base on the moon and landing humans on Mars beginning around the year 2014.
This was known as the Space Exploration Initiative.
Shortly thereafter, Vice President Dan Quayle, who was chairman of the National Space Council, requested that NASA “cast a net widely to find the most innovative ideas in the country” for carrying out the initiative.
Thus was born the Space Exploration Outreach Program (SEOP).

To initiate the program, NASA administrator Richard Truly made a public request, inviting anyone who was interested to submit new technology ideas that might help NASA execute the space exploration mission it was undertaking.
I was one of about 45,300 individuals who, early in 1990, received a flyer describing SEOP and inviting us to contribute our ideas.
All suggestions were to be sent to the RAND Corporation, which was responsible for their review.
Ideas were solicited in the following categories:

1. Mission concepts and architectures
   
2. System design and analysis
   
3. Space transportation, launch vehicles, and propulsion
   
4. Space and surface power
   
5. Life-support systems, space medicine and biology, and human factors
   
6. Space processing, manufacturing, and construction
   
7. Structures, materials, and mechanisms
   
8. Communications, telemetry, and sensing
   
9. Automation, robotics, and teleoperators
   
10. Information systems
    
11. Ground support, simulation, and testing
    
12. None of the above (specify category)
    

Seeing that this might be a good opportunity to inform NASA of the benefits of electrogravitic propulsion technology, I decided to make a concept submission under category 3, “Space transportation, launch vehicles, and propulsion.”
Certainly a means of transporting people to Mars in five days rather than 224 should be of some interest to NASA.

13.2 • IDEA CENSORSHIP

The submission I made to SEOP, cataloged by NASA as idea number 100159, is reproduced in appendix G.
¹
My submission pointed out that electrogravitics could make an important contribution toward helping NASA meet its space exploration challenge.
I noted that development work on electrogravitic propulsion is currently in progress at major aerospace companies, but that the work is restricted by military classification.
Furthermore, I explained that application of electrogravitic technology to NASA’s space program to replace outmoded rocket propulsion technology would entail a minimal amount of R&D if aircraft designs already perfected in the military aerospace sector could be declassified.
Hence, the issue would not be one of technological feasibility, but rather one of political decision—the decision to declassify an advanced technology already in existence.
I suggested that NASA make a serious lobbying effort to convince military authorities to declassify the technology for more open use in space exploration.
In addition to citing Brown’s electrogravitics work, I included several quotes from the February 1956
Aviation Studies
report.

A total of 1,697 people responded to NASA’s submission request (about 4 percent of the people originally solicited).
The ideas were initially screened by Peat Marwick Main & Co.
to remove submissions that were deemed to contain classified or proprietary ideas.
About 149 were removed as a result of this screening.
The remaining 1,548 ideas were sent on to RAND, which divided the workload among five review panels.
Each panel reviewed idea submissions concerned with a particular aspect of NASA’s activities and each wrote up its own summary report.
The review panels carried out an additional screening of the ideas, with the result that only 215 ideas (13 percent of the total number submitted to RAND) were passed on for final synthesis.
A synthesis group summarized the RAND panels’ reports along with ideas obtained from other sources.
These other sources were the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, the Department of Interior, the Aerospace Industries Association, several aerospace contractors, and NASA.
The overall organization of the outreach synthesis process is illustrated in figure 13.1.

The synthesis group summarized this information in a document titled
America at the Threshold
, which was publicly distributed in the fall of 1991.
²
This appeared to be more on the level of a NASA public relations document than a report with any kind of technical substance.
It was replete with pictures of planets and astronauts constructing space stations and attractive artwork of spacecraft.
The text did not go into much technical depth.
It appeared to be directed primarily to a general audience.

Upon receiving this synthesis group report, I discovered that nowhere did it mention anything about electrogravitics.
Puzzled as to the report’s silence on the subject, I called up the SEOP synthesis group office, but I was dismayed to find that the project had been disbanded.
Late in 1990, after the review process had been completed, the Space Exploration Initiative office went through a dramatic change.
Aerospace engineer Dr.
Michael Griffin took over as its director and replaced almost all of its personnel, leaving only one person who had some knowledge of the preceding activities.
I contacted the office at the end of June 1991, but Lieutenant General Thomas Stafford (U.S.
Air Force, retired), who had been responsible for chairing the project, was no longer there, and George Abbey, who had coordinated the synthesis group, had been moved to the White House, where he was working on another project.
Personnel from NASA who had worked on SEOP later became scattered between two NASA offices—the Office of Exploration in Washington, D.C., and the Exploration Program Office at the Johnson Space Center near Houston.
Neither office was able to give me a reasonable explanation as to why electrogravitics had been excluded from the synthesis group report.
They suggested I talk with the people at RAND who had administered the project.

Figure 13.1.
Chart showing the outreach and synthesis process followed in NASA’s Space Exploration Outreach Project.
(From
America at the Threshold,
A-49)

However, personnel at RAND were of little help.
As far as they were concerned, their contract was over, and they wanted nothing more to do with SEOP.
Any telephone inquiries were directed to a spokesperson who would not allow me to speak directly with RAND employees who had been involved in the project.
However, they did send me a copy of their technical report summarizing the findings of the panel that reviewed the ideas in category 3.
³
This contained considerably more information on submissions in this particular category and had an appendix listing the titles of the 348 submissions that had been reviewed in this category.
However, the main body of the report remained curiously silent on the subject of electrogravitics.

A review of the titles in the report’s appendix indicated there were several other submissions beside my own that also had suggested NASA look into nonconventional propulsion technologies.
The titles of some of those are in table 3.

I wanted to get copies of this subset of submissions along with the names and addresses of their respective authors for the purpose of correspondence, but was stonewalled.
The RAND representative told me all material processed for SEOP had been turned over to NASA.
However, people at NASA’s Office of Exploration and Exploration Programs Office were not of much help either.
One person at NASA thought that the submissions were being stored temporarily in someone’s office but did not know whose.
An individual at the Office of Exploration seemed to become nervous when I asked him about the whereabouts of the submissions.
I got the impression that he actually knew where they were being kept but was trying to avoid telling me.
He instead directed my request to the Johnson Space Center office.
People at that office, in turn, directed my request to the Washington office.
Thus, I very quickly got the impression that I was being sent in circles.
This was supposed to be an open, unclassified solicitation of ideas.
Why should they be trying to avoid public inquiries into the ideas that had been presented?
Was there something about this project they were trying to hide?

After about four months of calling one office or another and getting nowhere, finally at the end of May 1992, I instituted a request through NASA’s Freedom of Information Act Office.
After some difficulty, they eventually located the archived documents and in September sent me copies of most of the requested submissions.
NASA would not divulge the addresses of the submitters, only their names.
A review of these SEOP submissions confirmed what I had suspected, that there were others who also had attempted to make NASA aware of nonconventional propulsion technologies and that their ideas had also been omitted from the final report.

Two submissions had informed NASA about electrogravitic propulsion: my own (no.
100159) and that of Joe Hughes, on electric propulsion (no.
100153), which is reproduced in appendix H.
Hughes referred to Brown’s flying disc experiments as well as to Brown’s proposed design for a spacecraft powered by a plasma-jet, high-voltage ion generator.
He included a copy of Brown’s electrokinetic generator patent.
Hughes also cited Dr.
George McDonough, director of science and engineering at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, as saying that electric propulsion “is an interesting alternative to nuclear propulsion which is the only one being considered by the agency” and that the Soviets “consider it a viable way to do the job.”

In the case of the submission titled “The Searle levity disc,” the search could locate only the abstract.
Quite mysteriously, the backup paper that was supposed to contain an explanation of the disc’s operation could not be found.
As discussed in chapter 10, this is a device developed by the British engineer John Searl that nullifies gravity by rotating a set of roller magnets.
It was foolish of NASA not to take a serious look at this concept, since a few years after the SEOP report was issued, Roshchin and Godin, working in Russia on a shoestring budget, built and successfully tested a version of the Searl disc in which the rotor and its test platform were observed to lose 35 percent of their weight with the rotor spinning at the modest rate of 600 rpm.
⁴

Several individuals had also sent SEOP submissions suggesting that NASA look into gyroscopic inertial drive as a feasible method of spacecraft propulsion (submission nos.
100105, 100136, 100174, and 101570).
Inertial drive technology is entirely mechanical in nature.
It generally involves various methods of either rotating or repeatedly jerking back and forth the bearing supports of a massive spinning gyroscope wheel so as to produce a reactionless vectored thrust of the entire apparatus.
Several devices immediately come to mind.
One prototype inertial propulsion engine developed by American inventor Robert Cook (U.S.
patent 4,238,968) has been shown to develop a thrust of 1 pound.
⁵
Another device, built by Canadian inventor Roy Thornson, has demonstrated a thrust of 8 pounds.
Yet another inertial propulsion prototype, developed by Scottish engineer Sandy Kidd, has produced about 0.50 pound of thrust.
⁶
With the financial backing of an Australian oil drilling equipment company, Kidd has subsequently begun work on a much larger, passenger-carrying prototype.
All of these inertial devices blatantly violate Newton’s third law of motion, which states that every action must have an equal and opposite reaction.
That is, unlike a rocket, an inertial drive unit moves forward without ejecting mass in the opposite direction.
Nevertheless, like electrogravitics, such devices have had a long history of development and a proven track record.

The inertial drive idea submissions to NASA were generally quite well written, and in particular, the authors of two of these (nos.
100105 and 100136) indicated that they either had working devices or had done considerable computer simulation work establishing concept feasibility.
Yet nowhere in RAND’s space transportation/propulsion panel report or in the synthesis group report was there any mention of the inertial propulsion concept.
By all reasonable standards, NASA should have looked into these ideas, yet like the other nonconventional propulsion concepts, the RAND and synthesis group reports totally ignored them.
If NASA was asked to “cast a net widely to find the most innovative ideas in the country,” why had these ideas not been considered?
Had RAND selected panelists who were grossly inept, scientists with tunnel vision who callously weeded out some of the best ideas of the bunch just because they did not fit standard textbook theories, or was there a concerted effort to exclude such ideas in the name of national security?
The latter seems more likely since the RAND Corporation, which has a history of being involved in intelligence projects and weapons development, is said to be a front organization for the Central Intelligence Agency.