Secrets of Antigravity Propulsion (52 page)

It is doubtful that this screening operation was put in place to avoid criticisms that might have been leveled by academics skeptical of non-conventional ideas.
More likely its intent was to discourage NASA from considering technologies that were already being worked on in defense-sponsored black projects.
The censorship of the SEOP ideas submitted to RAND can be traced directly to the screening procedures that RAND had adopted.
Some revealing information in this regard may be found in the transportation, launch vehicles, and propulsion panel’s technical report.
It states that of the 350 submissions reviewed by that particular panel, “approximately 30 percent were judged infeasible” either because they “violated known physical laws or the performance claimed for a concept would be impossible to achieve.”
⁷
Actually, the total number rejected on this pretense was closer to 39 percent, since, at the end of the screening process, only 213 submissions had been passed on for more-formal analysis.

The report states that of the submissions that made it through this screening, none contained “any new scientific laws or principles, or wholly new areas of technology .
.
.
nothing was presented that is truly new and revolutionary.”
Moreover, it states that most of the submissions had proposed “concepts or ideas that are currently being considered [by NASA] or have been examined in the past.”
⁸
These observations about the outcome of the SEOP project should not be surprising; it is obvious the screening process was set up so that any ideas that were truly new and revolutionary were omitted.
As the expression goes, Quayle’s team of appointed panelists and hired think-tank consultants “threw out the baby with the bathwater.”
It is apparent that this was not just one other instance of Murphy’s Law at work.
These people knew what they were doing, as one panelist privately admitted to me that SEOP had received quite a few “advanced technology” suggestions and that none of these had been included in the final summary report.
⁹

The bias against considering innovative ideas is evident in the procedure used to rank the submissions.
Each submission was ranked on a scale of 1 to 5 (5 being the best) in each of five attribute areas: utility, feasibility, safety, innovativeness, and cost.
However, for reasons not stated, these areas were not given an equal weighting.
For example, the transportation, launch vehicles, and propulsion panel weighted these attributes respectively as 25 percent, 25 percent, 25 percent, 5 percent, and 15 percent.
Thus, feasibility was considered to be five times more important than innovativeness, with such feasibility being judged according to whether the ideas violated “known” physical laws.
It is no wonder that after being asked to “cast a net widely” for new technologies, the panelists had come up with nothing, with American taxpayers footing the bill.

What is even more shocking, the panelists usually ranked the submissions by considering their scores on just the first two attributes—utility and feasibility.
Thus, safety, innovativeness, and cost did not seem to count much in the final outcome.
This explains why the transportation, launch vehicles, and propulsion panel report seriously discusses concepts such as explosion-driven spacecraft and antimatter annihilation propulsion that, by most standards, fail miserably to meet safety or cost-effectiveness criteria.
In the case of explosion-driven propulsion, a nuclear bomb is detonated behind the spacecraft and the shock wave is made to impact a pusher plate that propels the craft forward.
Nowhere did the report express any concern about matters such as passenger safety and dangers associated with the proliferation of nuclear weapons in space.
The report’s discussion of antimatter annihilation propulsion is another case in point.
It would take a million years using the current multibillion-dollar CERN and Fermilab facilities just to accumulate 1 milligram of antiprotons, enough to propel a 1-ton payload to escape velocity from Earth.
Accumulating and storing such large quantities of antimatter is an even more formidable problem, from both the technical and the cost standpoints.
If cost was really of any concern, the report should not have even bothered discussing the antimatter subject.
Perhaps they were trying to please the fans of
Star Trek
.

In view of the above, it is quite disappointing that no space at all was given to reviewing propulsion technologies like electrogravitics, magnetic drive, and inertial drive that not only are feasible, but are safe and cost-effective as well.
One wonders whether the Space Exploration Outreach Project was worth the millions of dollars that taxpayers spent.

It seemed that I had exposed a very large black hole, one that happened to be centered right smack in the middle of NASA and was swallowing up a lot of money and with it a lot of good ideas.
We are told that one of the characteristics of a black hole is that whatever goes into it can never emerge again.
This definition very much fits NASA’s Space Exploration Outreach Program, for in 1991, after the synthesis group report was completed and copies mailed out, participants found it nearly impossible to learn anything about the fate of their submitted ideas or to get any information about ideas submitted by other participants.
As soon as the report was completed, the arm of this “outreach program” was immediately retracted, with no plans in place for carrying out follow-up activities.
It seemed the program organizers planned it that way from the start.
By the end of 1991, NASA had dismantled the project’s office and transferred its personnel to other jobs.
The original idea submissions were diverted either to someone’s office closet or to an obscure archive repository.
The rapidity with which the SEOP office was dissolved and its personnel and raw data scattered is reminiscent of the sudden dissolution of an FBI front operation after it has caught its crooks.
It is clear that SEOP had been planned to be a one-way information-gathering intelligence operation.

13.3 • THE MISSING DISCS

The transportation, launch vehicles, and propulsion panel report states that information about the evaluation of each SEOP submission was logged into a Macintosh computer database (Fourth Dimension by ACIUS).
This included “the unique ID number of the submission, the reviewer, the date of review, the name of the panel performing the review, and the title or subject of the review.”
¹⁰
Also, the database included the score assigned to the proposal (ranked on a scale of 1 to 5) and a written justification for that score.
The report states, “Each reviewer was required to briefly explain the reasons for scoring a submission as he or she did.”
¹¹

Information stored in this computer database should have been made available to anyone requesting information about the fate of his or her submission, but when attempts were made to locate the computer disks, they were nowhere to be found.
Neither RAND nor NASA personnel claimed to know their whereabouts.
One NASA employee went as far as to claim that there was no computer database.
However, one of the transportation, launch vehicles, and propulsion panelists had previously told me he had used the database in his proposal review.
Thus, the database definitely existed at one time.
I initiated a NASA Freedom of Information Act request to obtain a copy of the information on this disc, but the officials failed to locate this information, either in the magnetic media archives or in the archived boxes containing the written submissions.
An appeal also failed to turn up anything.
Later, I came in contact with Debra Ladwig, a NASA employee who had worked as a computer support person during the synthesis group phase of SEOP.
She told me she had initially received a copy of the discs from RAND and that at the close of the project she had turned the discs over to Dr.
Brenda Ward of Johnson Space Center.
However, in May 1992, I asked Ward if there had been a computer disc summarizing the submission reviews, and strangely, she maintained she did not know of any.
At present, then, the magnetic disc records of RAND’s evaluations of the SEOP submissions remain missing.
Was their disappearance just an accident, or did someone not want the public to know why certain idea submissions were not included in RAND’s final report?

The disappearance of the proposal evaluation database is particularly disturbing.
The closed-door nature of the whole evaluation process sounds more like a classified, black R&D project than a NASA program.
It is reminiscent of what reportedly was going on in the UFO study conducted by the Air Force under Project Blue Book.
According to informants connected with that project, the more-unusual UFO reports submitted to the project were routinely siphoned off to a highly classified intelligence group, never to be seen again by the public.
The missing reports not only were absent from Project Blue Book’s database but also were omitted from its final report.
It is not surprising to find that the same operating procedures are being practiced at NASA to screen out information relating to antigravity and field-propulsion technologies.

13.4 • THE NATIONAL AERO-SPACE PLANE

At the time the SEOP report was published, NASA had plans in the works to develop the X-30 National Aero-Space Plane, also called the space plane, which was to be the eventual replacement for the space shuttle.
The plane was to use three different propulsion systems.
The “low-speed” propulsion system, whose technology was then classified, was designed to take the craft up to a speed of about Mach 3 and to altitudes of greater than 50,000 feet.
At Mach 3, a liquid-hydrogen-burning ramjet would take over.
Unlike the space shuttle, which uses a liquid-oxygen oxidizer, the X-30 ramjet would be air breathing.
A ramjet is a jet engine that has no moving parts and that depends on the high pressures created in front of it to force air through its combustion chamber.
Since liquid oxygen accounts for 89 percent of the fuel weight in a standard liquid-oxygen/liquid-hydrogen rocket, this ramjet system allows a substantial reduction in the rocket’s overall weight.
At Mach 6, the ramjet would convert into a scramjet—a supersonic ramjet—as the airflow in its combustion chamber transitioned from subsonic to supersonic flow.
The scramjet then would propel the X-30 into speeds of Mach 12 and greater.
Ground tests achieved Mach 12 speeds, and much higher Mach numbers were expected to be forthcoming when actual flight tests would be conducted.
For comparison, at Mach 12, a trip from New York to Tokyo would take just one hour.
As the space plane would attain an increasingly high altitude, it increasingly would rely on the addition of liquid oxygen to sustain combustion in its scramjet.
Outside the atmosphere, it was to rely entirely on liquid-oxygen/liquid-hydrogen rocket combustion.

One problem NASA anticipated with the space plane was that its wing leading edges would experience excessive frictional heating during the plane’s high-velocity flight through the atmosphere (at Mach 3 and above).
Just in this one area, the project could have substantially benefited from knowledge about Brown’s electrogravitics work, which was discussed in two of the SEOP idea submissions, ideas that were weeded out from SEOP’s final report.
In particular, high-voltage electrification of the leading edge of the aircraft’s body, in the manner Brown had suggested, would have assisted in deflecting the approaching airstream so it would not directly contact the vehicle’s surface, thereby reducing the air frictional drag and softening the vehicle’s transition through the sonic barrier.
However, personnel working on the space plane project indicated that they had not heard of electrogravitics or about the potential of high-voltage charge to alleviate air drag, one of the project’s most pressing technical problems.

Determined to circumvent SEOP’s idea censorship, in May 1992 I sent copies of my electrogravitic propulsion SEOP submission and a copy of the 1956 Aviation Studies report, “Electrogravitics Systems,” to Charles Morris, director of the space plane project.
He said he would circulate this material among the project’s engineers.
One month later, he sent a letter stating that “the concept is not appropriate for consideration within the National Aero-Space Plane (NASP) program” (see
appendix I
).
A year later, I convinced him to reconsider the idea.
Since he had not kept any of the material I had sent earlier, in September 1993 I sent him a new packet of information (see
appendix J
).
Later that year, when I inquired whether he thought the space plane might benefit by using a high-voltage charge, the director commented that he found the ideas very interesting, but was not optimistic that NASA would adopt such a technology in the immediate future.

Subsequently, a scientist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center commented to me:

Electrogravitics is one of those things that certainly is worth looking at because we’re running up against boundaries, and nuclear propulsion isn’t going to happen in our time, as far as I can tell .
.
.
We don’t have a program.
That’s the problem.
We don’t have anything on the horizon where there’s support at headquarters for really futuristic things .
.
.
There are some real interesting things out there like this.
NASA used to be a lot better at forward thinking than we have gotten to be, and if we are going to survive in this age, we are going to have to take off our “things-as-usual hat” and think about some of these things.
¹²

Work on the space plane proceeded for several years but was discontinued in 1994 due to budget cuts and because the program could not deliver the kind of results Congress was expecting.
In 2003, there was a strong lobbying effort to resurrect the project, but none of the proposed ideas made any mention of the idea of applying electrostatic charge to a wing’s leading edge to solve the hull-heating problem.