Secrets of Antigravity Propulsion (53 page)

13.5 • THE
COLUMBIA
DISASTER

On February 1, 2003, the
Columbia
space shuttle crashed to Earth in flames as the result of damage its wing had suffered earlier in the mission.
During takeoff, a suitcase-size chunk of insulating foam had broken off from its main propellant tank and impacted the leading edge of the shuttle’s left wing, causing damage to one of the wing’s thermal protection tiles.
The damage went undetected and later caused a major problem when the vehicle attempted to reenter the atmosphere during landing.
Air friction normally heats the wing surface to incandescent temperatures during the high-velocity atmospheric reentry.
As a result of the earlier damage, superheated gases were able to penetrate a gap in the wing’s thermal protection tiles and cause damage to the shuttle’s internal wing structure.
Exposed to these hot gases, the wing structure ultimately failed, the vehicle became uncontrollable, and it was eventually destroyed by the extreme heat of reentry.
Seven crew members perished in the crash.

Had Brown’s aerospace technology been implemented on the space shuttle, the Columbia disaster would never have happened.
Thirteen years earlier, two SEOP submissions had pointed out the advantages of electrogravitics, but the SEOP review panel discarded the ideas and did not include them in its final report to NASA.
As mentioned earlier, in 1992 I had also contacted space plane project director Charles Morris of NASA to suggest a solution to the hull-heating problem foreseen to plague the project.
I had pointed out to him how air-friction heating of the leading edge of a shuttlecraft’s wing could be prevented simply by applying a high-voltage charge to the wing.
Again, in my 1993 letter to him (reproduced in appendix J), I wrote “.
.
.
electrostatic charging of the plane’s leading edge would also have the added benefit of reducing air friction heating of the hull surface.”
However, NASA personnel did not employ the idea.

Somewhat later I spoke with Jonathan Campbell, an engineer who works on electrical propulsion systems at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.
I learned that he had been trying for years to convince NASA to look into electrokinetics as a means for spacecraft propulsion, but his requests for money were routinely turned down by management.
He took out two patents on a thrust-producing apparatus (see figure 13.2) that is very similar to one of Brown’s electrohydrodynamic devices.
Although he has acknowledged that Brown’s work inspired him to develop his cylindrical thruster, curiously, Campbell’s patent did not cite or discuss Brown’s prior work.
^13
 
*39
Campbell has a more conventional view on the operation of asymmetrical capacitors than Brown and others, denying that any exotic principle such as electrogravitics operates.
His patent did not discuss the idea of charging the leading edge of a spacecraft’s wing, so even if NASA had funded Campbell’s research, there is no guarantee that Brown’s airframe-charging idea would have been employed.

Figure 13.2.
A symmetrical capacitor apparatus for generating thrust.
A high-voltage DC potential causes air to flow from the copper cylinder toward the copper disc.
(Campbell, 2001)

In March 2003, I submitted a suggestion to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (reproduced in appendix J).
I pointed out again the benefits of charging the wing leading edge, stating, “One technology that could prevent a Columbia-type hazard from happening in the future would be to apply a high voltage charge to the Space Shuttle hull during reentry, in particular to the leading edge of its wing.
The ion sheath so formed would create a buffer zone around the craft, ionizing, repelling and deflecting oncoming air molecules and thereby preventing them from directly impacting and heating the hull.”
I also noted that Northrop had researched this technique thirty-five years earlier and named some references they could consult.
I also summarized Brown’s work and the use of electrogravitics on the B-2 bomber.
I noted how I had earlier attempted to make NASA aware of the technology, both through my submission to SEOP and through my contacts with Morris.
I named Campbell as someone at NASA whom they could contact and also offered my own assistance to point them in the right direction, but nothing ever came of my suggestions.
All they sent me was a form letter thanking me for my input.
Efforts made to resurrect the space plane as a future space shuttle replacement made no mention of my suggestion for wing electrification.

The aerospace industry has not shown the same bureaucratic dinocracy.
In 1994, one year after NASA turned down the idea for its space plane, BAE Corporation (formerly British Aerospace) became seriously interested in Russian research into plasma air-drag reduction.
Together with the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA), Britain’s military research organization, it began researching the idea of generating plasmas upwind of an aircraft as a means of reducing air drag.
¹⁴

In 1996, Terry Cain, a research engineer with DERA, traveled to Russia to meet Anatoly Klimov and his colleagues and to repeat the plasma drag reduction experiments they had performed.
At the Central Aerohydrodynamics Institute, near Moscow, they carried out supersonic wind tunnel tests on 10-centimeter, conical-shaped bodies that used plasma generators to create upstream plasmas.
One method they used to generate the plasmas was to energize the cones with a Tesla coil that created voltages high enough to cause air to ionize over large distances.
The high-voltage fields generated “little streamers of lightning” that propagated into the airflow ahead of the test model.
¹⁵
They measured drag reductions of 10 percent.

In the United States, the Arnold Engineering Development Center, at Arnold Air Force Base in Tennessee, has modified its wind tunnels to conduct airflow tests of plasma-assisted models.
The long list of aerospace planes that have undergone aerodynamic testing at Arnold includes the B-2 Stealth Bomber and the X-30 National Aero-Space Plane.
In 2000, the head of its applied technology directorate was quoted as saying that a number of organizations have shown interest in plasma air-drag reduction, although he would not give their names.
Might we expect NASA to be among those showing interest?
¹⁶

13.6 • NASA: A MILITARY FRONT ORGANIZATION?

Donna Hare, a former employee of a NASA contractor, has disclosed evidence that implicates NASA in covering up evidence of the presence of advanced-technology spacecraft.
During the 1970s, Hare worked for NASA contractor Philco Ford in its photo lab at the Johnson Space Center.
Since she had a secret clearance, she was able, one day, to walk into the NASA photo lab where a friend of hers worked.
The lab was involved in developing satellite pictures and pictures taken during NASA’s various missions.
Her friend directed her attention to an area of a photo mosaic he had been working on.
Then, smiling, he suggested she look at a particular area of one of these photo panels.
There she saw a round white dot with a very crisp outline.
She asked if it was a dot on the emulsion.
Grinning, he said, “Dots on the emulsion don’t leave shadows on the ground.”
Sure enough, there was a round shadow on the trees at the correct angle from where the sun would have been shining.
She asked, “Is this a UFO?”
He answered, “I can’t tell you that,” meaning it was a UFO, but he wasn’t allowed to tell her it was.
He said, “We always have to airbrush them out before we sell them to the public.”
Hare’s astounding testimony can be found in Stephen Greer’s book
Disclosure
.
¹⁷

Hare also disclosed stories she had heard from NASA employees about some astronauts having seen extraterrestrial craft.
One gentleman whom she knew very well said just about every one of the astronauts who had gone to the moon had seen things.
One said there were three craft on the moon at the time the Apollo 11 mission had landed.
He said that as a precaution, the astronauts were put in quarantine for a while after they had returned and that some of the astronauts who wanted to talk were threatened.

Hare also related a story told to her by someone who used to work at Johnson Space Center as a security guard.
¹⁸
He said one day soldiers came in fatigues and ordered him to burn photographs.
At one point, he stole a glance at one of the pictures and could see that it was a UFO on the ground.
One of the guards apparently caught him doing this and hit him in the head with a gun butt.
She said she could see that as he told his story, he was very frightened.

So we see that NASA and its employees are being threatened and manipulated into silence to maintain the status quo of a cover-up about the presence of alien craft and the existence of advanced aerospace propulsion technologies.
Seeing that the NASA administration seem determined to steer clear of electrogravitics technology despite repeated attempts by several people to interest them, one is led to sympathize with Tom, my Project Skyvault contact, who said in the note he passed me at the 1994 Tesla conference that NASA is essentially a public relations organization or a front that obscures Air Force space research.

Over the phone, Tom later told me an astounding story of the scope of the Air Force’s involvement in space.
He said he had been in the Civil Air Patrol and had been given a Mitchelson Award, the highest award that one could get.
As a result, in 1963 he was chosen to represent the state of Idaho and go to Chanute Air Force Base along with Civil Air Patrol representatives from the other forty-nine states.
One day they were all gathered in an auditorium, and onstage there were about eight generals who were available for a “no bars” question-and-answer period.
One person popped up and asked them about Air Force Major Donald E.
Keyhoe, who at the time was writing about UFOs and had been severely censored.
One of the generals responded that they had a way of taking care of people who gave out a little too much information.
He said they would use physical injury or whatever was necessary to make them shut up, indicating they would kill a person (extreme prejudice, if you will).
Someone else started to ask more about UFOs and one of the generals said the United States had a defense system in place at the time that consisted of a number of satellites, in orbit not only around the Earth, but also around Mercury, Venus, Mars, and a few other, more distant planets they couldn’t talk about.
He said the satellites together functioned as an early warning system, that they were afraid of the “people out there” because they didn’t know very much about them.
This satellite defense system was built to observe three possible sources: missiles that might come from the Soviet Union, missiles that might come from China, and intrusions of aliens coming in toward Earth.
Someone asked why the generals were being so candid with them.
According to Tom, one responded by saying, “If you want, you can go ahead and tell people what we told you, but they’re not going to believe you.
Besides, if you did get anyone to believe you and they came back to ask us, we would just deny it.
So we have nothing to lose by telling you this.”
¹⁹

Russia had put the Sputnik satellite in orbit around the Earth in 1957, and the United States followed by putting the Explorer in orbit the next year.
In 1959, the Soviets photographed the far side of the moon with Luna 3.
In 1962, the Mariner 2 probe of Venus sent back close-range information about Venus, and that same year, the Russians launched the first probe to Mars, but contact was lost.
So in 1963, Tom was told that the United States at that time had a network of sophisticated warning satellites scattered throughout the solar system, orbiting planets farther out than Mars!
The well-funded military space program was apparently several decades ahead of what was being publicly acknowledged!
Tom said he had heard rumors that the first satellite ever was launched by the United States in 1948 using a modified V-2 rocket.
He said the Soviets never really were ahead of the United States in the space race.
The military used the publicity of the Soviet effort to their own advantage to get more money from Congress.

North American Rockwell delivered its first space shuttle to NASA in March 1979.
This was the Columbia shuttle, which made its maiden voyage two years later, in 1981, but Tom said that Rockwell had been delivering space shuttles to the U.S.
Air Force as early as 1976.
He also said the Air Force has its own shuttle system and that its shuttles were being launched from a highly secured island in the Pacific known as Johnston Island.
He said he had been working for the Air Force between 1976 and 1978 and that during this time he met a captain who was an engineer with the Air Force and who had returned from Johnston Island after being there for a year or two.
He said this captain told him he had heard rumors that the United States had a base on the moon.
The captain said that from looking at the cargo manifest for one of these shuttle launchings, one could conclude that provisions were routinely being shipped out.
This was several years after the Apollo program had been terminated, the last Apollo mission to the moon having been completed in December 1972.

Thus, it is apparent that there has been an effort to keep secret the military’s capabilities in space.
While NASA was mesmerizing the public with its rocket flights, aerospace companies were carrying out secret research on electrogravitics and microwave beam propulsion technologies.
A good guess is that the U.S.
military currently has large fleets of craft capable of hypersonic flight in space that use nonconventional means of propulsion.

This educated guess may be fact.
In 2002, a forty-year-old British computer buff named Gary McKinnon succeeded in using his home computer to hack into the computer network of several U.S.
military organizations.
Although not part of any terrorist organization and only snooping to satisfy his own curiosity, he now faces up to seventy years’ imprisonment in a U.S.
jail, but what he found on one of his Internet forays was quite astounding.
In a U.S.
Space Command database, McKinnon found a list of officer’s names under the heading “Non-Terrestrial Officers.”
He also found a list of “fleet-to-fleet transfers” and a list of ship names.
He tried to look them up, but found they were not Navy ships.
He came to conclude that these were off-planet vessels.

The U.S.
Space Command is headquartered at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs.
Its website states that its “mission is to conduct joint space operations in accordance with the Unified Command Plan assigned missions.”
These include “Space Force Support, Space Force Enhancement, Space Force Application, and Space Force Control.”
²⁰
With records of nonterrestrial officers carrying out fleet-to-fleet transfers, its missions appear to be far bolder than the average U.S.
citizen might have guessed.
It seems the United States has ongoing, manned space operations that go beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, all taking place under a cloak of secrecy and all made possible by advanced field-effect propulsion technologies that were under intense development in the middle of the twentieth century.

The Russians may also have a substantial presence in space.
In his book
The Awakening of the Red Bear
, Dimosthenes Liakopoulos wrote that the Russians have large electrogravitic-propulsion craft called cosmospheres that are equipped with particle beam weapons.
²¹
He maintains that these are used to ferry supplies to ten bases on the moon.

As for the application of field-propulsion technology to civilian aerospace flight, it is apparent that NASA, with its rocket-oriented approach, will not be the one to take the initiative.
That, instead, will likely be undertaken by farsighted aerospace corporations such as the Spaceship Company and Virgin Galactic.
The ability of nonmilitary private enterprise to compete in the space arena became evident on October 4, 2004, when Brian Binnie piloted SpaceShipOne to an altitude of 114 kilometers to win the $10-million X-Prize.
This prize, which was offered by the X-Prize Foundation, was available to anyone who succeeded in reaching an altitude of at least 100 kilometers twice within a two-week period.
That was SpaceShipOne’s second voyage, its maiden voyage having been made just five days earlier.
The winning team, led by aerospace engineer Burt Rutan, showed the world that, with a little ingenuity, space flight is possible even on a shoestring budget.

Figure 13.3.
SpaceShipOne landing in the Mohave Desert on October
4, 2004.
It was the first privately owned plane to achieve suborbital flight.
(Photo courtesy of Mike Massee)

In July 2005, Rutan’s company, Scaled Composites, signed an agreement with Virgin Galactic, a spin-off of the Virgin Group of Companies, founded by Sir Richard Branson, to form a new aerospace production company that both companies will jointly own.
This new company, called the Spaceship Company, has plans to build a fleet of commercial suborbital spaceships and launch aircraft and to market them to space-line operators, one of which will be Virgin Galactic.
Rutan, who will head up the company’s technical development team, said, “[T]his will truly herald an era of personal space flight first described by the visionary science fiction writers of the 1940s and 1950s.
Richard Branson and I share a vision that commercially viable and safe space tourism will provide the foundation for the human colonization of space.”
²²
It is more likely that entrepreneurs such as these, who are accustomed to thinking out of the box, will ultimately be the ones who will develop field-effect propulsion for aerospace flight.