New frontiers in space propulsion sciences
Glen A. Robertson · Paul A. Murad · Eric W. Davis
Abstract and summary · read the original at the source
In one page
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.
Why it matters hereChapter 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.
What it claims
01Mankind’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
What to watch02Many 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
What to watch03The 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
Published and peer-reviewed04Superconductivity 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
What to watch05The 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 watch06What 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
What to watch
Read it · abstract
Abstract
Mankind’s destiny points toward a quest for the stars. Realistically, it is difficult to achieve this using current space propulsion science and develop the prerequisite technologies, which for the most part requires the use of massive amounts of propellant to be expelled from the system. Therefore, creative approaches are needed to reduce or eliminate the need for a propellant. Many researchers have identified several unusual approaches that represent immature theories based upon highly advanced concepts. These theories and concepts could lead to creating the enabling technologies and forward thinking necessary to eventually result in developing new directions in space propulsion science. In this paper, some of these theoretical and technological concepts are examined – approaches based upon Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, spacetime curvature, superconductivity, and newer ideas where questions are raised regarding conservation theorems and if some of the governing laws of physics, as we know them, could be violated or are even valid. These conceptual ideas vary from traversable wormholes, Krasnikov tubes and Alcubierre’s warpdrive to Electromagnetic (EM) field propulsion with possible hybrid systems that incorporate our current limited understanding of zero point fields and quantum mechanics.
Glen A. Robertson, Paul A. Murad and Eric W. Davis, New frontiers in space propulsion sciences, Energy Conversion and Management 49, issue 3, 436–452 (2008). The published paper is at doi.org/10.1016/j.enconman.2007.10.013.
(Abstract only — no other text of the paper is reproduced here; see the rights note above. On this site, Robertson’s high-frequency gravitational-wave work with Beckwith is at /library/stm-be42f591d1 and his density-dependent propulsion line at /library/stm-79d83ef890; Murad’s Morningstar Energy Box measurements are at /library/stm-5892edd553 and his relativistic-fluid work at /library/stm-7e679403a6; and Davis’s laboratory route to negative energy is at /library/stm-2fa40aad9d with his wormhole induction propulsion paper at /library/stm-9cdb177b13.)
The way in
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enconman.2007.10.013SOURCE NOT REACHED IN FULL. Energy Conversion and Management volume 49, issue 3, pages 436 to 452. Elsevier holds it closed and no open copy exists that could be found: Unpaywall and OpenAlex both report closed with no repository full text, OpenAIRE lists no green instance, Semantic Scholar returns an empty open-access record and states that the publisher elided the abstract from its own index, and CORE’s search endpoint answers with a redirect page rather than results. The lead author wrote from NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, so a NASA-hosted version was searched for on the NASA Technical Reports Server by title, by subject and by author; the title search returned nothing and the author search returned six unrelated Robertson records, so no United States Government copy of this paper was read and the page is NOT promoted to public domain. THE ABSTRACT below is the authors’ own as deposited by Elsevier, taken from OpenAIRE and confirmed word for word against the CoLab record for the same DOI. Every locator points to a sentence of that abstract or to the bibliographic record. AUTHOR NAMES: Crossref carries the second and third authors with initials only; the given names here follow this site’s own people register, where the co-authors are Paul A. Murad and Eric W. Davis.
How 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
Where it sits in the curriculum
The reference documents and the institutional recordThe unified picture