X Prize Rejects Gravity Control Rocket Group

It was a weighty decision, not taken lightly, but X Prize officials voted last week to bar a group attempting to harness gravity from entering the contest aimed at promoting space tourism. The X Prize Foundation notified Gravity Control Technologies (GCT) of Budapest, Hungary that its application to become an X Prize team had not been accepted.

GCT was founded in 1999 and is a privately held aerospace research firm delving into superconductivity and Zero Point Energy Field physics in the hopes of achieving one-hundred percent propellant-less propulsion technology for flight.

The X Prize is a $10 million prize to jumpstart the space tourism industry through competition between entrepreneurs and rocket experts around the world. The purse is to be awarded to the first team that privately finances, builds and launches a spaceship able to carry three people to 62.5 miles (100 kilometers) altitude, then returns safely to Earth, repeating the launch with the same ship within two weeks.

GCT is on a quest to prove the existence of an underlying sea of energy at every point in the universe predicted by Quantum physics. This sea of energy is different from the cosmic microwave background and is also referred to as the electromagnetic quantum vacuum, since it is the lowest state of otherwise empty space. By utilizing a zero point field energy/superconductor-based propulsion system, GCT contends the door to space travel can truly be opened.

But in an X Prize Foundation letter to GCT, the rationale for closing the door on the group's X Prize team status is up-front.

Asked to comment on the GCT situation, Gregg Maryniak, Executive Director of the X Prize Foundation told SPACE.com: "Our policy is that we do not discuss pending applications. We only discuss them when they are approved," Maryniak said. "We have not accepted their [GCT's] application…and we haven't foreclosed the possibility of accepting their application," he said.

At present, there are 24 teams in seven countries that are officially registered as X Prize teams -- all vying for the $10 million purse, Maryniak said. "I'm ready to issue that check to somebody that actually does it."

Victor Rozsnyay, GCT's Founder and Chief Executive Officer, told SPACE.com he's not surprised by the X Prize Foundation decision and return of the $1,000 X Prize application fee. "Since Gravity Control Technologies is working on developing propulsion systems capable of controlling gravity for flight -- a 180 degree departure from what is currently accepted as feasible -- it was likely that our application would not be approved. All other X Prize teams are developing variations of rocket technology, including some ingenious designs," Rozsnyay said. Rozsnyay said that rocketry has been around for over half a century. That technology is tested and proven, he said. "Gravity control on the other hand does not -- and could not -- even exist according to traditional science," he explained.

One of the primarily goals of GCT research aims at introducing affordable, commercial scale space tourism vessels. A craft dubbed the "Space Tourist" would be capable of non-stop space excursions, carrying over a thousand people on each 8-hour flight. Preliminary design specifications call for a triple deck craft equipped with "Hull Wide Propulsion Assembly" technology. Seating will be provided for 1004 passengers, 25 flight attendants, and operated by a three-person crew. Given appropriate funding, GCT envisions flying an initial prototype of the Space Tourist around 2012.

"We feel that the X Prize committee acted in the best interest of the Foundation when rejecting our application," Rozsnyay said. "A certain level of credibility must be met for such a widely visible and respected organization. In the opinion of the X Prize Team Registration Committee, in its current stage of development, gravity control does not meet that credibility level." Rozsnyay said the X Prize letter offers to review another GCT application - as long as the group shows evidence for the feasibility of their propulsion idea. "We will continue to work toward this goal, and when successful, resubmit our application," he said. Rozsnyay said he thanks the X Prize for considering GCT's work and wished all the other teams in the race continued success. "May the best one win the prize," Rozsnyay said.

Weighty Implications: NASA Funds Controversial Gravity Shield
By Jack Lucentini
Special to SPACE.com
posted: 11:00 am ET
28 September 2000
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/anti_grav_000928.html

Brushing aside controversy and a few glitches, NASA officials are forging ahead with plans to build a device that they say could work as an antigravity machine.

Most scientists say the idea of such a gadget is ludicrous. But given the stakes, NASA officials say, it's worth a try.
A machine that even slightly reduces gravity at spacecraft launch sites, agency officials believe, could save significant amounts of money.

The opportunity to try out such a machine is expected to come this May, when an Ohio company is scheduled to finish a prototype of the device for NASA.

Not that the space agency's officials themselves have high hopes.

"To say this is highly speculative is probably putting it mildly," acknowledged Ron Koczor, assistant director for science and technology at the Space Science Laboratory in NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama.

Nonetheless, NASA awarded a $600,000 contract last year to Superconductive Components Inc. in Columbus, Ohio to build the device.

Critics say the notion of a "gravity shield" violates Einstein's fundamental laws of physics.

"The theory of gravity is fairly well established, and I don't see it reversing itself," said Francis Slakey, a professor of physics at Georgetown University. The NASA project is "wasted money that could have been used to do legitimate space science," he added.

Koczor portrayed that view as closed-minded.

Scientists such as Slakey "don't seem to be amenable to observing that maybe the laws [of physics] are incomplete," Koczor said.

Throughout history, new discoveries have rocked old assumptions, he pointed out. "People used to talk about laws of conservation of mass, conservation of energy. Then all of a sudden, Einstein comes along and says those are really parts of the same thing."

Einstein wrote that gravity can be considered a bending of space-time that inevitably occurs around massive objects such as planets and stars. That, the conventional view holds, means no mere machine or invention can make it go away; it is not a "force" that can be counteracted.

The conventional scientists aren't the only critics of the NASA project. The agency is also drawing fire from some of its former collaborators in the effort. To see why, it helps to start from the beginning.

In 1992, a Finnish scientist, Eugene Podkletnov, claimed to have built a device that produced a gravity-shielding effect.

It consisted of a hot, fast-spinning, 12-inch (30-centimeter) disk of a superconducting ceramic, levitating within a magnetic field. Objects above the disk, Podkletnov reported, showed a loss of weight of between about 0.5 percent and 2 percent.

In 1996, researchers at Marshall Space Flight Center decided to investigate the claims. "The fact that it had appeared in a credible scientific journal is what really caught our eye," Koczor said.

Actually, Podkletnov had withdrawn his most recent article from publication under unclear circumstances. But he and others had published research on antigravity phenomena in several peer-reviewed journals.

Koczor assembled a team that worked together with scientists at the nearby University of Alabama at Huntsville, to build a device partially simulating the one Podkletnov had used. But the researchers were unable to replicate Podkletnov's results, and the partnership fell apart last year with bad blood between the two sides.

The university's Larry Smalley, a physics professor, says NASA simply failed to assemble a competent team of scientists who could give the project a serious chance.

The events "amused me, stunned me and upset me," said Smalley, who said he was involved as an observer of the project at the time. "It made me feel like they wasted time, a lot of money and a really golden opportunity to do something."

Smalley said he remains skeptical that Koczor and NASA have the know-how to do anything meaningful with the project.

The main university professor involved with the project, Ning Li, has since left the school. She said she has founded a company in Huntsville that also will market a gravity-shield device.

Li said she dropped the NASA collaboration and decided to work independently after the agency "wasted" the project's money and resources.

Koczor said the project fell apart not because of incompetence, but because Li was primarily interested in proving her theories of why the "gravity shield" would work. That differed from NASA's goal of simply building a working device, he said.

"She wanted the research to focus on her particular theory. Our intent was simply to show there was a gravity effect, without saying 'theory A is right' or 'theory B is right,'" he explained.

Last year, NASA decided to try again, this time by contracting out the construction of the device. Superconductive Components is in communication with Podkletnov as they attempt to build it, Koczor said.

The project is on or ahead of schedule, said J.R. Gaines, vice president of Superconductive Components.

"The superconductor is built. The rest has been designed and fabrication is proceeding," Gaines said. However, he said, he can't offer an opinion on whether the device will actually work. The company's job is simply to build it to the assigned specifications.

"We don't necessarily have a technical opinion," he said, though "we would certainly love to see this work."

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/05/30/60minutes/main556337.shtml

Hailing The Hubble

NEW YORK

Several hundred galaxies never seen before are visible in this "deepest-ever" view of the universe, called the Hubble Deep Field, in an image made with NASA's Hubble space telescope. (AP)

(CBS) When most people think of space, what comes to mind are names like John Glenn and Neil Armstrong. When scientists think about space, the name that comes to mind is Hubble, the space telescope that's been sent on a 20-year journey to explore the origins of the universe. As Ed Bradley reports, it's being called the most scientifically significant space project man has ever embarked on.

The Hubble has produced images like nothing ever seen before, as much art as science, visions of a universe more violent and fantastic than anyone had dared to imagine. It's sent back everything from razor-sharp views of the planets in our own solar system, to the vast stellar nurseries where stars and planets are born. Some show us the explosive outbursts of dying suns; others the swirling masses of stars that make up the galaxies.

But Hubble isn't just giving us extraordinary pictures. It's helping astronomers unlock the secrets of the universe. Dr. Bruce Margon, associate director for science for the Hubble Space Telescope, says of its significance: "Generations of humans have gone by with absolutely no clue about how the universe started. When my father went to school, no matter how smart he was, or how smart his teachers were, nobody had a clue how old was the universe. How were atoms made? How are stars formed? No one knew."

The Hubble Space Telescope is the size of a Greyhound bus. It weighs 10 tons and flies 400 miles above the Earth, moving five miles a second. Its cameras and scientific instruments are so sophisticated, they can capture light that began traveling through space more than 13 billion years ago. By the time that light finally enters the telescope and is transformed into an image, the picture it shows is of the universe as it was back when the light began its journey, in the unimaginably distant past. In effect, the telescope acts as a time machine.

"When we look back in time, using Hubble, we can see the universe, how it looked when it was less than a billion years old," says Dr. Mario Livio, the head of the science division for the Hubble. "And we can see what galaxies looked back then when they were the building blocks of today's galaxies."

Margon says this is important, "because we want to understand our origins. I mean, it's a very fundamental thing."

The urge is so fundamental that back in 1977, Congress approved $450 million to construct a telescope that would have an unobstructed view of the universe from above the Earth's atmosphere. It was named after Dr. Edwin Hubble, an American astronomer who, back in the 1920s, discovered that the universe is expanding.

The Hubble Space Telescope didn't get off the ground right away. First technical problems, and then the Challenger disaster, delayed launch until 1990, adding $1 billion to the price tag. When it finally did go up, Hubble was described as the most perfect telescope ever built, with the most perfect mirror.

When the first pictures came back, it was a perfect disaster. A tiny flaw in the mirror produced pictures that were out of focus, and Hubble's trouble was a front-page national embarrassment. Many people believed that NASA's future depended on whether they could fix it.

Three years later, seven astronauts were sent to repair the telescope. A lot was riding on the mission. Five spacewalks were required to perform a series of necessary repairs, including installing a new camera. On the ground, everyone waited to see if the repairs worked. They did, and Hubble was back in business.

Over the next few months, Hubble confirmed the existence of black holes. It also gave astronomers a live, close-up view as chunks of a comet crashed into Jupiter. A year later, Hubble focused its camera on a tiny spot in space for 10 days, just to see if anything was there.

There was. One picture it took revealed at least 1,500 separate galaxies, many of them farther away than ever seen before. Astronomers call it the Hubble Deep Field.

"The Hubble Deep Field is one of the very first times in astronomy where we have looked far enough away, and therefore far back enough in time, that things have started to look different," says Margon. "Instead of seeing sort of sedate, calm, pinwheels of galaxies, we see fragments, and sort of little angry wisps that we think are the beginnings of today's universe."

Until a few years ago, it was the conventional wisdom that the expansion of the universe that began with the big bang was slowing down. Dr. Ed Weiler, the head of science for NASA and the person in charge of the Hubble, says that in fact, it's speeding up. "It means that we don't understand gravity," he says. "This implies there's some negative energy force, some anti-gravity, that's actually pushing things apart. We don't understand it. It's not supposed to be there." He says it's something that wasn't known before Hubble.

According to Livio, the discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating flies in the face of what everyone thought was happening. He says it is one of the most amazing and important discoveries in the history of science.

He explains: "Suppose I'll take my keys from here, and I throw them up. They come back to my hand. Why did that happen? The gravity of the Earth was able to slow these keys down, and then finally even reverse the motion. So what we naturally thought was that this expansion ought to slow down in the same way as these keys slow down. What we discovered is that this expansion is, in fact, speeding up, accelerating. It would be like, I throw these keys up, and instead of falling back into my hand, they actually speed up upwards."

This extraordinary phenomenon was confirmed by a 32-year-old astrophysicist, Dr. Adam Riess. Riess' calculations on an exploding star in a small section of the Hubble deep field confirm that the universe has picked up speed.

One astronomer says that many years from now, our direct descendants won't see the sky as we see it today. It will appear as though we are sort of alone on an island, because all the lights around us will blink out.

This knowledge from Hubble doesn't come cheap. So far, it's cost the United States nearly $7 billion, with an annual operating budget of $250 million. This pays for the technicians who control and monitor the satellite, and the scientists who analyze its data at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. It also pays for the engineers at the Goddard Space Flight Center who design the tools, equipment and procedures the astronauts use to upgrade Hubble and keep it running smoothly.

Maintenance is a challenge, since Hubble can't come into the garage for repairs. It took engineers months to figure out the procedures to replace, or change out, Hubble's power supply. The operation, completed in 2002, took almost four-and-a-half hours. It was the most complex maintenance job ever performed in space. Without power, there was no way to heat the telescope or monitor its instruments. On the ground, the engineers weren't sure Hubble would survive the deep freeze of space until power was successfully restored.

At a time when NASA's other programs rarely make headlines, Hubble does. And it's the pictures that have captured the public's imagination. Livio thinks the hype is justified. "I think that Hubble has been one of the most fantastic experiments there has been," he says. "I mean, I will go so far as to argue that the Hubble images are in some sense the most fantastic artworks of our time.

The man responsible for putting together those artworks is a NASA imaging specialist, Zoltan Levay. He uses scientific data to apply color to Hubble's black and white images. "We do adjust the color a little bit," he explains. "Partly just so it looks better, and partly so it also imparts the information that we'd like to get across." He says these are not, however, works of fiction. "It's a representation of reality, just as any photograph is not a literal reality, but a representation of reality."

On some nights in the South, the Hubble is actually visible from the ground. The orbiting observatory has become a cultural icon. The pictures it takes are so compelling, they've been used to sell everything from magazines to stamps. They're even used to sell CDs.

NASA's next mission to service Hubble was scheduled for 2004, but since the Columbia shuttle disaster earlier this year, the remaining shuttles have been grounded and the servicing mission has been postponed indefinitely.

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