In October an official from NASA leaked a military secret. NASA is doing a study intended to launch military star ships toward other nearby stars. The leak caused a lot of speculation in the news. In recent years the US military has tested a number of new space vehicles. At the same time NASA had to struggle financially just to support the old programs.
DARPA the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency issued a confirmation of the leak with little additional information.
http://www.darpa.mil/news/2010/starshipnewsrelease.pdf
About 10 years ago NASA had a program for Break Through Propulsion to identify possible technologies. Five studies were completed. None of them looked like a break through. Then the program was canceled in budget cutting.
Now the NASA space shuttle program is scheduled to be phased out. NASA needs to get some new programs and public support to finance them. It’s time to look again at longer missions like Mars and the near by stars.
Photo is here for NASA BPP.
http://www.science20.com/sites/all/modules/author_gallery/uploads/164255...
The public may wonder why taxes should be spent on space research. One reason is that most of the money stays in the local economy instead of being sent over seas. The military reason is that USA can not afford to fall behind Europe and Russia in space technology.
A big argument is raging in the scientific community. The experts don’t agree about how much energy is contained in the vacuum of space. One group claims there is enough energy in an empty shoe box to boil the oceans of Earth. It is the Dirac Sea of Energy. The opponents claim that space is nearly devoid of energy. For an academic community the safe way to live is to support the second group.
If the Dirac opinion is correct the next big discovery in science will be more dangerous than nuclear weapons and more powerful than the sun. It will be available to everyone everywhere. Nick Cook discussed it in his best selling book “The Hunt For Zero Point.” If the opponents are correct it will be the biggest embarrassment in centuries. The military researchers are not sure about Dirac, but for them the safe way to live is to assume the worst case.
Military research is in a race with other countries to discover a new science of vacuum energy in space. The only way to get the answers is to launch a star ship and run the experiments in a high speed laboratory. It is possible to show some of the public information that is going into the research.
In recent years support has been growing for light speed to become a variable in general relativity. The main concern is that the proper velocity measured on a star ship could be faster than the constant speed of light. The proper velocity has no limit in relativity. Only the relative velocity has a limit. It is one of the embarrassing things that science doesn’t mention very often.
There are good reasons to suspect that light speed becomes a variable in a high speed star ship. That changes a lot of assumptions that have delayed space exploration and short changed NASA.
Here is one way to get a variable speed of light prediction. The Dirac equation is integrated for energy and momentum in a star ship with no assumptions about what parameters are constant or variable.
Graph is here for light speed on a star ship.
http://www.science20.com/sites/all/modules/author_gallery/uploads/159262...
The result is a prediction that light speed increases as the star ship accelerates. A graph predicts light speed as measured on a star ship is always faster than the proper velocity of the star ship. This prediction means that star travel could be less difficult than generally believed. The first journey could be achieved in 100 years. To military research it is a way to get the data on vacuum energy.
What type of public policy would achieve the benefits of Zero Point technology? How would the destructive side effects be prevented? For now the results will be kept secret. The first travelers will not be coming back.
