The ultimate challenge I can think of as a scientist
is to control gravity.
If you could control gravity, the power you'd have is unlimited,
and potentially, even deadly.
It is a very powerful weapon.
This is the story of the secret space race to control gravity.
I did not want to attract the attention of military people in Russia.
And the scientists willing to risk everything to attempt the seemingly impossible.
Well, it's not impossible.
It's just we don't know how to do it.
And trying to achieve the impossible.
Well, that involves some pretty weird science.
Weird Science
Anti-gravity: The Secret Space Race
Dr Josie Peters - Astrophysicist. We think of gravity as something that pulls us,
but what if we could use it to push us,
to propel us into outer space?
This story starts in the late 1980s.
This is when the Cold War still dominated the global agenda.
And it's also when aerospace engineer Ron Evans started to wonder
if he could use anti-gravity to levitate a plane.
It could fly anywhere. Into space, even into water.
Of course, it was a vertical takeoff design
because it had a gravity engine inside.
That’s pretty out there.
Most planes we think of are trying to overcome gravity.
And not only did he wonder about it, he asked his employers if they'd let him try.
He worked for the biggest defence and aerospace contractor in Europe,
BAE systems.
And instead of sending him home to lie down,
they listened.
I had to come up with some concepts and come up with some ideas
that could actually feature an anti-gravity or gravity-type propulsion system.
Well, this was one of the designs that we came up with.
But it didn't look very exciting.
And so we asked the artist to put some green rays underneath.
That made it look far more futuristic.
Not everyone in the company thought we should be doing it,
but there were a few, and some very senior people, that felt,
‘OK, let’s just have a little look at the future.’
And the concept became known as ‘Greenglow’.
‘Project Greenglow and the Quest for Gravity Control’.
Sounds like it could be a fantasy novel.
But Ron's job as the head of Project Greenglow
was just as fantastical…
To create anti-gravity.
And so glittering the prize, so tantalising the prospect,
that both Moscow and Washington soon joined the race to control gravity.
It was around 1996 when I was asked
to lead the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project.
Things like non-rocket space drives, interstellar propulsion,
and manipulating gravity, things like that.
NASA’s ultimate goal was to replace rocket fuel, to travel further than ever before,
possibly even outside our solar system.
Don't get me wrong, rocket fuel is great,
but the sheer amount we need to break free from the Earth’s gravity,
is kind of holding us back.
If you wanted to go to our nearest neighbouring star,
which is over four light years away,
and you wanted to do it with the kind of rockets that are on the space shuttle,
well the amount of propellant you need for that journey
is about the mass of our entire sun.
Others think anti-gravity has more direct uses closer to home.
It is a very powerful weapon and it can destroy the missiles
or remove them from their trajectory.
So the interest from military people will be definitely big.
But needless to say, the quest for gravity control proved somewhat challenging.
And many scientists, well they didn't think too highly of this mission.
Crap.
That's hilarious.
And despite many attempts, neither Ron nor Marc could make it work.
So when a Russian scientist called Dr Eugene Podkletnov
claimed to have cracked it and actually created an anti-gravity field,
everybody took notice.
Out of the blue from the MoD, I got a letter,
asking me what I made of the Podkletnov paper.
Eugene Podkletnov claimed that
by spinning electrical superconductors at high velocity,
he could create a gravitational field.
So we have a vacuum chamber with a disk, which can be rotated.
And when the disk reaches a certain speed of rotation,
it exerts a repulsive force on the weight sample, and pushes it up.
This gravity field is, in our case, repulsive.
And as you can see, the repulsive force is pretty big.
The problem was, nobody was able to recreate Eugene's experiment.
So we couldn't say, ‘Yes, he had found an effect,’ or, ‘No he hadn’t.’
I think Podkletnov had jumped to a conclusion,
had seen some things and did not take the rigour to go through
and make sure that he wasn't misleading himself.
But Eugene Podkletnov was not going to be put off that easily.
In 2001, he claimed to have found a new way to control gravity.
And who did he trust to give him a fair hearing?
Ron Evans at Greenglow.
But he'd only meet him in total secrecy.
It was a secret meeting because I did not want to attract the attention
of military people in Russia.
I presented to him my latest works, which gives a very short impulse of gravity waves.
It’s really a giant spark plug.
But according to Dr Podkletnov, someone way away,
a kilometre away on the balcony of some flats in line with the beam
was still able to detect a slight effect.
That was incredible.
Did you really think that was feasible?
We don't know with gravity.
Again, everyone tried to recreate Eugene Podkletnov’s findings
to see if they, too, could create an anti-gravity field.
Institute of Aerospace Engineering, Dresden University, Germany
Dr Martin Tajmar is leading efforts to replicate Podkletnov’s findings
If you have an extraordinary claim, you must have extraordinary proof.
But…
That's the most sensitive sensor there is in the world
and we don't even see something out of the noise.
So how can you make a claim to say that you move things metres away
or that you actually push pendulums away?
So that's really an outrageous claim.
We haven't seen something not even remotely like that.
Unfortunately.
Ultimately, the Russian research could not be replicated.
And with no luck in the UK and the US, both BAE systems and NASA
shut down their anti-gravity research programmes.
We asked whether we could go there and talk to them about it
and they just said, ‘No.’
We can't go in there to talk about it now
because NASA is not doing that work right now.
But that's not necessarily the end of the story.
New research into gravity still continues.
So might it be possible in the future?
Porton Down, Ministry of Defence. The UK’s top secret military research laboratory.
Ron, good morning.
Welcome to the Defence, Science and Technology Lab.
This is the heart of British defence science, Porton Down.
I've got some really interesting things I'd like to show you today.
So what we have here is our quantum gravity gradiometer.
It's a small system.
At the heart of the device we have a vacuum chamber.
This is quantum-level physics.
And this sensor basically uses lasers to freeze a cloud of atoms.
And then, amazingly, this cloud reacts to disturbance in the Earth's gravitational field,
caused by a moving mass, as in, caused by gravity.
The atoms are sensitive enough to detect the mass of my body
over a range of about one metre.
So your gravitational field is affecting this device?
Yes.
To me, this is amazing technology.
Getting into the quantum that's really allowing us
to do things that were just unbelievable 30 years ago.
Yes, some people use the phrase, ‘they break the laws of physics’.
I prefer to say they break the laws of physics, as we understand them today.
100 years ago, we didn't understand the quantum physics.
The idea of being able to measure changes in gravity: science fiction.
Could never happen.
Today we can.
And possibly even gravitational propulsion might be a possibility in the future.
It may be, yeah.
Could be that we've got something.
Certainly I see this as a start.
There's still a very long way to go before we can even consider it possible
to control gravity anywhere near the way that Project Greenglow imagined.
And some still say never.
Crap.
But the dream certainly isn't over yet.
I'm sure we will one day.
It's just a matter of time.