Monday, July 29, 2002

Remember what I was saying about flying cars? Well apparently Boeing bought it and have now set up a research division, Project Grasp, to investigate the possibility of anti-gravity. It's all based on the work of a Dr Podkletnov, who sounds like a refugee from the Journal of Irreproducible Results, and claims to have discovered a way to lessen the effect of gravity by suspending objects over a spinning superconductive disc. No one has yet been able to sucessfully reproduce his experiment, and he conveniently forgot to tell any of his coworkers the details of his apparatus.


Strangely, Boeing would not appear to be the first to take this work seriously. Notably BAe Systems (formerly British Aerospace and part of the Airbus Consortium) set up Project Greenglow, presumably named after the amount of management buy-in they got (i.e. not quite a green light) and NASA has the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program which appears to be in danger of having it's funding cut. Neither entity seems to have gotten very far with their research, but at least NASA has pictures of what it thinks it will be like to go really fast. One thing's for sure, neither of them were spending their budget on web design, and NASA had $1.7m


Apparently, part of NASA's problem was the vast amount of unsolicited "help" they received, some excerpts of which can be found here.

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