Prospects for Breakthrough Propulsion From Physics: Marc Millis's 2004 NASA Survey and Its Verdict on Biefeld-Brown Devices, Lifters and Asymmetrical Capacitors

"Prospects for Breakthrough Propulsion From Physics" is NASA Technical Memorandum NASA/TM—2004-213082, written by Marc G. Millis of Glenn Research Center, Cleveland, Ohio, dated May 2004 and prepared for the 2004 Conference on Evolvable Hardware in Seattle (June 24–26, 2004). It is a survey, not an experiment: it sums up what NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics (BPP) Project and several parallel efforts had learned about propellantless thrust, faster-than-light travel and exotic energy sources. The Biefeld-Brown effect occupies three short paragraphs of it, and they end in a negative conclusion.

What the survey says about Brown's effect

The claim under review is that a capacitor charged to high voltage pushes itself along by something other than ordinary physics. Millis reports that builders of such devices have described them as working by an "electrogravitic" or antigravity effect.

The idea is traced to Thomas Townsend Brown's British patent 300,311 of 1928, "A Method of and an Apparatus or Machine for Producing Force or Motion", and the survey says the claim has since been attached to a wide range of descendants, lifters and asymmetrical capacitors among them. The list reaches into NASA itself: a recent design attributed to Marshall Space Flight Center is referenced to J. W. Campbell's US Patents 6,317,310 (2001) and 6,411,493 (2002), for a two-dimensional asymmetrical capacitor module.

Against those claims the memorandum sets a single sentence of assessment: "all rigorous experimental tests indicate that the observed thrust is attributable to ion wind". Its conclusion is that these devices are "not viable candidates for breakthrough physics propulsion".

The survey lists the Marshall patent only as one of the variants; it does not offer the patent as support for the effect.

What the survey cites for its verdict

The survey reports no measurement of its own on these devices, and none of the eight tasks the BPP Project sponsored concerned them. The topic appears under research sponsored by others, and the survey cites three studies for its ion-wind conclusion:

• R. L. Talley, "Twenty First Century Propulsion Concept", a final report for Phillips Laboratory, Air Force Systems Command, Edwards AFB (PL–TR–91–3009, 1991), covering February 1989 to July 1990.
• Martin Tajmar, a 2000 conference paper on an experimental investigation of five-dimensional divergent currents as a way of coupling gravity and electromagnetism.
• Martin Tajmar, "The Biefeld-Brown Effect: Misinterpretation of Corona Wind Phenomena" (2004), described in The Biefeld-Brown Effect as a Misread Corona Wind: Martin Tajmar's Sealed-Box Pendulum Test and Its 10 µN Limit.

The memorandum does not describe what any of the three did or found; it gives only the collective conclusion. One further piece of work differs from those three in that it was unfinished when Millis wrote. The West Virginia Institute for Scientific Research (ISR), funded by a Congressional earmark, was testing such devices in vacuum. Millis gives no figures from that programme. He reports only that it, too, had turned up no sign of new physics, and that by then the testers were measuring how the devices perform in conventional terms. The reference for that work is a paper by Canning, Campbell and Winet on the ISR asymmetrical capacitor thruster, listed as planned for a conference in July 2004, two months after the date of the memorandum.

The 2003 Army Research Laboratory report described in Force on an Asymmetric Capacitor: The 2003 Army Research Laboratory Lifter Tests and Why Their Ion-Wind Estimate Fell Short (Bahder & Fazi) is not among the references for this section. Readers comparing the two should note the difference in emphasis: the Army authors left the mechanism open, while the NASA survey states the ion-wind attribution flatly.

The project behind the judgement

NASA ran the BPP Project from 1996 through 2002 around three "Grand Challenges": propulsion needing little or no propellant, drastically shorter transit times, and new onboard energy sources. Millis stresses that success was defined as gaining reliable knowledge, not achieving a breakthrough; that reviewers were asked to judge the credibility of proposed work, not predict whether an idea would pan out; and that null results were to be published as progress.

Of 16 research tasks summarised, eight sponsored by the project and at least eight by others, the survey counts 6 as not viable, 6 as unresolved or debatable, and 4 as having clear openings for follow-up work. The survey does not list which task falls under which heading, so it does not say in which group, if any, the Biefeld-Brown item is counted. Other negative findings it reports include Rex Schlicher's specially terminated coax (in-house tests observed no excess thrust), quantum tunnelling as a route to faster-than-light travel, and the rotating-superconductor "gravity shielding" configuration of E. Podkletnov, for which a privately funded replication published in 2003 found nothing at a sensitivity put at 50 times better than Podkletnov's. James Woodward's transient-inertia claims and the Slepian-Drive, by contrast, are described as unresolved.

How far the verdict reaches

Millis attaches a caution that applies here as much as anywhere in the survey: a dead end on a given task should be read within the limits of that task and not stretched to cover every related idea. Read that way, the finding is specific. It concerns high-voltage capacitor thrusters as candidates for new physics. It does not say the devices produce no force: the survey speaks of observed thrust and attributes it to ion wind. Its remark that the ISR tests had turned to the devices' conventional performance can be read as suggesting they were being treated as conventional thrusters, though the survey does not spell that out.

The survey also has the limits of its form. It is a summary of conclusions with citations, containing no thrust figures, voltages, pressures or apparatus details for any Biefeld-Brown test, and it does not address Brown's own assertions of thrust in vacuum beyond reporting that vacuum work was in progress. What it documents is the position NASA's breakthrough-propulsion office had reached by May 2004, and which studies it cited for it.

Connections within this dossier

Brown's 1928 British patent, which Millis takes as the starting point, precedes the 1960 American one described in US 2,949,550: Thomas Townsend Brown's Electrokinetic Apparatus Patent (Wire-and-Plate Thrusters, Discs and a Torpedo Body), where the thrust is explained as a reaction against the surrounding medium. Tajmar's 2004 paper is one of the three studies the survey cites; its sealed-box test and its review of Talley's vacuum work are described in The Biefeld-Brown Effect as a Misread Corona Wind: Martin Tajmar's Sealed-Box Pendulum Test and Its 10 µN Limit.

Five years later a second Glenn memorandum treated the ion wind as a conventional thruster: it measured lifter thrust against wind momentum on a balance and concluded that corona-discharge propulsion for aircraft did not seem very practical. See An Investigation of Ionic Wind Propulsion: NASA Glenn's 2009 Balance Tests Showing Lifter Thrust Equals the Ion Wind, and Why It Stays Too Weak for Aircraft (Wilson, Perkins & Thompson).