NASA - confused as ever about A/G

Jerry Wayne Decker ( jwdatwork@yahoo.com )
Thu, 18 Feb 1999 18:36:40 -0800 (PST)

Hi Folks!

The following was forwarded by Patrick Padrak, president of the INE
(Institute for New Energy) and host of the excellent INE website at;

http://www.padrak.com/~ine

In my opinion and I DO HOPE I'M WRONG, this is a complete waste of
money because the effect isn't true antigravity, just shielding of the
earths magnetic field. Time will show the truth or fallacy of it.

Let's see, myself and 2 of our people working for a couple of years
without interference would blow this out of the water with the real
thing,...but at this point, we (who have touting it for 30+ years and
seeking the necessary correlations for the experiments) are considered
flakes or 'half-baked' as they still piddle around wth
minutiae....well, for now, I'm just another armchair theorist...a
wannabee...<g>...time, a bit' o'cash and some other bubbas, that's all
I ask..
===================================
NASA PLEDGES $600,000 FOR ANTIGRAVITY RESEARCH

[This text is adapted from a story by Charles Seife which was released
for general distribution by the New Scientist magazine
(newscidc@idt.net) on February 3, 1999.]

Courtesy of CNINews

NASA has just awarded $600,000 to a project that the space agency
hopes will duplicate the controversial experiments of a Russian
scientist who claims to have invented a device that blocks the force
of gravity.

NASA's interest in antigravity is both obvious and practical --
anything that eases the burden of getting big rockets out of Earth's
gravity well and intospace is a good thing.

If a device could even partly shield a rocket from the Earth's
gravity, the spacecraft would need less thrust to achieve orbit.

Most scientists think this is impossible, but E. E. Podkletnov, a
materials scientist at the Moscow Chemical Scientific Research Centre,
is not one ofthem.

Several years ago, Podkletnov claimed that he had
performed experiments in which a spinning, superconducting disc lost
as much as 2 per cent of its weight.

In practical terms, that doesn't sound like much, but to a scientist,
it's an astounding claim. And that's when NASA officials got
interested.

NASA is now paying an Ohio-based company, Superconductive Components,
to builda 12-inch (31-centimetre) super-conducting disc to continue
a series ofexperiments on gravity shielding.

The first experiment didn't work, but it wasn't exactly as specified
by Podkletnov, because the first disc was too small.

"For a small disc four to five inches in diameter, we didn't see any
gravitational signal much above the noise of tens of nanogees," says
Ronald Koczor, a physicist at NASA's Marshall Spaceflight Center in
Huntsville,Alabama
..
However, Koczor and David Noever, also at Marshall, believe that the
experiments are worth pursuing.

"We're trying to get a 12-inch disc. We succeeded in
pressing one last November, and we're trying to set it up to put
radio-frequency signals into the disc," Koczor says.

The RF signals used by Podkletnov, ranging from 100 to 1000 megahertz,
were evidently an important feature of his experiment.

According to Ho Paik, a gravitational physicist at the
University of Maryland,they are probably wasting their time.
"Gravity's produced by mass -- it's not produced by quantum
mechanics," he says.

"I can't see why you'd do an experiment based upon physics that's
completely wrong."But the team seems undaunted. Eventually, Koczor and
Noever hope to
replicate elements of Podkletnov's experiment more faithfully.

"There will be an exhaustion point, but in my opinion anyone who
proves it's not worth doing had better have done it in the same way
[Podkletnov] did," says Noever.

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