Here’s my Christmas present to my readers: there’s an phenomena which has not yet been fully explained, called the Biefeld-Brown effect, that apparently produces a gravity field directly from electricity.

The effect was discovered early in the twentieth century, but abandoned due to technical limitations and all but forgotten, which is why I’d never heard of it before.

The lifting effect had been theorized to come from something called “corona discharge,” which would require an atmosphere and make it useless for space propulsion. But a few years ago, experiments at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center (Huntsville, Alabama) strongly suggested that although that may be the greater part of it, the effect was also actually warping gravitational fields.

That’s thrust, space enthusiasts — thrust that requires no reaction mass whatsoever.

And that’s huge news. Why? A space vehicle can only carry a limited amount of reaction mass. If it can’t refuel (as most of today’s satellites cannot, for instance), it will eventually run out. For a satellite, that means that what goes up, must eventually come down — with a crash.

So far as I know, the only other method of propulsion we’ve got that requires no reaction mass is the ion drive, which produces only a very tiny thrust. It can be useful if your craft is in no hurry to get where it’s going, but for manned space travel, it’s far too weak to be viable. I don’t think most satellites can make use of it, they’re too heavy for its thrust to make an appreciable difference to their orbits.

But this apparently produces a stronger thrust than an ion drive can, which may make it a viable contender for future space vehicles. In fact, the idea of using gravitational warping for thrust has also been used in science fiction since at least 1972 — the fictional “KK drive” in Alan Dean Foster’s Humanx Commonwealth universe is described as producing a huge gravity well in front of the ship, which drags the ship along with it as if it were falling toward a planet that is constantly moving away from it. Which always struck me as kind of like lifting yourself up by your shoelaces, but in theory it should work.

And yes, the effect can also apparently be used to produce antigravity. 🙂 Though only for very light things, at least so far.

For science geeks like me, this is a good time to be alive.

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny…’
— Isaac Asimov