Did anyone see that article in one of the tech magazines, describing how a scientist was working on- and apparently close to a breakthrough- an actual antigravity device?
I honestly can’t recall the magazine, and the article was not detailed, but the point was, it didn’t so much “create” an “antigravity” field, instead it was supposed to “block” the Earth’s gravity.
Like a mask making a shadow in a spotlight, anything in that “gravity shadow” was not affected by gravity- well, I assume Earth’s gravity anyway. In other words, as the article put it, anything placed in the “shadow”, an area that got bigger and bigger as one goes higher, and no matter the weight, would simply hang there, as it does in space.
Now, the article said they’re years away from the breakthrough, but they were confident it could be done. I don’t know about power requirements, but I got the impression it was not something that required a whole Three Mile Island to power it, and in any case, once powered, the mass it could render weightless was nearly infinite- It wasn’t having to “lift” anything, it was merely blocking that which gave it weight.
I thought the article was very interesting, but it didn’t give many details.
However, if it works, that would still render a huge benefit to spacetravel. Heck, render an entire Shuttle launchpad area shadowed from gravity, and you could use a big spring and two roman candles to launch the whole shuttle into space, at which point you could THEN light the boosters to inject the entire craft into a trans-lunar or trans-martian orbit.
I mean, wasn’t something like three-quarters of the Apollo Saturn 5’s fuel used simply to get everything out of Earth’s gravity well? As another poster mentioned a little while back, if one could have the whole S5, complete, in orbit, it has enough fuel to make for a VERY fast trans-lunar trip.