ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

NICK COOK 99
He paused and rubbed the bristle hairs at the back of his head. I
waited.
"It would be extremely frustrating to think that we're duplicating what
was done maybe decades before. We like to think we're on the cutting
edge, at the forefront of knowledge. It would be very discouraging to
think that everything had been determined before and we were just sort
of ... here for show. I hope that's not the case. But you never know.
Maybe in some aspects it is."
It was then that my PR escort interjected.
"You know," she said, "I really don't think this is anything that we can
comment on in any depth."
I knew that the topic of conversation had taken an unwelcome turn.
Now, I had intruded far enough.
"I'm simply trying to get a feel for the kind of capabilities that are out
there—on both sides of the fence," I replied.
"Then maybe you should go talk to the Air Force," she said crisply. In
any case, I was talking to the wrong people at NASA, she added. Huntsville
was where the big picture behind the interstellar vision came together.
But, she said, the "breakthrough physics" that would one day lead
to the engineering of a "device" was being managed by the NASA Glenn
Research Center at Lewis Field in Cleveland. It was from there, not here,
that NASA was actively in the process of handing out contracts that
aimed to prove or disprove whether there was any substance to the theory.
If I wanted to know whether the physics was doable, get up there, she
told me. Talk to a guy called Millis. Marc Millis.
Before I left, I had one last question for Schmidt. I asked him if he
genuinely believed that a wormhole might one day give man the ability to
cross the universe.
"Yeah," he said, smiling but serious at the same time. "If you can build
a wormhole, certainly. Who knows? But you've gotta be careful to make
sure you've got the right end point. Who knows where you'll end up if
you just generate it? You could end up anywhere in the universe. So
that's something to be very careful about."
Six hundred miles to the northeast in Cleveland, Ohio, but a world away
culturally, Marc Millis had indeed just received a half-million-dollar
contract to test whether there was any theory out there, anything at all,
that might one day enable a propulsion device to be built with the energy
to take man out of the Solar System and into interstellar space.
Millis ran the NASA Breakthrough Propulsion Physics program,
referred to in the trade as BPP.