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

NICK COOK 103
down. He was abandoned by his friends, ostracized by the university,
which claimed that the project did not have its official sanction (and later
threw him out), and the journal pulled his paper. Leaving his wife and
family in Tampere, Podkletnov returned to Moscow to lick his wounds
until the furor had died down.
And all because the Sunday Telegraph had used a single, taboo word in
its opening sentence: antigravity. The term may have been vital for 1950s
pulp sci-fi, but it had no place in the world of mainstream physics.
What was unfair, was that Podkletnov had been so careful to avoid the
term himself. All along, he had referred to the test as a gravity-shielding
experiment.
It was still heresy; and he had burned for it.
But here was Millis saying that NASA had taken Podkletnov's claims
seriously. Not only that, but NASA had been apprised of the "gravityshielding"
properties of superconductors even before the Sunday
Telegraph story broke.
I wondered why no one had told me about all this while I was in
Huntsville.
In 1993, the Advanced Concepts office at the Marshall Space Flight
Center was handed a copy of a paper written by two physicists, Douglas
Torr and Ning Li, at the University of Alabama at Huntsville. It was
called "Gravitoelectric-electric coupling via superconductivity" and
predicted how superconductors—materials that lose their electrical
resistance at low temperatures—had the potential to alter gravity. Even
if the amounts were fractional, NASA officials quickly saw the benefits.
Applied to something like a rocket, even fractional methods for cutting
launch weights would, over time, lead to a considerable reduction in the
space agency's fuel bills.
In their paper, Torr and Li went out of their way to avoid the term
"antigravity." One whiff of it, they knew, and no one would take their
work seriously.
It worked. NASA promised money for an experiment.
But when the Podkletnov story broke, Millis told me, NASA decided
to take a multi-path approach instead. First it tried to contact Podkletnov
to see if he would share his findings with them. When the Russian
refused, it elected to do the experiments itself, setting up the "DeltaG
group" at Marshall specifically to look for interactions between superconductors
and gravity.
At first, Ning Li, the brilliant Chinese woman scientist who had
predicted a one percent weight change in her original calculations, joined
forces with the DeltaG effort. Then, apparently frustrated by the pace of