LightCraft

It will be shaped like a flattened disc. It will be almost silent, and it will reach tremendous speeds. It sounds like something out of a science-fiction film, and it is not. It is one of NASA’s own projects, called LightCraft, a vehicle whose propulsion runs on microwaves. Yes, microwaves, the same kind we already use to heat food. Students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, led by Professor Leik Myrabo, found this new way to fly without carrying any fuel at all.

The people behind it say they chose this design simply because it works best with the propulsion system they developed, and they are very keen to stress that any resemblance between the project and UFOs is pure coincidence.

It began as a prototype built years ago, weighing 25 grams, driven by a 10-kilowatt infrared laser at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. The full craft is to have a large parabolic reflector to gather energy from space, be ringed by two superconducting magnetic rings, and carry a set of ion engines with solar cells. Ion engines are the fruit of decades of work on electric propulsion in space, an idea that goes back fifty years, to Wernher von Braun, father of the German V-2 rockets, who began his career on chemical propulsion.

Switch on the microwave transmitter and the craft reaches twenty-five times the speed of sound and vanishes from sight in seconds. The microwaves heat the air on one side of the vehicle, shoving it forward with immense force. NASA’s scientists believe the first prototype could be ready early in the twenty-first century: twenty meters across, able to carry twelve people, powered from the surface of the Earth all the way to the Moon by sunlight captured in orbit and converted to microwaves. With LightCraft, the trip to the Moon would take about five hours. Commercial flights to the Moon may not be so far off.

The crew would have to ride in tubes filled with liquid to withstand the crushing forces of that speed. Another idea, already in development at some US Air Force research centers, is that they might breathe an oxygenated fluid to protect their lungs.

For all of NASA’s insistence that LightCraft has nothing to do with flying saucers, the unveiling stirred up the ufologists, who have argued for years that more than one extraterrestrial disc crashed on Earth and was carried off, wreckage and surviving occupants alike, to secret military bases and studied for a very long time. You could not have served them a better dish.

So here is what I am really asking. Did NASA’s scientists truly dream up this design on their own, or did they just borrow the idea from something that was already here? (See Roswell.)