Propulsion research goes into hyperdrive

A new exact solution of Albert Einstein's 90-year-old gravitational field equation was offered at STAIF by physicist Frank Felber, vice president and co-founder of Starmark Inc., based in San Diego.

And after you follow a blitzkrieg of his equations, Felber predicted that space travel near the speed of light is attainable — and not too far off in the future.

"I believe this new solution represents a major advance for space propulsion, in that it addresses the major engineering challenges of providing enormous energy to a payload quickly with negligible stresses," Felber later told Space.com.

Felber's solution of Einstein's gravitational field equation is the first to calculate the changing gravitational field of a mass moving near the speed of light.

His analysis found that a mass moving faster than 57.7 percent of the speed of light will gravitationally repel other masses lying within a narrow "antigravity beam" in front of it. The closer a mass gets to the speed of light, the stronger this antigravity beam becomes. Thus, the forward antigravity field of a suitably heavy and fast mass might be used to propel a payload from rest to relativistic speeds, Felber explained.