[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 130 (Friday, September 25, 1998)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1812-E1813]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        IN HONOR OF MARC MILLIS

                                 ______
                                 

                        HON. DENNIS J. KUCINICH

                                of ohio

                    in the house of representatives

                       Friday, September 25, 1998

  Mr. KUCINICH. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor the breakthrough 
work of Marc Millis, the head engineer for Breakthrough Propulsion 
Physics Program at NASA's Lewis Research Center.
  Since 1990, his tireless work has centered around the idea of how to 
build space vehicles that bypass the rules of physics and carry humans 
far into the universe faster than the speed of light. He gathers and 
explores a variety of ideas from his fellow colleagues and physicists 
throughout the nation. Although most of the ideas that come from this 
program are considered, as he puts it, ``too far away from fruition for 
sponsorship,'' Mr. Millis has strong convictions to continue his 
research on how we can best explore the vast outer space. To recognize 
his important work, on August 31, 1998, Newsweek published the 
following article, ``Department of Warp Drives and Wormholes.'' The 
text is as follows:

                     [From Newsweek, Aug. 31, 1998]

                 Department of Warp Drive and Wormholes

       The geeks are getting impatient. Here we are practically in 
     the 21st century, and human beings have never been to another 
     planet. We've never accelerated to unimaginable speeds, 
     warped space-time or manipulated gravity. And that's not good 
     enough for Marc Millis, an aerospace engineer at NASA's Lewis 
     Research Center. When he was a kid he watched ``Star Trek'' 
     (all baby engineers do) and Jacqeau Cousteau on TV and wanted 
     to be an explorer. ``I assumed by the time I was old enough 
     to get into the field, the rocket technology used by Apollo 
     would be old hat,'' Millis says.
       Would that it were so. NASA is still heaving metal into 
     space with rockets. But there are signs of change--or at 
     least willingness to change. Millis runs a small, meagerly

[[Page E1813]]

     funded program called Breakthrough Propulsion Physics. The 
     idea is to figure out how to build spaceships that bypass the 
     rules of physics and carry human beings far into the universe 
     faster than the speed of light. Inside the rocket-scientist 
     fraternity of NASA, these guys stand out: they're serious 
     researchers who actually use sci-fi terms like ``warp drive'' 
     and ``gravity shield.'' Millis rides herd over the group, 
     organizing workshops and extracting the big ideas while 
     filtering out the nutty ones.
       For Millis the job began in 1990. At a workshop he made a 
     presentation titled ``Unsolved Problems: Propelling 
     Spacecraft Without Rockets.'' Quietly, a few likeminded souls 
     introduced themselves, even though ``these kinds of topics 
     were . . . the polite way to say it is `too far away from 
     fruition for sponsorship','' says Millis. In other words, 
     crazy. Then in 1995 NASA started the Advanced Space 
     Transportation Program at Marshall Space Flight Center, 
     seeking to improve space exploration with traditional 
     technology. ``Someone asked, `What about things like 
     manipulating gravity? Is this light-speed thing still a 
     showstopper?' Stuff like that,'' says Millis. ``And one of 
     the Marshall people tracked me down.''
       It turned out there were plenty of ideas out there. At 
     Caltech, a physicist named Kip Thorne was investigating what 
     it would take to construct a person-size wormhole, a shortcut 
     that tunnels through space-time, the quantum-mechanical 
     fabric of the universe. A University of Wales physicist named 
     Miguel Alcubierre proposed that a ship could exceed the speed 
     of light by compressing space-time in front and expanding it 
     behind--your basic science-fictional warp drive. Quantum 
     physicists were trying to figure out how photons, particles 
     of light, seem to accelerate past light speed when they 
     tunnel through an obstacle. Only one idea is actually being 
     tested: researchers at Marshall's Space Sciences Lab are 
     trying to replicate experiments said to show reduced gravity 
     above a spinning superconductive disc. But designing an 
     experiment that eliminates external influences has proved 
     difficult. ``It's fascinating,'' says David Noever, the 
     researcher leading the project, ``but you have to be very 
     careful.''
       Needless to say, the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics 
     program is controversial. ``NASA is a place that builds 
     things, not a place to try and take ideas which are decades, 
     if not hundreds of years, from fruition and try to build 
     working prototypes,'' says Lawrence Krauss, a physicist at 
     Case Western Reserve and author of ``The Physics of `Star 
     Trek'.'' Thorne, the wormhole expert, is starting to think 
     that fundamental physics forbids traversable, human-size 
     wormholes. And then there's the money issue. ``So far 
     Millis's activity has not spent much government money,'' says 
     Gerald Smith, a physicist at Penn State. ``Advanced 
     propulsion is a very tough area, and NASA's not putting much 
     money into it. Those of us who are doing work in it don't see 
     it wasted.''
       Millis knows he's not likely to be making the jump to 
     hyperspace any time soon. But the program continues to gain 
     speed--in February the Marshall center ran a weeklong 
     workshop on breakthrough propulsion. Next year Millis hopes 
     to award a few small grants to researchers in the field. 
     ``There's a few people that these subjects will make 
     nervous,'' he says, ``but there seems to be a greater number 
     who find it exciting.'' They're the ones without the patience 
     to wait to reach the stars.

     

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