No one ever took U.S. President Donald Trump for Star Trek’s Capt. Jean-Luc Picard. Nevertheless, his creation of the U.S. Space Force in December 2019 resembled the latter’s powerful command, “Engage!”
The space race is on but what most people would find surprising is how far along that race is already.
“The power of space will change world power forever,” retired U.S. Air Force Lt.-Gen. Steven Kwast told a Hillsdale College audience in Washington D.C. less than three weeks before Trump’s announcement. “You either have it and your values rule or you don’t have it and you must submit.”
Kwast warned that the Chinese were developing a space force that the U.S. must address. He also suggested the “expensive” and “wasteful” technologies engineered by Einstein and Tesla had been superseded by U.S. defence engineers.
“This technology can be built today with technology that is not developmental to deliver any human being from any place on planet Earth to any other place in less than an hour; to deliver Wi-Fi from space where you never need a cell tower to connect; to deliver energy from space where you never have to plug your phone in and it trickle charges and you can use that energy over time. It can be applied to cars, to houses,” Kwast explained.
The Earth’s circumference is 40,075 km and even supersonic Concorde jets flew just 2,180 km/h. What stunning energy and transportation tech did the U.S. have?
TheDrive.com, an online publication dedicated to all things mechanical, had the answer. Prior to covering Kwast’s speech, the website researched and disclosed patented technologies of the U.S. Navy, accredited to Salvatore Cezar Pais.
In 2019, Pais told the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics SciTech Forum in San Diego that the Navy made a key breakthrough with its high energy electromagnetic field generator. Pais claimed it could be used to redirect the Apophis asteroid headed for Earth in 2029.
According to the patent application approved in 2018, the device could also generate “an impenetrable defensive shield to sea and land as well as space-based military and civilian assets.” (Shields up!) This field apparently creates a quantum vacuum around itself that minimizes its internal mass. When used with propulsion, the usual resistance of air or water vanishes, facilitating ludicrous speeds.
In 2016, Pais and the U.S. Navy applied for a “hybrid aerospace-underwater craft” that could also navigate space through electromagnetic propulsion. That seemed far-fetched to Philip Bonzell at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The patent officer refused the application and wrote that “there is no such thing as a repulsive EM energy field,” and “to polarize a quantum vacuum as claimed it would take 10^9 [T]eslas and 10^18 V/m.” Nuclear power plants can’t even generate that.
In response, the chief technical officer of the Naval Aviation Enterprise, Dr. James Sheehy, wrote Bonzell, urging him to approve the patent. Sheehy said the Chinese were “investing significantly in this area” and the Navy did not want to have to pay them “forevermore to use this revolutionary technology.”
Navy attorney Mark Glut pointed out how Sheehy’s statement confirmed “the invention is operable and enabled.” Finally, the “craft using an inertial mass reduction device” was approved on Dec. 4, 2018.
But where could so much energy come from?
Pais’s patented Piezoelectricity-induced room temperature superconductor would definitely help. However, the Navy curiously abandoned this patent application.
The Navy is still waiting for patent approval of Pais’s plasma compression fusion device. The application says Lockheed Martin Skunk Works and two other contractors have designs but “it is questionable whether they have the ability of achieving the … fusion condition, let alone a self-sustained plasma burn leading to ignition.”
Then again, the Navy may be falsely modest.
Ben Rich, then head of Skunk Works, told Popular Mechanics in October 1994, “There are some new programs, and there are certain things, some of them 20 or 30 years old, that are still breakthroughs and appropriate to keep quiet about [because] other people don’t have them yet.”
Maybe the U.S. Navy had all of this for years but sought patents only recently as China started to catch up.
Pais’s patented gravitational wave generator might just be one of these long-held, top-secret technologies. An “anomalous aerial vehicle” was seen repeatedly by officers on the U.S.S. Nimitz in 2004. Reports only disclosed in recent years describe a 14-metre tic-tac-shaped object flying with “high g, rapid velocity, rapid acceleration” in the air that could also travel “70-plus knots underwater.” Its capabilities and description resemble those of the Navy patent.
Before we embrace the Star Trek dream “to boldly go where no man has gone before,” we should probably ask another question: where have we been already?
Lee Harding is a research associate with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
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