Space's Deepest Secrets

This is the story

of an incredible scientific adventure,

of an unlikely collection of scientists and engineers,

dreamers and schemers, who attempted the impossible...

Aaaah!

To control gravity.

Gravity is the fundamental force

that holds us to the earth and binds the universe together,

yet, we still don't fully understand it.

Gravity is the most mysterious

of all the fundamental forces.

The ultimate challenge I can think of,

as a scientist, is to control gravity.

The scientific quest triggered a race

between rival corporations, government, and military.

It can destroy the missiles

or remove them from their trajectory.

Fueled by the paranoid fear of missing

the greatest technological advance in history.

If just one idea works,

if only partly,

you won the jackpot!

If the dream of gravity control ever came true,

it would revolutionize the world

and could send us to the stars.

Aaaaah!

Aaah!

captions paid for by Discovery communications

In the late 1980s,

aerospace engineer Ron Evans was working

in the defense industry in lancashire, england.

He'd been trying to find a way to detect stealth bombers

using fluctuations in gravity

and he wondered if he could take it even further.

Could he use gravity to levitate a plane?

Of course, it was impossible.

But Ron did something a bit reckless.

He asked his employer if they'd let him try.

Ron's employer was the biggest defense

and aerospace contractor in Europe: Bae systems.

And, instead of telling him to have a cup of tea and a nap,

they listened.

I had to go to the head of the technology board...

it's a panel...

and persuade them that it was worth doing.

Now, clearly, it was very speculative.

I had to go away

and come up with some concepts and come up with some ideas

that could actually feature an antigravity

or a gravity-type propulsion system.

Well, this is one of the designs that we came up with.

For start, it wouldn't be limited

to just flying in the air.

It could fly anywhere, into space, even into water.

And, of course, it was a vertical takeoff design

because it had a gravity engine inside.

But it didn't look very exciting

and so we asked the artist

to put some green rays underneath.

That made it look far more futuristic.

Let's be clear

that not everyone in the company thought we should be doing it.

There were quite a few that felt "we make aircraft.

We're good at it and that's what we should be doing."

But there were a few,

and some very senior people, that felt, "okay."

Let's just have a little look at the future"

and the concept became known as Greenglow.

As head of Project Greenglow,

Ron's job was to find and develop

advanced propulsion systems to overcome gravity.

The potential was enormous, if it happened.

It would totally change aerospace.

And Ron was not alone.

At around the same time, in the U.S.,

NASA began a parallel project,

headed by aerospace engineer Marc Millis.

It was around 1996 when I was asked

to lead the breakthrough propulsion physics project.

Things like nonrocket space drives,

interstellar propulsion,

and manipulating gravity, things like that.

For that project, the idea was to think radical, think big.

Today, NASA says it has moved on

and doesn't want to look back.

We can't go in there to talk about it now

because NASA's not doing that work right now.

At bae systems, the same situation:

The company no longer wants to discuss Project Greenglow.

We asked whether we could go there and talk to them about it

and they just said no.

Gravity control is a dark and dangerous science,

but, like modern-day alchemy, it promises a glittering prize.

But it can destroy your reputation.

Years earlier, Ron had watched a gravity experiment

bring down one of britain's best-known scientists...

this time, I call for a volunteer.

Professor of engineering at imperial college London

Eric Laithwaite.

And then, we're gonna SPiN up

the biggest gyro of the day, which is here.

Like millions of others, Ron had been spellbound

by Laithwaite's Christmas lecture

at the royal institution in 1974.

I can make him raise it.

Now...

Laithwaite suggested that, by spinning a heavy wheel,

you could make it counteract gravity.

Ron has returned to the royal institution

to try and recreate the effect.

- Does it feel light? - It does. It feels very light.

With the help of fellow engineer

Dr. Adam Wojciech.

If I slow down, it feels...

what I think was at the back of Laithwaite's mind

was that there was a force

in one direction more than in the other

and so the gyro will start to rise up

and that gives you the illusion as though it's losing weight.

It isn't.

It's just an illusion.

It isn't light.

When a gyroscope is rotated in the same direction

it's spinning, it's given an upward lift.

And if I rotate in the opposite sense.

Ohhh, that does look heavy.

Oh, careful, careful, careful. Wow.

When it's rotated in the opposite direction,

the opposite happens and it seems to get heavier.

Still hoping to make gravity control

a subject of serious research,

Laithwaite acknowledged his mistake.

Yet, his reputation was permanently damaged.

He was snubbed by the academic establishment.

And felt compelled to leave his position

at the royal institution.

Professor Laithwaite got into a lot of trouble

with this, really, because of the claim

that it got lighter, which is antigravity,

and academics jump on any antigravity device

as being impossible!

Well, it's not impossible.

It's just we don't know how to do it.

But we should look.

It's like flight in the last century.

In those days, anybody that said they could fly

was looked upon as a lunatic!

The difference is that, before humans could fly,

we knew birds could.

We could study aerodynamics.

But there was nothing we knew of

that could actually overcome gravity.

The dream of lifting effortlessly from the earth

is not confined to engineers.

Despite being so contentious,

many academics are rather seduced by the idea.

Dr. Tamara Davis is among them.

From a little kid, I always wanted to go

and visit other planets and go up into space

and to be able to have a form of propulsion

that could get me there easily would be fantastic.

But we don't yet know whether we can manipulate gravity

or have any control over it.

There is one, fundamental force

we know we can control,

which we've used to build our modern world:

Electromagnetism.

It gives us a tantalizing illusion of gravity control

when we levitate a magnet.

Ta-da!

Electromagnetic propulsion

balances the weight of the magnet

by using the same magnetic polarity in the base.

We know that like charges repel,

so, here, we just have a magnetic field

that's levitating a magnet.

So this is nothing mysterious.

This is just electromagnetism.

Let's see if I can get this across.

Ah.

The power of control we get from electromagnetism

lies in the fact that we can change its polarity

and make it either repel or attract.

So, in electromagnetism, we have positive charges

and negative charges and they tend to attract each other.

If you have a positive charge and a positive charge,

it will repel from each other, but wouldn't it be great

if we could get gravity to where it can reverse

and be able to levitate things using gravity?

Only problem is there isn't any negative gravity.

There isn't any antigravity that pushes.

Gravity always pulls, as far as we now.

The reason seems to be that, unlike electromagnetism,

gravity has only kind of polarity:

Positive.

One mass is simply attracted to another.

Gravity and electromagnetism are completely different forces.

There's a very special property of gravity.

That is that it adds up.

Inside an atom, there's a positive nucleus