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This is an unclassified Defense Intelligence Reference Document (DIA-08-1003-015), dated 29 March 2010. The Defense Intelligence Agency prepared it under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications (AAWSA) Program, and Rep. Burchett entered it into the House committee record. The paper uses a general relativity metric tensor approach to look at how engineering spacetime might enable propulsion, including warp drives, apparent superluminal travel, reduced effective mass and antigravity. It finds these ideas consistent with physics but far beyond present engineering capability.
UNCLASSIFIED/ ONLV Gravity Field Figure 3. Alcubierre Warp Drive Metric Structure IV. Discussion This paper has considered the possibility—even likelihood—that future developments with regard to advanced aerospace technologies will trend in the direction of manipulating the underlying spacetime structure of the vacuum of space itself by processes that can be called vacuum engineering or metric engineering. Far from being simply a fanciful concept, a significant literature exists in peer-reviewed, Tier 1 physics publications in which the topic is explored in detail.3 The analysis presented herein, a form of general relativity for engineers, takes advantage of the fact that in GR a minimal-assumption, metric tensor approach can be used that is model-independent—that is, it does not depend on knowledge of the specific mechanisms or dynamics that result in spacetime alterations but rather only assumes that a technology exists that can control and manipulate (that is, engineer) the spacetime variables to advantage. Such an approach requires only that the hypothesized spacetime alterations result in effects consonant with the currently known GR physics principles. In the metric engineering approach, the application of the principles gives precise predictions as to what can be expected as spatial and temporal variables are altered from their usual (that is, flat space) structure. Signatures of the predicted contractions and expansions of space, slowdown and speedup of time, alteration of effective mass, speed of light and associated consequences, both as occur in natural phenomena in nature and with regard to spacetimes specifically engineered for advanced aerospace applications, are succinctly summarized in Table 1. Of particular interest with regard to innovative forms of advanced aerospace craft are the features tabulated in the right-hand column of Table 1, features that presumably describe an ideal craft for interstellar travel: an ability to travel at superluminal speeds 'See Reference 1 for a comprehensive introduction to the subject with contributions from lead scientists from around the globe. 11 UNCLASSIFIED/rrl 9"I^I" 'lel
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