AAWSAP DIRD, Cockpits in the Era of Breakthrough Flight, November 2010

This Defense Intelligence Reference Document, dated 1 November 2010 and numbered DIA-08-1011-002, was prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency's Defense Warning Office. It is one of a series of advanced technology reports produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications program. It draws mainly on the book Frontiers of Propulsion Science and speculates about breakthroughs such as control of gravity and inertia and faster-than-light travel. It then proposes a provisional cockpit design with six-degree-of-freedom controls, virtual displays and no windows.

From the source: Release of 2026-09-18 Incident: 11/1/10, Las Vegas, Nevada. Released with redactions. This document is a Defense Intelligence Reference Document (DIRD), a technical reference format used by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to capture baseline knowledge on a specific topic for later analytic use. DIRDs are best understood as reference and synthesis products rather than as original research. It is one of 38 DIRDs produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) between 2009 and 2011. Because AAWSAP’s scope permitted a broad range of supporting topics, not every DIRD in the series directly concerns aerospace systems or future threat assessment. The following summary reflects the DIRD’s scope and framing at the time of writing and should not be read as implying current validation of the concepts discussed. This DIRD examines how cockpit design might change if future aerospace vehicles were ever to achieve major propulsion breakthroughs such as control over gravity and inertia, “propellantless” flight, or faster-than-light travel. The report does not describe an existing or emerging vehicle class. Instead, it asks what such hypothetical capabilities would mean for piloting, displays, controls, and human factors, and it argues that the biggest design challenges would come from full six-degree-of-freedom motion, operation across multiple flight regimes from near-surface flight to orbit and deep space, and the possible separation between the craft’s actual motion and the crew’s internal physical sensations. It combines those assumptions with established human-machine-interface principles and with maturing inputs such as gesture, voice, and brain-machine control to outline a provisional cockpit centered on intuitive displays, stress-tolerant physical controls, and a virtual surround display.

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Figure 4. Warp Drive. Taken directly from the Frontiers book, this image has become the iconic representation
for a warp drive : the "York Extrinsic Time Plot."
In theory, the outer shell is presumed to create the propulsive effect of warping space
time outside the craft without affecting the inside. In short, the Alcubierre warp drive
creates a separation of space-time environments inside and outside of the craft,
although the exact details remain uncertain.
Although there is no explicit function for the inner hull in this situation, this Alcubierre
warp drive at least illustrates the concept of separation of these outer and inner
environments. When planning future cockpits, the outer and inner inertial frames need
to be treated as two distinct zones. The physics related to such considerations is still
evolving 4 and beyond the scope of this report.
Why Double Hull Needed: Example 2 {Field Space Drive)
Another class of conceptual propulsion is a "field drive"-a subset of "space drives"
where a spacecraft is propelled " ... using only the interactions between the spacecraft
and its surrounding space ... "5 Instead of using the Riemannian geometry of Einstein's
general relativity, these approaches use the physics of fields and scalar potentials. 6
While several variants exist, the "Bias Drive" concept is selected here to illustrate the
relevance of the double-hull configuration, specifically in the context of modifying the
scalar potential that defines an inertial frame. By altering the properties of the
surrounding inertial scalar, a gradient in that scalar is induced which, in turn, induces
gravitational-like forces on matter located in that gradient.
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