The search for "breakthrough propulsion" may be officially at an end. First, NASA disbanded the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics program, then it eliminated its vestiges, the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, and now it appears the Space Technologies and Applications International Forum could be dead. According to Tim Ventura, who runs American Antigravity, two of the sections pulled out of STAIF, leading the entire conference to collapse. The next meeting would have been in 2009.

I attended part of STAIF in 2005, spending most of my time there at the "F Section," which covers "new frontiers and future concepts." I listened to people in the session discuss zero point energy, warp drive, antigravity, and other "frontier" concepts, which I wrote about later in a blog post titled "Among the Fringe."

But STAIF is/was much more than future concepts. It was actually a federation of six sypmposia that ranged from mainstream to the far, far, far edges of science. In 2008, for example, these six areas included:

If STAIF is dead, I think it's a sad thing; not because STAIF was good or bad, but because its death (and it's life, for that matter) is probably a symptom of the sorry and confused state of the U.S. government's commitment to space exploration.

[Image: NASA]

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