Attempted Verification
In his 1997 interview with Charles Platt, Podkletnov insisted that his gravity-shielding work was reproduced by researchers at universities in Toronto and Sheffield, but none have come forward to acknowledge this. The Sheffield work is known to have only been intended as partial replication, aimed at observing any unusual effects which might be present, since the team involved lacked the necessary facilities to construct a large enough disk and the ability to duplicate the means by which the original disk was rotated. Podkletnov counters that the researchers in question have kept quiet "lest they be criticized by the mainstream scientific community". Podkletnov, in fact, visited the Sheffield team in 2000 and advised them on the conditions necessary to achieve his effect—conditions that they never got close to matching.
A group at NASA in Huntsville did not finish their attempts to verify Podkletnov's original gravity shielding experiment. Two attempts were made to repeat the superconductor rotation experiment, one in-house and one through an SBIR. In both cases, large superconductor disks were fabricated. However, in both cases, the funding did not allow for the development of the rotation system needed for the completion of the test. No attempt has been made by NASA to repeat the second impulse experiment.
In a BBC news item, it was alleged that researchers at Boeing were funding a project called GRASP (Gravity Research for Advanced Space Propulsion) which would attempt to construct a gravity shielding device, but a subsequent Popular Mechanics news item stated that Boeing had denied funding GRASP with company money, although Boeing acknowledged that it could not comment on "black projects". A possible solution of this contradiction has been suggested: it is alleged that the GRASP proposal was presented to Boeing, but that Boeing chose not to fund it.
Read more about this topic: Eugene Podkletnov
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