Dr. Eric Haseltine

So you can move something through the air where there's no engine on it at all.

You're just pushing on it with photons.

Yes.

Whoa.

In fact, this guy that we've talked to did it for the government, and he's been forever trying to say, look, you want clean energy?

You don't need any fuel at all.

You just use a laser beam or a microwave to push it.

Um, I'd have to look it up.

Um, he, uh, and I don't know, he'd want himself.

He's a little private, but you can go online and you can look at a laser propelled disc and you can see a video and it looks exactly like a flying saucer just levitating up.

Well, this gets into another thing, and this is his frustration.

Yeah, yeah.

Is that if this were successful, it would threaten a huge established jet engine.

Sure.

And he wants to use it for civil aviation, right?

And he's done the math.

And now with adaptive optics, at the time he first doing this, you could only do it at short distances.

Yeah.

But we have adaptive optics now where we can control for atmospheric losses and distortion of the beam and stuff like that.

And I think when it comes to getting things into low Earth orbit in particular, this ought to really be looked at.