---
title: "Field propulsion"
chunk: 4/9
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_propulsion"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:55:18.670066+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

The British National Space Centre and Society of British Aerospace Companies began organizing an annual field propulsion research conference in 2001, inaugurated in Brighton at the Institute of Development Studies, with initial delegates including Harry Kroto. British Aerospace was confirmed in 2001 to have initiated a research program called "Project Greenglow" to research "the possibility of the control of gravitational fields." As demonstrated systems accumulated flight heritage, research programs continued exploring more speculative coupling mechanisms.
Subsequent work largely extended this research, examining whether identifiable environmental interactions could meet the same conservation law and measurement criteria. Later NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) studies continued in the same mold, examining whether Alfvén wave plasma interactions might provide quasi-propellantless thrust. Yoshinari Minami of the Advanced Space Propulsion Investigation Committee argued in 2003 that a potential propulsion "breakthrough" could rely on field propulsion, defined as employing "a physical means to asymmetrically interact with the space vacuum." By 2009, a recognized category of 'breakthrough propulsion concepts' had emerged in the interstellar transport literature, encompassing warp drive, traversable wormholes, and vacuum-energy ideas, though the same literature noted strong skepticism about claims that appeared to conflict with conventional demonstrated physics. Millis summarized the matter as: "For field propulsion, the fields themselves must act as the reaction mass."
While further research and study continued, new environment-coupled propellantless systems were launched into space. IKAROS (Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation Of the Sun), launched by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) on May 21, 2010, was the first spacecraft to use a solar sail as its main propulsion system. LightSail 1 and LightSail 2 flew between 2015 and 2019, with functional sail-type propellantless systems active in outer space. NASA's Advanced Composite Solar Sail System (ACS3), launched on April 23, 2024, tested next-generation composite-boom solar-sail technology in orbit, and mission operators confirmed full sail deployment on August 29, 2024. Related electrostatic sail concepts also moved into in-space technology-demonstration phases in the 2020s, with AuroraSat-1 launching in 2022 as a plasma-brake technology demonstrator and Foresail-1p launching in 2025 with a plasma brake experiment intended to enable the first-ever space measurements of Coulomb drag for orbital change.

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