---
title: "Field propulsion"
chunk: 2/9
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"
---

In 1921, Tsiolkovsky published Extension of Man into Outer Space, further exploring photon-based propulsion concepts. Перелеты на другие планеты (Flights to Other Planets) by Friedrich Zander was published in 1924 in Техника и жизнь, a Russian science journal, describing concepts to achieve interplanetary flight by use of light-propelled "screens made of extremely thin sheets". Zander was reportedly inspired in this work by his colleague Tsiolkovsky's own research on the topic.
Between 1928 and 1932, Nikolai Rynin published Mezhplanetnye Soobshcheniya (Interplanetary Flight and Communication), a nine-volume Russian-language encyclopedia that the National Air and Space Museum described as the first encyclopedia on the history and theory of aerospace technology and spaceflight. Its coverage included radiation-pressure propulsion and beamed-energy concepts, and the work of Lebedev, Tsiolkovsky, Goddard, Hermann Oberth, and Robert Esnault-Pelterie. Rynin's first volume, Dreams, legends, and early fantasies (1928), organized spacecraft energy sources into three categories: energy transmitted from Earth to the vehicle, energy carried onboard, and energy derived from outer space; the last including "radiation pressure to bear on special large screens around the vehicle," an explicit description of photon-pressure propulsion. Rynin observed that the work surveyed in his encyclopedia "clearly shows that different people in different countries independently came to the same conclusion" regarding the feasibility of interplanetary travel.
While encyclopedic surveys were documenting the theoretical landscape, parallel experimental work was emerging in Europe. In 1928, J. Navascués of León, Spain described a field coupled dynamo-electric machine concept "producing translatory motion of machine by current reaction with earth's field", in which "Propulsion is caused by cutting with a closed conducting turn the earth's magnetic flux". After the 1930s, related field propulsion research concepts reached a lull in public published activity for over a decade through and after World War II, appearing mainly in science fiction rather than in sustained technical development.
The first clear postwar reappearance of these propulsion concepts in open scientific literature was in the 1958 Franklin Institute astronautics lecture series. H.W. Ritchey, vice-president of Thiokol and head of its rocket program, highlighted 'Field Propulsion' concepts, describing 'the use of fields' as a way to avoid an exhaust jet. In the same monograph, Israel Levitt, director of the Institute's Fels Planetarium, described solar propulsion methods including Krafft Arnold Ehricke's solar thermal concepts, Richard Garwin's radiation pressure sail proposals, and photon rocket research by Kurl Stanukovitch of Russia. U.S. Air Force general Donald L. Putt, who led Operation Paperclip after World War II, predicted that upcoming spacecraft would deploy "photo or ion field-type propulsion".

=== 1960s-1970s ===

As spaceflight programs expanded throughout the 1960s, contractor studies for the U.S. Air Force and NASA increasingly organized advanced propulsion concepts under three main headings, Thermal, Field, and Photon, so that unconventional ideas could be compared within a common analytical framework. A 1972 report from the Air Force Rocket Propulsion Laboratory, followed by Jet Propulsion Laboratory studies in 1975 and 1982, carried this framework forward in published roadmaps. These studies emphasized "infinite specific impulse" systems that would obtain energy or working fluid from the ambient environment, and suggested that advances in lasers and superconductors could revive earlier discarded concepts such as laser propulsion or ramjets. Later reviews characterized propulsion research in this period as driven by unrestricted creativity and "free-thinking".
Terrestrial field propulsion concepts also attracted attention during this period. United Press International reported in 1964 on a proposal from the Westinghouse Air Brake Company to link Youngstown, Ohio with Pittsburgh via a "super conductor magnetic field propulsion" transit system. The Chicago Tribune later reported on early NASA advocacy of what was then called "field resonance propulsion," noting that related magnetohydrodynamics research had begun in 1971 as an extension of training astronauts on solar physics.
Photon-pressure propulsion concepts also advanced through dedicated study programs. NASA funded the Battelle Memorial Institute in 1973 under Jerome L. Wright to study solar sailing concepts for a Halley's Comet intercept. In 1976, a formal solar sail rendezvous proposal managed by Louis Friedman at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory was submitted to NASA, but the sail concept was dropped in 1977 in favor of solar electric propulsion, and the comet mission itself was later canceled.