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Your Vision...

You want to know what my vision is? Dollar signs. Money. I didn't build this ship to usher in a new era for humanity. You think I want to go to the stars? I don't even like to fly. I take trains. I built this ship so that I could retire to some tropical island filled with naked women. That's Zefram Cochrane. That's his vision."

Zefram Cochrane, the fictional inventor of warp drive, speaking to the embarrassed Enterprise crew shortly before his test flight in the motion picture StarTrek: First Contact

What are your visions about space flight? Like the one above? Or something more political? Well, Cochrane's statement is clear after all, as opposed to the official statements from space agencies, industry and governments.

Progress is futile - dealing with politics

We must live with the fact that there is no public consensus about space flight and space exploration, in conctrary, it is subject to a strange kind of group dynamics. Particularly, political correctness absolutely prohibits any discussion about propulsion. Anything that goes beyond chemical rockets is called crackpot stuff. Many particularly smart people from these organizations waste lots of time and energy for "proving" that progress is futile. If they invested only a fraction of that energy into new developments, we would be much better off now. Rocket manufacturers spend millions of dollars each year just to improve specific impulse by a fraction of a percent. Just think about that. However, what do we need this consensus for? We only need it, if we keep on whining about the lack of measurable progress and begging for money from the big organisations, hoping, that we get assigned a small fraction of their space budget. Instead of discussing with these organizations about the future of space travel, we are much better off if we summon our energy to do it ourselves - collect knowledge, scrutinize it and build it into a concept that is so powerful that no one can stop it any more. Apart from this, we should avoid to get trapped in useless discussions with people that can usually be identified to belong to one of these groups:

People who believe that space travel is irrelevant and that mankind has enough serious problems to overcome - pollution, violations of human rights, just to mention two of them. (There may be some validity to this point but I do not make any claim of this kind, see below.)
Hardcore capitalists who consider only commercial satellite transport with conventional rockets to be economically viable and politically desirable.
Politically correct conformists who define the status quo of spaceflight as the final step of technological development and consider any technology that is even slightly more advanced than the current one to be crackpot stuff.
Half-hearted visionaries who show beautiful paintings of huge colonies on <insert any celestial body here> with thousands of inhabitants and lots of infrastructure and, if asked about how they get all this incredibly heavy stuff on location, tell me something about "chemical rockets".
Nuclear age fossils who still dream of pouring liquid hydrogen through totally unsecured, near-meltdown reactor cores, blowing the radioactive dust into the atmosphere, barely making single-stage-to-orbit technically feasible
Cosmologists praying to special relativity like others do to the bible and impose artificial, anthropocentric restrictions on our possibilities ("If god wanted us to fly, he would have given us wings").
String theory avantgardists who want to make us believe, that within a ridiculously few billion years, our technology has advanced far enough to finally harness the power of a whole galaxy, including its black hole, to make travel through hyperspace (whatever that is) feasible and enable us to get at least a single stage trip from Earth to Alpha Centauri.

A pragmatic position on space travel

Space travel does not need a particular justification - no one asks "why do we need olympic games", "why do we need the Eiffel tower", "why do we play chess" - these things simply exist because a lot of people find them fascinating, for various reasons. After all, I do not claim to offer a solution for any of mankind's big problems. I am working on this project with my private time and money, making use of my constitutional right of freedom of speech. I am dealing with space propulsion because it's fun for me. Period.
Propulsion is the core of any effort to go into space. It is the tool around which space exploration can be built. Common sense in engineering tells that tools make processes, it's not the other way round. A better tool means better processes, therefore more possibilities.
It does not make sense to get entangled in wasteful discussions about transportation costs, technical feasibility etc. unless we have a working prototype.
Current technology that is based on chemical rockets makes only commercial satellite transport economically viable - anything beyond that is either unaffordable or a half-hearted political effort that fails to deliver measurable progress.
Current physics offers a mixture of schoolbook knowledge, bleeding-edge publications and grass roots or crackpot efforts that - if properly distilled, may lead within a few decades to the possibility of building a propulsion system that would make at least travel inside our solar system a routine job like inter-continental air travel is today and interstellar return missions a distant but possible option.
Warp drive is not to be delayed until interstellar travel is on the agenda - it is already necessary right now: to fill the most important gap in space flight - the one between your launch pad and low earth orbit!

Why yet another site about advanced propulsion?

This is not at all the first web site about advanced space propulsion. The Links section has many of them and it is not my goal to make them obsolete. I have great respect toward the work of their creators. I have the following primary objectives with this site:

Offer explanations for various propulsion technologies without requiring in-depth background knowledge. I do not need to convince experts who have worked on that field - I want to convince people who are new to that subject.
I don't think that the single theory that is shown on each of these sites is ever sufficient to build a working prototype - we need to combine several theories to achieve success. The whole is worth more than the sum of its parts.
Some of these theories may simply turn out to be wrong - this is not because their creators are incompetent but because that's the way science works. Having several theories at hand minimizes the risk of failure.