As writer and physicist John Cramer has pointed out>, there is a perhaps more likely advanced propulsion technology, one that might allow us to tap into the universal source of inertia and use it to travel to the stars -- James F. Woodward's Mach's Principle propulsion theory>. He has written up his theories in a series of at least 9 papers in Foundations of Physics Letters and other places; he has done thorough, rigorous experimental work; he has documented the design of his experiments in great detail; and he has a working prototype in his lab. Podkletnov cannot match any of these claims.
Woodward's device relies on Mach's Principle. This principle is one of the leading explanations for the origin of inertia. Inertia, as you may recall from physics class, is the tendency of a massive object to resist acceleration. For example, if you push on a heavily loaded airport luggage cart, it requires a lot of force to get it to move quickly. And, once it is moving quickly (in other words, has a large velocity), it requires an equally large counter force to slow it down again.
Mach's Principle attempts to explain this resistance by virtue of the combined gravitational attraction on the object from all other objects in the universe. Each of us, and everything around us, is being pulled in all directions by the combined gravity of all the matter that is. Everywhere. Farther than the best telescope can see. Even though the strength of the pull from a single galaxy 2 billion light years from Earth is small, when you combine the pulls of all visible matter, the sum of the strengths, or what physicists call the gravitational potential, is huge indeed -- up to the square of the speed of light in magnitude! Woodward shows in his papers how this reduces, conveniently, to producing the famous equation F = M A (force equals mass times acceleration).
His effect arises from a mathematical term in Einstein's theory of General Relativity which is routinely dropped when physicists are using it to model slow moving objects like the Earth and sun. This dropped term predicts that an object with a rapidly changing energy density will have a corresponding rapidly changing mass. That's right, we're talking about mass, not weight. Weight is a property of an object which depends on the local gravitational force; on the moon you weigh 1/6 what you weigh on the Earth, but your mass would be the same.
This change is very small in normal situations, and occurs as an increase and decease around the rest mass of the object, so no one notices such things. But, Woodward has found that this can be used as a propellantless propulsion mechanism in a simple way. Simply vibrate such an object up and down in time with the mass oscillations, so that it is always being accelerated upwards when it is light and downwards when it is heavy. A small time-averaged force will be generated.
What is so great about propellantless propulsion? This: It's easy in the vicinity of a star like our sun to generate lots of electricity for very long periods of time using solar panels. Away from a star, you can generate large amounts of electricity through nuclear means (like NASA's Galileo spacecraft> uses while it studies Jupiter); it has been nearly 10 years since Galileo was launched. If we could find a way to drive a spacecraft simply with electricity, without expending a limited resource like fuel, then the spacecraft would be able to accelerate to tremendous velocities. It is impossible to use conventional chemical rockets to reach equally large velocities, because of a law of diminishing returns. The more fuel you carry, the more your mass is. So, more fuel must be burned to accelerate a to a given velocity. And, eventually it runs out!.
Check out the Woodward link> for more details.
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