Charles Chase
Charles Chase is an aerospace engineer, inventor, and advanced-technology researcher whose career spans more than three decades of work on emerging aerospace systems, energy, electromagnetics, advanced materials, and breakthrough propulsion concepts. He spent more than 25 years at Lockheed Martin’s legendary Skunk Works, eventually becoming a Senior Technical Fellow and founding the organization’s Revolutionary Technology Programs group.
Today, Chase is co-founder, Director, and Chief Technology Officer of UnLAB, a nonprofit research organization dedicated to turning breakthrough science into technologies that benefit people, the planet, and the broader human understanding of nature. His current research includes advanced propulsion, the Casimir effect, zero-point energy and vacuum fluctuations, coherent matter waves, semiconductor propulsion devices, and other unconventional approaches to energy and transportation.
A recurring theme throughout Chase’s career has been the transition from speculative ideas to experiments and working hardware. His approach to frontier science emphasizes identifying potentially transformative physical effects, designing experiments capable of testing them, and building interdisciplinary teams to determine whether those effects can ultimately become useful technologies.
Lockheed Martin Skunk Works
Chase spent more than 32 years at Lockheed Martin, including more than 25 years at Skunk Works, where he worked across a remarkably broad range of aerospace and emerging-technology programs.
Early in his career, his work included electromagnetics, low-observable technologies, computational electromagnetic modeling, signature management, aerospace vehicle design, plasma systems, and engineered materials. He later founded and led Revolutionary Technology Programs, which served as a technological front end for Skunk Works and explored concepts that fell well outside conventional product-development timelines.
The group investigated technologies ranging from advanced materials and electromagnetic systems to power generation, propulsion, particle and wavefront systems, adaptive structures, aerodynamics, and fundamental physics.
Chase ultimately became a Lockheed Martin Senior Technical Fellow, a distinction that the company reserved for a small fraction of its technical workforce. In that role, he helped develop long-range technology strategies, mentored engineers and scientists, and led multidisciplinary teams pursuing high-risk technologies with the potential to create entirely new capabilities.
One of his best-known Skunk Works projects was Lockheed Martin’s Compact Fusion program. Chase helped conceive, organize, and build the program, assembling the team and internal support needed to investigate a compact approach to fusion energy. The project became one of the most publicly visible examples of Skunk Works applying its rapid-development philosophy outside traditional aircraft design.
Revolutionary Technology and the Skunk Works Philosophy
Chase’s career is unusual not simply because of the technologies he worked on, but because much of his professional life was devoted specifically to ideas with a high probability of failure.
At Skunk Works, that was part of the job.
Chase has described breakthrough research as fundamentally different from incremental engineering. If nearly every project succeeds, researchers probably aren’t taking enough technical risk. The purpose of an advanced research organization is to explore possibilities that conventional development organizations often can’t justify pursuing.
That philosophy continues to shape Chase’s work today. Rather than beginning with the requirement that an idea already fit comfortably inside an established technological roadmap, his approach is to ask whether there is credible physics behind it, whether a decisive experiment can be devised, and whether success would matter enough to justify taking the risk.
It’s an approach that makes him particularly relevant to the alternative propulsion community, where separating a genuine anomaly from an experimental artifact is often as important as developing the theory itself.
UnLAB
Following his retirement from Lockheed Martin in 2018, Chase co-founded UnLAB as an independent environment for exploring breakthrough science and technology.
UnLAB is organized around a broad mission: turn fundamental discoveries into disruptive technologies that can benefit people, the planet, and the biome while expanding human understanding. Rather than limiting itself to a single technical field, the organization brings together researchers from universities, government laboratories, industry, and other institutions to investigate difficult interdisciplinary problems.
UnLAB research has received support through organizations and programs including DARPA, the Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation, and the Limitless Space Institute. Chase and UnLAB have also collaborated with researchers associated with institutions including Stanford, Princeton, UCLA, Technion, and national laboratories.
The organization has explored subjects ranging from advanced propulsion and fundamental physics to energy, refrigeration, water production, environmental technology, and advanced materials.
For Chase, these areas aren’t necessarily separate. The underlying objective is to identify physical phenomena that can be converted into useful technology.
Casimir Effect and Zero-Point Energy Research
One of Chase’s most provocative areas of research involves the Casimir effect, zero-point energy, and electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations.
Quantum physics predicts that even apparently empty space contains continuously fluctuating electromagnetic fields. One measurable consequence is the Casimir effect, in which carefully arranged surfaces experience forces associated with changes in the electromagnetic modes permitted by their geometry.
Chase’s work asks a more engineering-oriented question: can those fluctuations be deliberately manipulated?
Instead of treating zero-point energy primarily as a theoretical question, Chase has explored structures designed to introduce asymmetries into fluctuating electromagnetic fields. If one side of a system interacts differently with those fluctuations than another, the resulting imbalance could potentially create a measurable force.
This doesn’t automatically imply a practical propulsion system. Effects at these scales can be extraordinarily small, and experiments must contend with thermal effects, electrostatic forces, electromagnetic coupling, vibration, and numerous other possible sources of false positives.
For Chase, that is precisely why these ideas belong in the laboratory.
Semiconductor Space Drives
One of the most developed concepts emerging from this research is what Chase has described as a semiconductor space drive.
The concept uses resonant tunneling diodes, or RTDs—semiconductor structures in which electrons quantum-mechanically tunnel through extremely thin barriers. Their internal potentials can be deliberately made asymmetric, creating an intriguing platform for studying whether electromagnetic fluctuations interacting with that asymmetry can generate a net force.
Chase and his collaborators have investigated resonant tunneling structures, including triple-barrier devices, coupled to electromagnetic cavities, waveguides, and other structures designed to manipulate the electromagnetic modes surrounding the device.
The proposed experiments are straightforward in principle: fabricate the semiconductor device directly onto a sensitive cantilever or force-measurement system, switch the device between operating and control states, and look for a force correlated with the electrical conditions inside the structure.
If a force exists at the individual-device level, semiconductor manufacturing provides an obvious scaling mechanism. Instead of building one large exotic engine, millions or potentially billions of microscopic structures could be patterned onto wafers and operated together.
The resulting propulsion system would look less like a conventional rocket engine than a semiconductor panel.
The concept remains experimental, and the central question—whether these structures actually produce a reproducible net force attributable to vacuum fluctuations—requires careful laboratory validation. But it illustrates Chase’s characteristic approach: take an unusual physical idea and reduce it to a device that can be fabricated, measured, falsified, and potentially scaled.
Fluctuation Flow Propulsion
This research has continued into UnLAB’s Fluctuation Flow Propulsion program, which investigates whether asymmetric structures can produce directed forces through interactions with electromagnetic fluctuations.
The National Science Foundation awarded UnLAB a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research project for Fluctuation Flow Propulsion, with Chase serving as principal investigator. The program represents an important step in moving the concept from theoretical discussion toward structured experimental research.
The significance isn’t that propellantless propulsion has been demonstrated. It hasn’t. Rather, the work attempts to formulate one of the central questions of unconventional propulsion in a form that mainstream experimental physics can address: can a carefully designed asymmetric physical system produce a force that survives rigorous controls for conventional interactions?
That distinction is critical.
Extraordinary propulsion concepts ultimately become scientifically interesting only when their predictions become measurable.
Coherent Matter Waves
Another long-running thread in Chase’s research involves coherent matter waves.
Lasers produce coherent photons—particles of light whose quantum phases are organized rather than random. Chase has explored whether analogous techniques might be developed for massive particles, creating highly organized beams of matter whose constituent particles maintain controlled phase relationships.
He has received patents related to coherent matter-wave technology and continues to explore methods for controlling the phase behavior of particles and matter-wave systems.
Although distinct from his vacuum-fluctuation research, the work reflects the same larger theme: using increasingly precise control over quantum and electromagnetic phenomena to create capabilities that conventional macroscopic engineering cannot easily reproduce.
Advanced Propulsion and APEC
Chase has been a longtime participant in advanced propulsion research and has contributed to discussions surrounding propellantless propulsion, vacuum physics, quantum effects, and emerging energy technologies.
Through UnLAB’s Advanced Propulsion and Energy meetings, he has brought together researchers working across quantum field theory, vacuum fluctuations, gravity, unconventional propulsion, matter waves, and related areas. Participants have included physicists and researchers representing both established theoretical approaches and more exploratory models.
His involvement with APEC reflects a similar philosophy.
Alternative propulsion is an area where bold ideas are plentiful but reliable experimental evidence is much harder to obtain. Chase’s background gives him an unusual perspective on the problem: decades spent inside one of the aerospace industry’s most famous advanced-development organizations, followed by independent research focused specifically on ideas whose outcomes remain uncertain.
That experience makes him less interested in whether a technology sounds conventional or unconventional than in whether someone can devise an experiment capable of determining if it works.
Inventor and Technology Builder
Across his career, Chase has been named on patents covering technologies including plasma systems, aerodynamic flow control, electromagnetic sensing, coherent matter waves, energy harvesting, and physiological sensing.
His work has ranged from technologies that reached operational aerospace applications to highly experimental concepts whose ultimate feasibility remains unknown.
That breadth is central to his professional identity. Chase describes himself as an inventor and solver, with a particular interest in bringing together specialists who might not ordinarily work on the same problem. Physics, electrical engineering, materials science, aerospace design, manufacturing, and even art and design can all become parts of the same technology-development process.
The objective is not simply to generate unusual ideas.
It is to discover which unusual ideas can be made real.
Links & Resources
Charles Chase — National Science Foundation
UnLAB LLC — National Science Foundation
Systems and Methods for Generating Coherent Matterwave Beams
The UnLAB’s Coherent Matter Wave Beam & Vacuum-Fluctuation Propulsion
Advanced Propulsion & Zero-Point Energy at the UnLAB