He posited that a gyroscope set at various angles could provide a lifting force, defying gravity. In the 1990s, several people sent suggestions to the Space Exploration Outreach Program (SEOP) at NASA recommending that NASA study a gyroscopic inertial drive, especially the developments attributed to the American inventor Robert Cook and the Canadian inventor Roy Thornson. In the 1990s and 2000s, enthusiasts attempted the building and testing of GIT machines. Eric Laithwaite, the "Father of Maglev", received a US patent for his own propulsion system, which was claimed to create a linear thrust through gyroscopic and inertial forces. However, after years of theoretical analysis and laboratory testing of actual devices, no rotating (or any other) mechanical device has ever been found to produce unidirectional reactionless thrust in free space. David M. Burns, Ph.D., manager of the Office of Science and Technology, a NASA engineer at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, theorized a potential spacecraft propulsion drive that could possibly exploit the known mass-altering effects that occur at near the speed of light. He wrote a paper published in 2019 by NASA in which he describes it as "A new concept for in-space propulsion is proposed in which propellant is not ejected from the engine, but instead is captured to create a nearly infinite specific impulse". Several kinds of thrust generating methods are in use or have been proposed that are propellantless, as they do not work like rockets and reaction mass is not carried nor expelled from the device. However they are not reactionless, as they constitute open systems interacting with electromagnetic waves or various kinds of fields. Most famous propellantless methods are the gravity assist maneuver or gravitational slingshot of a spacecraft accelerating at the expense of the momentum of the planet it orbits, through the gravitational field, or beam-powered propulsion using the radiation pressure of electromagnetic waves from a distant source like a laser. More speculative methods have also been proposed, like the Woodward effect , the quantum vacuum plasma thruster or various hypotheses associated with resonant cavity thrusters. Because there is no well-defined "center of mass" in curved spacetime, general relativity allows a stationary object to, in a sense, "change its position" in a counter-intuitive manner, without violating conservation of momentum.