Despite our efforts, what comes up must come down

With current technology, our ability to travel into space is trapped in a catch-22: to get more things into a spacecraft means adding more fuel, which adds more weight, which means adding more fuel. We could break the cycle if we could shield the thing that holds us down: gravity. Just think-- if you could place a box under your feet that could shield gravity, you could pretty much go anywhere you want with little effort. A gravity shield would not only revolutionive space travel, but transportation in general.

But so far, no one's been able to shield or control gravity in any way. Studies commissioned by the European Space Agency (ESA) to evaluate schemes for gravity control have concluded that, even if such control were possible, the benefits for lifting spacecraft out of the Earth's gravitational field would probably not be worth the effort. Link. In 1996, NASA began research program on "speculative propulsion methods", called Breakthrough Propulsion Physics. The program was all about finding breakthroughs in space transportation, such as rocket fuel systems that don't add mass to the spacecraft and propulsion systems that achieve incredibly high speeds. The program yielded no results, and its funding was cut in 2003. Link.

Before we can shield gravity, we need to rewrite some laws of physics. First we would have to do away with the law of conservation of energy, which says that you can create energy without using energy. For example, say you had a gravity shield, and you placed it underneath one-half of a wheel. Whay would happen? The shielded part of the wheel would rise, causing the wheel to rotate forever without a power source. The law of conservation of energy says no-can-do. The second problem is with Einstein's general theory of relativity. Used by Einstein explain gravity, the theory says that gravity results from the fact that massive objects actually bend the fabric of space itself, and you just can't undo that so easily.