Before the sleek machine comes the ugly one. Prototype Zero may be held together with tape, zip ties, hardware-store parts, and more optimism than engineering elegance. That's okay. Its job isn't to impress the world. Its job is to prove there's something worth building next. When you become a Founding Member, you'll help builders take those first imperfect steps toward technologies that may someday look inevitable. With your help, we'll give more ideas the opportunity to survive their ugly beginning and become part of our future. What did your ugliest successful prototype look like?

There are inventors capable of building serious experiments who aren't asking for millions of dollars. Sometimes a few hundred dollars buys sensors. A thousand dollars buys materials. A few thousand dollars can put an entire prototype on the bench. When you become a Founding Member of The Lift Society, you'll be joining builders and supporters determined to close the gap between bright ideas mixed with wishful thinking and advanced propulsion technologies pushing us into the future. The future we were promised won't build itself, but with your help, we'll be the ones to build it. We'll do this together. Inventors, what tools are you missing from your workbench to complete your build? Drop your comments below.

Important work doesn't require an impressive building. Independent inventors now have access to CAD, CNC machines, 3D printers, microcontrollers, sensors, and computing power previous generations could only dream about. What many still lack is the funding necessary to put all those capabilities to work. As a Founding Member of The Lift Society, you'll be helping us identify and support serious builders wherever they're working. The next important propulsion breakthrough could begin in somebody's garage. What's being built in your garage, shop, or workspace?

We don't have to know beforehand whether an unconventional propulsion idea will work. That's what the experiment is for. The Lift Society exists to help researchers move beyond speculation by getting promising concepts into the workshop where they can be built, measured, tested, and improved. When you join us as a Founding Member, your support becomes part of an independent funding base dedicated to helping those experiments happen. One successful experiment could eventually open technological possibilities that benefit millions of people. What unconventional idea would you most like to see seriously tested?

A propulsion concept can look brilliant on paper and still tell us very little until somebody builds it. Materials, machining, electronics, instrumentation, and testing all cost money. The Lift Society exists to help promising ideas cross that gap from theory to hardware. When you become a Founding Member of The Lift Society, you're helping build the funding base that gives independent researchers a chance to turn promising ideas into real technology for the benefit of us all. What would you build if funding wasn't the thing holding you back?