Rotating black holes could power spacecraft through frame dragging effect

Roger Penrose's theoretical model describes a mechanism for extracting rotational energy from a spinning black hole by exploiting the frame-dragging effect, which turns spacetime from a passive background into an active participant in physical processes. The work remains a calculation within general relativity and has not been experimentally verified with a black hole. Spacetime as a fluid-like medium The calculation rests on the relativistic view that spacetime possesses physical properties: it can curve, stretch, and twist under the influence of mass and energy. To visualize the process, the model treats spacetime as behaving like a fluid. When a massive object rotates, it literally twists the surrounding geometry, creating a vortex flow that is most intense near the object and diminishes with distance. Biophysicist Alexey Kornilov notes that the fluid analogy helps visualize the complex tensor equations, but spacetime lacks viscosity or temperature, meaning the vortex does not decay on its own as long as the source continues to rotate.