  While still an admittedly remote possibility, the concept of an interstellar
mission has become a legitimate topic for scientific discussion as evidenced by
several recent NASA activities and programs. One approach is to extrapolate
present-day technologies by orders of magnitude; the other is to find new
regimes in physics and to search for possible new laws of physics. Recent work
on the zero-point field (ZPF), or electromagnetic quantum vacuum, is promising
in regard to the latter, especially concerning the possibility that the inertia
of matter may, at least in part, be attributed to interaction between the
quarks and electrons in matter and the ZPF. A NASA-funded study (independent of
the BPP program) of this concept has been underway since 1996 at the Lockheed
Martin Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto and the California State
University at Long Beach. We report on a new development resulting from this
effort: that for the specific case of the electron, a resonance for the
inertia-generating process at the Compton frequency would simultaneously
explain both the inertial mass of the electron and the de Broglie wavelength of
a moving electron as first measured by Davisson and Germer in 1927. This line
of investigation is leading to very suggestive connections between
electrodynamics, inertia, gravitation and the wave nature of matter.
