In a possible game changing discovery that could potentially change the laws of physics, NASA has conducted a long awaited experiment to prove that the fabled space drive works. If this find turns out to be truth and not just an error in the results, space ship construction will be revolutionized.
For years British Scientist Roger Shawyer has been trying to get people to notice his EmDrive ( A new concept in space propulsion) through his company SPR Ltd. Shawyer claims that his invention converts electric power into thrust without the need for any propellant by bouncing microwaves around a closed container. He had built several prototypes but critics rejected his relativity based theory insisting that based on the law of conservation that it couldn’t work.
In short, if the results were to hold up, there would be significantly less energy consumption costs associated with space travel. Deep space missions and distant world exploration would need only a fraction of the cost for 100 times more speed. But, since the inception from Shawyer the revolutionary drive had appeared to be impossible because it breaks the laws of the conservation of momentum. In other words, acceleration in any rocket engine is achieved by a large amount of fuel bursting out of the thrusters and pushing the vessal forward.
Shawyer’s company, SPR Ltd., writes that it has “demonstrated a remarkable new space propulsion technology. [It] has successfully tested both an experimental thruster and a demonstrator engine which use patented microwave technology to convert electrical energy directly into thrust. No propellant is used in the conversion process. Thrust is produced by the amplification of the radiation pressure of an electromagnetic wave propagated through a resonant waveguide assembly.”
As is common in good scientific practice, an independent third party needed to replicate Shawyer’s results in order for it to be considered. This was done by a Chinese team last year where they built their own EmDrive and confirmed that they produced enough thrust for a practical satellite thruster. This type of thruster could be powered by solar electricity, completing eliminating the need for propellant that takes up almost half the launch mass of many satellites. However it seems that despite this being shown by the Chinese team they have attracted little attention.
However a US Scientist, Guido Fetta has built his own microwave based thruster managed to persuade NASA to test it out. This was done on July 30th at the 50th Joint Propulsion Conference in Ohio and astonishingly the tests were positive.
With its paper, entitled ‘Anomalous Thrust Production from an RF [radio frequency] Test Device Measured on a Low-Thrust Torsion Pendulum’, the scientists describe the work carried out over six days, as they set up the equipment, and the two days spent achieving results. These tests included creating a ‘null drive’, which is a replica of the real drive but built in a new way that would make it unstable, like a control, and another device was then built to simulate the load on the engine.
Although the new results produced much less micronewtons than the Chinese tests, NASA were finally able to get the confirmation that they required. At the moment there is nothing in the paper or anywhere with information on how the drive works, instead offering just the results and the procedures used to achieve them.
At this stage we now have several tests all confirming that thrust can be generated out of thin air, which in turn can lead to a very different future for humanity. The costs of the satellites, space ships and stations can be reduced to a mere fraction of what was thought. This should open the world to exciting deep space missions at a much faster pace and enable us to survive a virtual lifetime in space.
