Electromagnetic Propulsion Drive?

Electromagnetic Propulsion Drive? October 7, 2015

A device has been invented that generates much more propulsion than a rocket.  The electromagnetic propulsion drive (EM Drive) works by bouncing microwaves around, and it could conceivably get us to Mars in only 70 days, as opposed to 260 days with current technology.  But it violates the known laws of physics, and scientists cannot figure out why it works.  Nevertheless, experimental tests keep confirming that it does.   However, skeptics remain.

Does any of you know anything about this?  Is this a delusion, like cold fusion?  Or might it be an invention that will open up interplanetary travel?

From Independent expert confirms that the “impossible” EM Drive actually works – ScienceAlert:

Over the past year, there’s been a whole lot of excitement about the electromagnetic propulsion drive, or EM Drive – a scientifically impossible engine that’s defied pretty much everyone’s expectations by continuing to stand up to experimental scrutiny.

The drive is so exciting because it produces huge amounts of propulsion that could theoretically blast us to Mars in just 70 days, without the need for heavy and expensive rocket fuel. Instead, it’s apparently propelled forward by microwaves bouncing back and forth inside an enclosed chamber, and this is what makes the drive so powerful, and at the same time so controversial.

As efficient as this type of propulsion may sound, it defies one of the fundamental concepts of physics – the conservation of momentum, which states that for something to be propelled forward, some kind of propellant needs to be pushed out in the opposite direction.

For that reason, the drive was widely laughed at and ignored when it was invented by English researcher Roger Shawyer in the early 2000s. But a few years later, a team of Chinese scientists decided to build their own version, and to everyone’s surprise, it actually worked. Then an American inventor did the same, and convinced NASA’s Eagleworks Laboratories, headed up by Harold ‘Sonny’ White, to test it.

The real excitement began when those Eagleworks researchers admitted back in March that, despite more than a year of trying to poke holes in the EM Drive, it just kept on working – even inside a vacuum. This debunked some of their most common theories about what might be causing the anomaly.

Now Martin Tajmar, a professor and chair for Space Systems at Dresden University of Technology in Germany, has played around with his own EM Drive, and has once again shown that it produces thrust – albeit for reasons he can’t explain.

Tajmar presented his results at the 2015 American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics’ Propulsion and Energy Forum and Exposition in Florida on 27 July, and you can read his paper here. He has a long history of experimentally testing (and debunking) breakthrough propulsion systems, so his results are a pretty big deal for those looking for outside verification of the EM Drive.

To top it off, his system produced a similar amount of thrust as was originally predicted by Shawyer, which is several thousand times greater than a standard photon rocket.

[Keep reading. . .]

The article goes on to cite skeptics and critics of the latest experiment.

(I know, Star Trek fans, that this wouldn’t really be “warp drive,” which warps space allowing interstellar travel.  This would be more like “impulse.”  But still. . ..)

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