"NASA has trialled an engine that would take us to Mars in 10 weeks
And may have inadvertently created a warp drive in the process.
NASA scientists have reported that they've successfully tested an engine
called the electromagnetic propulsion drive, or the EM Drive, in a vacuum
that replicates space. The EM Drive experimental system could take
humans to Mars in just 70 days without the need for rocket fuel, and it's
no exaggeration to say that this could change everything.
But before we get too excited (who are we kidding, we're already freaking
out), it's important to note that these results haven't been replicated or
verified by peer review, so there's a chance there's been some kind of
error. But so far, despite a thorough attempt to poke holes in the results,
the engine seems to hold up.
The engine is controversial because it seems to violate one of the
fundamental concepts of physics - the conservation of momentum, which
states that for something to be propelled forward, it needs some kind of
propellant to be pushed out in the opposite direction. But the EM Drive
doesn't require any propellant in order to create thrust, it simply relies on
electromagnetic waves.
However, British scientist Roger Shawyer, who invented the EM Drive in
the early 2000s, disagrees that his design violates the conservation of
motion. "To put it simply, electricity converts into microwaves within the
cavity that push against the inside of the device, causing the thruster to
accelerate in the opposite direction," writes Mary-Ann Russon over at The
International Business Times, who interviewedShawyer after the story on
NASASpaceflight went viral.
Engineers over at NASA's Eaglework Laboratories have been trying to
work out whether or not the results are real for months, and they've now
ruled out their main hypothesis for why there would be an error by
showing that the engine works in a vacuum. "Despite considerable effort
within the NASASpaceflight.com forum to dismiss the reported thrust as
an artefact, the EM Drive results have yet to be falsified," write José Rodal,
Jeremiah Mullikin and Noel Munson for NASASpaceflight, one of the
leading space flight news sites.
So what does all this mean? If the results can be replicated and verified in
a vacuum (something that Eaglework engineers plan to do in the coming
months), it would change the way we travel in space, and open up access
not only to planets in our own Solar System, but in the systems beyond.
For starters, our payloads would become a whole lot lighter without the
need for rocket fuel. It would also speed things up incredibly.
Harold (Sonny) White, the leader of the research group at Eaglework,
predicts that a crewed mission to Mars inside a 2 MegaWatt nuclear
electric propulsion spacecraft, powered by an EM Drive with a
thrust/power input of 0.4 Newton/kW, could get to Mars in a mind-
boggling 70 days.
Even more impressively, the NASA researchers predict that a trip to Alpha
Centauri, the closest star system to our Solar System, would take just 92
years.
But Shawyer has some applications closer to home in mind - primarily, he
hopes that the engine could be used to send cheap solar-harvesting
satellites into space, with the ability to beam the power back to Earth.
"We will go to Mars, but the most important thing is what EM Drive will do
for the rest of the world. It will be solar power stations, city-to-city long-
haul flights using hydrogen. It's green and convenient and will change our
world in the next few decades," he told Russon.
So where does warp drive come into all of this? The NASA engineers also
reported on the forums that they'd fired lasers into the EM Drive's
resonance chamber and that some of the laser beams had travelled faster
than the speed of light, at around 300,000 kilometres per second...
suggesting that the EM Drive may have produced a warp bubble like the
kind that allows travel faster than the speed of light in Star Trek.
In reality, a spacecraft travelling at warp speed doesn't actually move
faster than the speed of light, but it creates a bubble that warps
spacetime around it so it has less distance to travel. NASA has already
created designs of what this kind of ship might look like (spoiler:
awesome). The presence of this kind of warp bubble is something that the
engineers at Eaglework are going to investigate with an interferometer.
Of course, all of this requires a lot of gaps to be filled before we can even
verify that results like these are possible. But it seems that we're now in a
position where the engine warrants further investigation.
"After consistent reports of thrust measurements from EM Drive
experiments in the US, UK, and China - at thrust levels several thousand
times in excess of a photon rocket, and now under hard vacuum
conditions - the question of where the thrust is coming from deserves
serious inquiry," the NASASpaceflight authors conclude.
We couldn't agree more."
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