Posted on 09/12/2020 1:33:14 PM PDT by DUMBGRUNT
More than 20 years after its introduction, the EmDrive is still being tested in labs around the world, including DARPA. But the controversial thruster's do-or-die moment is quickly approaching.
“We can also get an unmanned probe to Proxima Centauri in a (long) human lifetime, 90 years.”
The original EmDrive, built by Roger Shawyer in 1998, is a sealed copper tube (pictured above) wider at one end than the other. According to Shawyer, if you bounce microwaves around inside the tube, they exert more force in one direction than the other, creating a net thrust without the need for any propellant.
Critics believe that the experimental results must be wrong while McCulloch believes we just don't understand the physics yet.
This is why most critics don't take the EmDrive seriously, and some mock it with comments about ‘magic space unicorns’ providing thrust, or ‘EmDrive, more like BS Drive.’
(Excerpt) Read more at popularmechanics.com ...
Sumply stick with the tried and true, proven technology. The radiometer! Scale it up, multiple drives... May have to harden the glass to protect from meteor strikes and Chinese missile attacks...
Heck yeah, the radiometer! You could put propellers on your space ships and not have to use rockets. Well, I’m off to the Patent Office...
I think the EM drive is circling around a problem being solved, but I don’t think it is there yet.
As a reminder, we could make flying machines 30+ years before they arrived at the correct reason that heavier than air could fly. It was the same argument.
"Starchips" can get there in 20 years, and don't require questionable physics.
Thanks for the post.
Once upon a time the hydrogen bomb was a surprise
Not trying to start anything.
But Bernoulli predates the Wright brothers by about two hundred years? Kind of settled science.
So you are suggesting that the Wright bros were unfamiliar with Bernoulli’s principle?
Maybe they clammed up for fear of Bernoulli’s descendants and a lawsuit?
It’s easy to prove these day. Build it into a cubesat and get SpaceX to launch it for you.
90 years to Alpha Centauri?
“Starchips” can get there in 20 years,
But I’m happy on the third rock in from the sun?
Its a microwave rocket. Set it on “Baked Potato” for Mars orbit.
Its a microwave rocket.
Set it on “Baked Potato” for Mars orbit.
But that might slow it down?
No free energy, never!
Maybe you could warm your lunch over the power supply for the magnetron.
And cold C-rats never killed anyone.
Not counting the pork and little MFers.
Gravity still IS. We can describe the effects and predicted forces and have mathematical theories that get the right answers but we still don’t really understand the essential mechanisms without using mystic terms such as “curved spacetime” and other hermetic angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin pseudo understanding.
Sign me up for stocks on the Epstein Drive.
/The Expanse reference
Bernoulli's principle is only a very small part of what it takes to build a working flying machine.
It killed itself !
Starchips weigh about 5 grams, that’s roughtly the weight of that nickel in your pocket.
That’s much more of a diet than I’m willing to do!
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