NASA confirms ‘impossible’ thruster actually works, could revolutionize space travel By Drew Prindle — August 1, 2014
You just bounce microwaves in a cavity. So far about 50 micro Newtons of constant force. Not a lot. Now put this sucker in a circular orbit and watch it go. A nuclear battery would do nicely for about 10 years of thrust. BTW the microwaves were at about 950 MHz. Not too hard to generate these days.
The drive people have a news page.
Comments
8 responses to “The Impossible Thruster”
So photons carry momentum. Didn’t Einstein get a Nobel Prize for that piece of information?
And scifi is full of photo-thrusters. The problem is how much impulse can you get.
My question too – how much acceleration can this thing produce? Is it a function of power – could you get approach 1G with a hundred of them behind a living module and nuclear reactor?
I’ll believe this when someone puts one in orbit and demonstrates that it can accelerate all by its lonesome.
The Chinese claim .72 Newtons in their experiment. At that level experimental error is less of a question.
Thrust was observed on both test articles, even though one of the test articles was designed with the expectation that it would not produce thrust.
This makes me suspect they’ve really discovered a failure in their test apparatus.
Kudos on them, however, for closing with a desire for independent replication. That’s how serious people do science.
I want to see this work conclusively in a vacuum. In air I wonder if they’ve just discovered the ponderomotive force. (non-linear acceleration in a charged plasma)
MMM: Not sure I get your point. The resonating chamber is under vacuum.
I missed that part. Any ions in an inhomogeneous oscillating EM field will experience a unidirectional force. I was assuming any residual gas would exhibit this in their experiment.
G. Harry Stine was all excited about jerk rectifying inertia, and using it to make a reactionless drive. I think he drastically misunderstood jerk, it’s just the derivative of acceleration, no non-linear accelerations.