From the one and only . . . Kent Ballard: I love stories like this one. Just simply love em. Years ago, a guy named Robert Shawyer built a new kind of rocket engine. One that did not use fuel. Instead, his little engine took electricity and turned that into microwaves which he bounced around inside a bell-like thing and when they came out they gave off a tiny bit of thrust. He tried to interest investors. He called it the EmDrive. I have no idea why. But he said with a little work, you could take the electricity made from solar panels and scoot a spaceship around with just that, no kind of fuel needed. They all laughed at him. Obviously Mr. Shawyer had no idea of the well-established Laws of Thermodynamics, the conservation of energy, common sense, or how to pull off a good scam. He had reinvented the perpetual motion machine, or the square wheel. Some said it was like trying to push a car down the road by hitting the transmit key on a CB radio. Sure, radio waves came out, but they dont provide any thrust. And neither do microwaves. They had a good chuckle and ignored him. Shawyer tried--and failed--to get aerospace companies to even *look* at his EnDrive engine. The few who responded did so mockingly and then told him to get lost and quit wasting their time. But he kept trying, swearing the thing produced a small amount of thrust--which could possibly be scaled up into a LARGE amount of thrust. I read about this guys claims years ago. It was pretty preposterous and I never paid any more attention to him than anyone else. I dont know if he patented the thing or not, of if he was even ABLE to patent it because he openly said he wasnt entirely sure how it worked himself. It might be interesting to go back and follow the story on this. Because in 2009, the Chinese built one of his engines and tested it. It gave off a thrust of 720 millinewton, which is actually enough for a small satellite thruster to change its attitude in space. Eureka!, right? Wrong. Everybody then ignored both Shawyer *and* the Chinese. They just figured the Chinese made a mistake or were trying to fool western scientists in wasting time on this silly thing. That was up until two days ago. Lockheed has its famed secret Skunk Works. They developed the U-2 and the SR-71 Blackbird and probably half the flying saucers people see today. Boeing has a counterpart, its Phantom Works (They obviously stole the name-thing from their competitor.) Several other aerospace companies have secret departments too. No big surprise there. NASA once had what they called their Advanced Propulsion Laboratory. There was nothing secret about it at all. Sometimes reporters would just walk into their offices and ask if anything new was in the works? It only consisted of a few people and a small handful of offices, but they tinkered on things like solar sails and rockets that heated their propellant using nuclear energy. There wasnt any Star Trek stuff going on there as much as they would have loved to pursue it, because no one knew where to start. Federal budget cuts finally forced NASA to close the project altogether. So they did. At least thats what they told everybody... But somewhere, somehow, in the multi-billion-annual-dollar American black budget someone was smart enough to toss a little money under the table to NASA. They did in fact shut down their Advanced Propulsion Laboratory--and started up a secret research facility of their own. God only knows what its really called, but NASA now refers to it at their Eagle Works, a tip o the hat NASAs glory days of the past, and what it could become again in the future. They work on really, really weird and secret stuff. And one of they things they tackled was Shawyers EmDrive. And damned if it didnt work. They used a variation of the Chinese version of the EmDrive engine, and got a much *smaller* thrust. But the day before yesterday they released a paper vindicating Roger Shawyer and his revolutionary new engine after all these years. It works, all right. But they cant explain HOW it works. They still havent a clue. It *still* flies in the face of conventional physics. It shouldnt work, has no right to work, but it does anyway. The NASA paper gave some mumbo-jumbo about this being a possible quantum vacuum plasma thruster, knowing the word quantum means any damned crazy thing is possible. It saved them from directly stating, We dont know either. But you can bet the European Space Agency and the Russians and a half-dozen others are going to jump all over this thing. The first Wright Brothers Flyer had a twelve horsepower engine. There were scores and scores of much more powerful engines in existence at the time, but none light enough to fly around with. But once they proved their point, the scale-up in horsepower commenced immediately. And there are more ways than one to make electricity in space. The Voyager space probe, still reporting from outside the solar system, has a small nuclear powerplant on board. Several satellites do now. Heres where the math sounds odd at first, but makes sense to the average person when they think about it--any engine that gives off a constant thrust, no matter how small, will eventually reach absolutely incredible speeds. The mighty Saturn Five could lift many tons into orbit quickly, but after about three minutes the fuel was all gone and acceleration stopped. Whatever Saturn threw out there would remain going at that same speed, but that it was it. It could go no faster. But a constant thrust means your ship is always being pushed faster, every hour, every week, every month it is acclerating, going faster every second. It also means that at some point you can flip around and use the same engine to *decelerate*, slowing down and stopping whenever you arrive at your destination. Stick around for a while, and then fire the thing again to come home--or go somewhere else interesting. Instead of months or years of simply coasting through space, we can have *powered* flight to anywhere in the solar system. And maybe, just maybe, beyond it. Because theres another thing working here. Various rocket engines and fuels have a specific impulse, meaning that even in a vacuum they can only go so fast. Its the speed of the rocket exhaust itself. Youre sitting atop a controlled explosion, but that explosion can only move at the speed with which you can expel exploding rocket fuel. This is why they talk about a manned mission to Mars taking a year and a half or more (depending on what you lug along with you). Its because even rockets have limits to their speed. They can only explode their fuel so fast. Its a chemical reaction. But...what is the speed of microwaves? Yup. They travel at the speed of light. Think about it for a moment... Even lightspeed is too slow for the kind of manned interstellar exploration wed like to do, but the EmDrive has the potential to be a game-changer within our own solar system. You can read a little bit more about it here-- sploid.gizmodo/nasa-reveals-new-impossible-engine-can-change-space-t-1614549987 --but not much. I think they would have said and explained more if only they had been able to. So far they cant because nobody knows how this bloody thing does what it does. Thats why the above article refers to it as the impossible engine. The EmDrive just might be the engine weve wanted all this time for unmanned interstellar probes, several of them flying to nearby stars and releasing a half-dozen new Voyager-type probes to have a look at all the new worlds before us. So what if it took 40 years? Or 80? Wed do it and you know we would. Id be proud to work on the first starship, even though I knew I would never live to see it arrive and begin beaming back information. Someone will be here to receive it. And someone has to be here to build it. Kent
Posted on: Sun, 03 Aug 2014 13:05:54 +0000
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