Society changing potential.Follow

http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/04/evaluating-nasas-futuristic-em-drive/

It appears NASA has validated this new space based engine concept and it's looking pretty damn promising.

No massive fuel means your only restriction on acceleration is energy production. We have various long term energy production options already.

They're mentioning 130 year trips to our nearest neighbor solar system based on current propulsion measurements, including slowing down to a stop in system at the other end. Near 10% light speed at the mid point. This is 1000s of years shorter than estimates using current chemical rockets.

4 hour trips to the moon.

~65% reduction in satellite launch weights.

Indefinite mission lengths and redirection capabilities for robotic missions as fuel is no longer required.

There's potential warp drive effects instigated by the same technology that they are looking at. Nothing proven, just slightly supported hypothesis that are good enough to check out if I'm understanding correctly (not a physicist) but exciting none the less.

We still don't really understand how it's working apparently, but it does, and it's glorious. Hopefully it all works out and they can make a practical engine out of it.

5. Borg

I'm already picking movies to force the first crew to watch once their ship "accidentally" gets stranded in orbit.

Yes, in fact the "Monkey fightin' snakes on this Monday to Friday plane" censored version.

I misremembered the line a bit. Fixed and youtubed.

Edited, May 1st 2015 2:57pm by lolgaxe

A few things, the drive is not fully proven, and scalability has also not been proven.

You'd still need fuel, energy is still required to generate motion, there is just no chemical propellant. hypothetically an electromagnetic wave drive is possible.

Quasi-reactionless drives are already possible, too, Solar sails are a thing.

Yeah, that's bowshock. It would probably generates a drag equivalent force too.

Yeah. But that's a huge portion of the mass involved with existing propulsion systems. It's always been assumed that you have to generate energy to propel some kind of mass out the back end of something to make it move in the other direction. A heck of a lot of the complexity of longer distance motors involve finding the right mass that can be broken up (or generated) in discrete quantities and propelled backwards to create forward thrust. Even plasma based systems are based on this assumption (and add several extra steps to the process of generating thrust). If you can just direct an EM beam out the back? Total game changer.

We can generate power with relatively small/efficient mass sources (nuclear alone is pretty easy). The problem has always been the issue of reaction mass.

I agree with the question of scale though. It's possible they'll find that the effect ceases to add additional thrust past some very small range. Which would suck, but we learn by failure, right? It's an interesting discovery all by itself and may lead to all sorts of interesting things. Even beyond the idea of sending space craft to other planets, the existing scale could have applications in a number of industrial areas. Anything where energy and motion are transferred is a current efficiency loss point due to mechanical structures involved (friction of all kinds). Being able to generate force directly from EM, even at a small scale, could be *huge*.

That's the theory.

He's never failed, hence his lack of education. Why he intuitively figured out long division when he was 9! I mean, sure, he had been taught it for a year, but that played no role, clearly.

I like to think that I was born knowing everything, and only needed to remember it along the way. In class, it's always like "Oh yeah, now I remember how that formula for mass/energy conversion works. Thanks teacher!".

Truth be told I was more referring to our social inability to learn from mistakes, over thousands and thousands of years, but this direction isn't wrong either.