Author Topic: FEATURE ARTICLE: Evaluating NASA's Futuristic EM Drive  (Read 301338 times)

Offline Jared

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Re: FEATURE ARTICLE: Evaluating NASA's Futuristic EM Drive
« Reply #440 on: 05/11/2015 07:31 pm »
Thank you for your further explanation! :) So I am looking forward to all future developments regarding conjectures, theories and tests.

Offline Star One

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Re: FEATURE ARTICLE: Evaluating NASA's Futuristic EM Drive
« Reply #441 on: 05/11/2015 07:45 pm »
If these drives do work I'd put reasonable money that they turn out to be obtaining all the rules just that they are doing it in a very novel & subtle way. It's probable our current prospective that's wrong.

Offline Mulletron

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Re: FEATURE ARTICLE: Evaluating NASA's Futuristic EM Drive
« Reply #442 on: 05/13/2015 08:13 am »
EM Drive X-Prize Planning thread here at NSF:
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=37563.0

http://www.xprize.org/about/what-is-an-xprize

We've been asked to help develop the challenge design.

What better way to spur development of such a high risk/high reward endeavor? An XPRIZE.

Interested teams who compete have quite a challenge ahead.
1) Prove the reports of anomalous thrust are genuine.
2) Contribute something new to the current state of the art.

Needless to say, those who are successful stand to benefit immensely, simply by leading from the front.

Even if there is ultimately no success, there is still immense value associated with applying lessons learned.

A nice rundown here about the history of spurring innovation:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/31/AR2010123104063.html

Positive coverage of this effort, links back to EM Drive X-Prize Planning thread
http://www.examiner.com/article/a-x-prize-competition-for-nasa-s-impossible-em-drive

« Last Edit: 05/13/2015 08:22 am by Mulletron »
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Offline ThereIWas3

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Re: FEATURE ARTICLE: Evaluating NASA's Futuristic EM Drive
« Reply #443 on: 05/13/2015 11:30 pm »
The judging panel must include a profession stage magician. Some extravagant claims in the past have been debunked this way, because they see things that observing physicists have missed.

Offline Misha Vargas

The judging panel must include a profession stage magician. Some extravagant claims in the past have been debunked this way, because they see things that observing physicists have missed.

No, stage magicians are useful for catching deliberate fraud. The tiny effects are more easily explained by small unanticipated (but conventional) forces.

These guys at NASA are not Uri Geller. They're independently testing a design.

Offline ThereIWas3

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Re: FEATURE ARTICLE: Evaluating NASA's Futuristic EM Drive
« Reply #445 on: 05/14/2015 01:54 am »
If there is xprize money at stake, the possibility of fraud is there.  Not from NASA but from independent "researchers" who may come out of the woodwork.   

Offline Ben the Space Brit

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Re: FEATURE ARTICLE: Evaluating NASA's Futuristic EM Drive
« Reply #446 on: 05/14/2015 08:42 am »
For the second time in two weeks, the Daily Mail is reporting on EM Drive.

This second article is pretty much a summary of the principles of the concept and the objections raised against it in pure layman's terms. The overall tone is neutral (with a gleeful hint of 'who knows what else THEY aren't telling us!').

Still, It's odd that the DM should report on this twice in such quick succession. The first article was, oddly enough, heavily drawn from the threads here on NSF. I'm wondering if the Rothschilds (who ultimately own Associated Newspaper Group) may have invested some cash in EMDrive and are trying to talk it up.
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Offline Mulletron

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Re: FEATURE ARTICLE: Evaluating NASA's Futuristic EM Drive
« Reply #447 on: 05/14/2015 10:33 am »
From tabloid:
Quote
Claimed it could fly for eons at the equivalent of 450 million miles an hour

Quote
Its inventor calculates that an interstellar probe would take ten years to reach two-thirds the speed of light, which he sees as pretty much the limit of how fast we could practically travel.

Dang that's fast.....guess I missed that source. Like their tone though.
« Last Edit: 05/14/2015 10:42 am by Mulletron »
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Offline A_M_Swallow

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Re: FEATURE ARTICLE: Evaluating NASA's Futuristic EM Drive
« Reply #448 on: 05/14/2015 11:17 am »
The Daily Mail article on Mr Shawyer reports

"Its inventor calculates that an interstellar probe would take ten years to reach two-thirds the speed of light, which he sees as pretty much the limit of how fast we could practically travel."

Which is presumably where the "450 million miles an hour" comes from.


Offline Mulletron

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Re: FEATURE ARTICLE: Evaluating NASA's Futuristic EM Drive
« Reply #449 on: 05/14/2015 12:54 pm »
The Daily Mail article on Mr Shawyer reports

"Its inventor calculates that an interstellar probe would take ten years to reach two-thirds the speed of light, which he sees as pretty much the limit of how fast we could practically travel."

Which is presumably where the "450 million miles an hour" comes from.

Quote from tabloid:
Quote
When I tracked down Mr Shawyer to his base in Havant, Hants, he said he was pleased Nasa was ‘having fun’ with his creation and felt some vindication after years of scepticism.

Ah I get the source now, they interviewed him in person. Looks like things are looking up and up for Mr. Shawyer now days.

That stuff always happens:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmelweis_reflex
« Last Edit: 05/14/2015 12:55 pm by Mulletron »
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Offline Star One

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Re: FEATURE ARTICLE: Evaluating NASA's Futuristic EM Drive
« Reply #450 on: 05/14/2015 03:27 pm »
I don't know if many of you encountered this kind of debate on other websites in response to this article. It basically ran along the lines of this concept was discovered sometime back and if there was anything in it we would have known by now. The response to that argument either seemed to be well that's it then case closed or it does work & is in use in the classified world already & that's why we don't know.
« Last Edit: 05/14/2015 03:30 pm by Star One »

Offline Hanelyp

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Re: FEATURE ARTICLE: Evaluating NASA's Futuristic EM Drive
« Reply #451 on: 05/14/2015 07:53 pm »
Given the known physics this violates the question naturally rises "why didn't we notice anything related to this before?"

Offline JasonAW3

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Re: FEATURE ARTICLE: Evaluating NASA's Futuristic EM Drive
« Reply #452 on: 05/14/2015 08:20 pm »
Given the known physics this violates the question naturally rises "why didn't we notice anything related to this before?"

Likely, the effect was so small that no one noticed it before.  In this case, someone was looking for just such a result.
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Offline JasonAW3

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Re: FEATURE ARTICLE: Evaluating NASA's Futuristic EM Drive
« Reply #453 on: 05/14/2015 08:24 pm »
If one were to use an alblative shield of some sort ahead of the probe and a huge solar sail during decelleration, the probe could arrive after achieving nearly 3/4 C, and decellerate enough to make a more leasurely pass through the starsystem.  (Mind you, this also assumes a turn over along the course, in conjunction with the use of the solar sail).
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Offline tchernik

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Re: FEATURE ARTICLE: Evaluating NASA's Futuristic EM Drive
« Reply #454 on: 05/14/2015 08:28 pm »
Given the known physics this violates the question naturally rises "why didn't we notice anything related to this before?"

Likely, the effect was so small that no one noticed it before.  In this case, someone was looking for just such a result.

If you add there likely are material (the internal dielectric) and physical parameter dependencies (e.g. the resonant frequencies dependent on shape) for seeing any thrust, it's not that surprising nobody has seen it before.
« Last Edit: 05/14/2015 08:30 pm by tchernik »

Offline txdrive

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Re: FEATURE ARTICLE: Evaluating NASA's Futuristic EM Drive
« Reply #455 on: 05/14/2015 11:25 pm »
Given the known physics this violates the question naturally rises "why didn't we notice anything related to this before?"

Likely, the effect was so small that no one noticed it before.  In this case, someone was looking for just such a result.
Except that the effect isn't small. The force may be small, but the difference to the standing wave pattern necessary to push the cavity with such net force is really huge, the coupling between microwaves and this neo-aether is huge, etc.

Short of having some God of Space Travel who looks for a specific arrangement of metal, you can't have an isolated instance of little thrust from microwaves without causing a major contradiction with highly sensitive, accurate, and very well repeated experiments.

edit: furthermore, NASA's thrust per watt is much closer to zero than to Shawyer's or Chinese, while Shawyer's scatter plot is linear and would predict much higher thrust per watt. So, NASA's results are much more of a (not particularly high quality) falsification than confirmation. The highly accurate and well repeated experiments supporting established physics are within parts per million from one another. edit2: meanwhile these results are not even consistently within parts per ten from one another within a single lab.

There's thousands of experiments (and billions of practical devices) which confirm that microwaves behave in a particular way, all consistent with one another to a very high degree of accuracy - most do not measure forces, but they do measure microwaves directly, and thus any momentum carried by microwaves and any interactions involving microwaves. And there's a handful of results that disagree, which are so inconsistent that each new casts more doubt than support towards the others.
« Last Edit: 05/14/2015 11:50 pm by txdrive »

Offline Stormbringer

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Re: FEATURE ARTICLE: Evaluating NASA's Futuristic EM Drive
« Reply #456 on: 05/15/2015 03:37 am »
If one were to use an alblative shield of some sort ahead of the probe and a huge solar sail during decelleration, the probe could arrive after achieving nearly 3/4 C, and decellerate enough to make a more leasurely pass through the starsystem.  (Mind you, this also assumes a turn over along the course, in conjunction with the use of the solar sail).

Assuming that the orbital mechanics work out you should be able to slow all the way in from the stellar pause (what the heck is a helio-pause around another star?) to near the star hook a "u turn" go back out ward hook another "U turn" and deploy the sail again. Rinse and repeat until enough velocity is lost enough to enter orbit. What i am talking about it a magneto-plasma sail powered by a modest sized tank of gas and whatever is powering the primary propulsion system.
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Offline StrongGR

For the second time in two weeks, the Daily Mail is reporting on EM Drive.

This second article is pretty much a summary of the principles of the concept and the objections raised against it in pure layman's terms. The overall tone is neutral (with a gleeful hint of 'who knows what else THEY aren't telling us!').

Still, It's odd that the DM should report on this twice in such quick succession. The first article was, oddly enough, heavily drawn from the threads here on NSF. I'm wondering if the Rothschilds (who ultimately own Associated Newspaper Group) may have invested some cash in EMDrive and are trying to talk it up.

Not such a good article. Emphasis is on warp drive while EM Drive, if ever will work, had nothing to do with that. Eventually ion drive or solar sails are to compare.

Offline kdhilliard

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Re: FEATURE ARTICLE: Evaluating NASA's Futuristic EM Drive
« Reply #458 on: 05/15/2015 08:06 pm »
The Daily Mail article on Mr Shawyer reports

"Its inventor calculates that an interstellar probe would take ten years to reach two-thirds the speed of light, which he sees as pretty much the limit of how fast we could practically travel."

How does he reconcile that with his "because the EmDrive obeys the law of conservation of energy, this thrust/power ratio rapidly decreases if the EmDrive is used to accelerate the vehicle along the thrust vector"? (#18 in http://emdrive.com/faq.html)

~Kirk

Offline A_M_Swallow

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Re: FEATURE ARTICLE: Evaluating NASA's Futuristic EM Drive
« Reply #459 on: 05/16/2015 01:31 am »
The Daily Mail article on Mr Shawyer reports

"Its inventor calculates that an interstellar probe would take ten years to reach two-thirds the speed of light, which he sees as pretty much the limit of how fast we could practically travel."

How does he reconcile that with his "because the EmDrive obeys the law of conservation of energy, this thrust/power ratio rapidly decreases if the EmDrive is used to accelerate the vehicle along the thrust vector"? (#18 in http://emdrive.com/faq.html)

~Kirk

With no trouble at all. That is why the EM Drive stops at two-thirds of the speed of light.

Similar rules apply to cars, only with lower top speeds.

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