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Comment by Nokinside | Hacker News Reader

NASA seems to be minimally involved.

The group has been working five years in their own time in this small laboratory with shoestring budget. White has a day job in NASA and he and others are working with this project in their free time. To best of my knowledge - and correct me if I'm wrong - NASA only gave them $50,000 and a room in Johnson Space Center 2011. They don't seem to be involved in any other way but "NASA Eagleworks Laboratories" makes it sound like official NASA organization.

Their results are consistently close to the detection threshold of their sensors. They are always flirting with the measurement error.

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I think your view reflects a misunderstanding of how NASA works. The vast majority of the research done at NASA is done by small teams working on shoestring budgets.

Where do you get the idea that they did all of this research on their own time?

The team he claims to lead seems to be nonexistent in NASA organization. Biography: "Advanced Propulsion Team Lead for the NASA Engineering Directorate at JSC"

Considering that wording is from an official NASA biography, it's probably not non-existent:

    He currently serves as the Advanced Propulsion Theme
    Lead for the NASA Engineering Directorate and is the
    JSC representative to the Nuclear Systems Working
    Group. In his role, White is serving to help the
    Agency incorporate high TRL advanced power and
    propulsion technologies into near and mid-term human
    exploration architectures. He also is pursuing
    theoretical and laboratory research on developing
    lower TRL advanced propulsion and power technologies
    in the advanced propulsion physics laboratory known
    as Eagleworks that is located at the Johnson Space
    Center.

https://www.nasa.gov/ames/ocs/2014-summer-series/harold-whit...

That's not official NASA biography. It's the biographical information he himself provided for summer series video presentation.

Most of NASA's work isn't public. My group happens to have one project on NASA's GitHub. Aside from that one project, my group of a dozen full-time researchers would seem to be nonexistent to the public too.

I've linked to it before on HN, but NASA's grand road map document includes a section on testing advanced propulsion ideas, which is what this lab is doing.

NASA's involvement is minimal, in that the resources dedicated to it are minimal. But it would be wrong to take that as some sort of implicit disavowal by NASA.

Rather, it's probably just reflective of a reasonable approach to budget prioritization. "Show something good for a little before I give you a lot" is a common approach to budgeting for speculative R&D.

Edit: here's my earlier comment

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10497100

the paper is reporting milli newtons and claims the measurement device can measure micro newtons - or am I missing something?

No you're absolutely right. This is more a holy crap paper from Nasa, this actually might work.

The paper is actually reporting measurement of millinewtons with 40/60/80 watts, and estimating that when pushed up to a 1kW it would generate micronewtons.

Wait ... a millinewton is 1000 micronewtons, not the other way around. Not taking a position on this issue, just posting a clarification.

I stand corrected. They appear to have measured forces in tens of micronewtons while the error is in single digit micronewtons. Still the confidence interval is an order of magnitude smaller than the measured force which is not bad.

>They don't seem to be involved in any other way but "NASA Eagleworks Laboratories" makes it sound like official NASA organization.

If the NASA name is being used unofficially in such a public manner, wouldn't NASA do something about it?

It really comes down to what the management at NASA JSC wants to do about it. As a non-research oriented center, they don't seem to care very much. At the research centers, I suspect it would be a different story.

Not necessarily if there is no harm from the association.

NASA encourages people to do independent research. If they NASA gave them small grant and facilities in JCS, they show their support even if they don't take them seriously. That's part of scientific openness.

There is harm from the association, if the association is not accurate.

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