I remember seeing this. I didn't see anywhere in the NASA paper that they tried to replicate the German results. Did anyone else see this?
To be fair, the authors did enlist Tajmar's paper in the state-of-the-art but they do not discuss despite it being the most relevant prior art.
For anyone who knows a little bit Tajmar, if there was a tiny hint of a possibility that this effect could be real, he would definitely have pursued it; after all, his self-admitted goal is nothing else but to discover the warp-drive... That being said, he is no crackpot and the thoroughness of his article confirms it.
Incidentally, in a similar HN story a couple of days ago I shared my suspicion about spurious contributions from thermal drift, and unsurprisingly I see this was also the number 1 suspect for Tajmar. Beside using thermal barrier to mitigate the problem, he also went from electro-magnetic damping to oil damping and found completely different results. Meanwhile, the Eagleworks guys are still using an EM damper, working right next to a strong EM field source.
That being said, I can understand the over-reaction, it is indeed frustrating to see relatively weak articles making front page because they originate from NASA when earlier, more thorough research did not get any attention because their authors were more careful with their claims.
Mind you, I am not saying the Eagleworks paper should not have been published; any data point is good as long as the experiment is sufficiently described for it to be reproduced or disproved, and in that respect I think it is OK. But very good it is not.