NASA Funded Scientists Claim Breakthrough in Propellantless Propulsion
wired.com
wired.com
Look closely at the picture of the test chamber in the article. Do you see Helmholtz coils surrounding the entire apparatus? Nope.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmholtz_coil
It's the same story as the EMdrive: they run something at high current, without cancelling earth's magnetic field.
high current + earth magnetic field = force. This method is used to move satellites:
Not canceling earth's magnetic field (an easy thing to do) when measuring microNewtons at high currents is just very poor experimental practice. Unprofessional. Amateur.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_force#Force_on_a_curre...
"When a wire carrying an electric current is placed in a magnetic field, each of the moving charges, which comprise the current, experiences the Lorentz force, and together they can create a macroscopic force on the wire (sometimes called the Laplace force)."
It's basic. I don't think of the relevant people as idiots.
"Experimental Null Test of a Mach Effect Thruster." https://arxiv.org/pdf/1301.6178.pdf
"The motion of the beam is damped by a pair of aluminum plates attached to the beam that move in the magnetic field of an array of small neodymium-boron magnets. The power circuit was extensively shielded to insure that stray fields did not compromise the results."
> Everything Woodward knew about satellites told him that what he was seeing should be impossible. It would take too much energy for a satellite to change its orbit like that, and most satellites weren’t able to shift more than a couple of degrees. And yet, he had just seen a satellite double back with his own eyes. He didn't conclude that engineers at NASA or in the Soviet Union must have secretly achieved a breakthrough in satellite propulsion. Instead, he believes he saw a spacecraft of extraterrestrial origin.
Seems more likely he spotted a reconnaissance aircraft at very high altitude. I think the U2, A-12, and SR-71 were all operational in 1967.
Even a high-altitude plane such as the U-2 would be fairly difficult to misidentify as a satellite. For obvious reasons, U-2s and SR-71s and such didn't employ lights while operating at altitude; therefore the only way to see them would be via reflected light. It would need to be reasonably long after sunset, or else the sky isn't dark enough to credibly see a satellite -- but not so long after sunset that the plane would be in the earth's shadow. Satellites have a similar window of observability -- but it's much longer, because they're much higher. A high-altitude plane would have a very small window. Moreover, it would need to execute that turn without crossing the terminator: as soon as any reflecting object crosses the terminator, that reveals its altitude.
That he was hallucinating is much more plausible than that it was aliens.
That he was lying or had a false memory is much more plausible than that it was aliens.
Pretty much any mundane explanation is much more plausible than that it was aliens.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Yes.
> Have you seen how satellites move?
Yes.
> They traverse the sky in a perfectly straight and constant-motion fashion that is utterly unlike any bird.
That's exactly like any migrating bird. Like a goose. Well, until they suddenly switch direction and continue at a constant speed and height till they go over the horizon. Have you ever seen birds migrating?
Also, if lights in the sky that look like meteors but suddenly switch direction are aliens, then I've seen them hundreds of times walking home from the pub (no streetlights here). Never yet been offered a lift!
Extraordinary claims, etc.
Except this one didn't.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.00494
> the kinetic energy of a mass with a constant force applied will increase with the square of time, while the electrical energy input only increases linearly with time. A mass with such a drive attached would eventually have a kinetic energy greater than the energy input.
...
> For example, an evacuated track 10km long and supplied with 1 GW of power that is fed via induction along the track to a 100 kg mass equipped with an EM drive would result in the mass experiencing an acceleration of 4000 m/s2(i.e., 407 g’s) and having a velocity of 8.94 km/s at the end of the track, at which point the mass would have a kinetic energy of 4 GJ. The time to accelerate the mass is only 2.23 seconds,however, so the energy input required is only 2.23 GJ. At the end of the track, the mass could be decelerated via regenerative braking, generating more energy out (4 GJ) than was input (2.23 GJ), for a net gain of 1.76 GJ free energy.
In theory, if we could run an unbreakable string from Earth to Mars and twist it around a spindle, the differing orbits of Earth and Mars would pull that string taut and that string yanking the spindle around would generate energy that wasn't "free," but (like solar) would be free for all practical purposes. Do too much of it, and Mars crashes into Earth of course, but there's a LOT of energy that could be siphoned off from the planets' different velocities before something like that happened.
It's the same kind of "free" spacecraft get making a gravity-assist maneuver; they slow (or speed up) the orbit of the body they're assisting off of imperceptibly.
(1) ... of course hypothetically. The details of the mechanism are not well-understood and appear mostly theoretical.
This is the fallacy. In an electric motor the power required to exert a force is proportional to the speed, so if you want to keep the acceleration constant you need to increase the electrical power (i.e. rate of energy use) linearly over time. Hence the total energy input increases with the square of the time, just like the kinetic energy imparted. If the system is 100% efficient then the total electrical energy used will be equal to the kinetic energy of the mass.
In what reference frame? It's not obvious to me how this works in a space drive. How does it "know" how much speed it gets per unit energy?
I guess if it's a sort of Dean drive that swims through the gravitational field of the visible universe, then that's the reference frame. It's still weird!
If we produce a fluctuating mass in an object, we can, at least in principle, use it to produce a stationary force on the object, thereby producing a propulsive force thereon without having to expel propellant from the object. We simply push on the object when it is more massive, and pull back when it is less massive. The reaction forces during the two parts of the cycle will not be the same due to the mass fluctuation, so a time-averaged net force will be produced. This may seem to be a violation of momentum conservation. But the Lorentz invariance of the theory guarantees that no conservation law is broken. Local momentum conservation is preserved by the flux of momentum in the gravity field that is chiefly exchanged with the distant matter in the universe.
(Noether's theorem)
Engines used in such long journeys will likely emit a thin stream of particles at extreme velocities. This stream is not wide enough or thick enough to stop space dust from hitting the engine. An unshielded forward-facing engine will get destroyed. So we must shield the engine.
Instead of having two shields and turning the ship around, just turn the engine around. Make the engine emit streams forward from the sides of the ship.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Songs_of_Distant_Earth
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Navigational_deflector
I always thought it was a nice touch and hopefully a teaching moment when they talk about it in the show.
Still, a "vacuum propeller" would be a massive revolution (no pun intended) if it is at all possible.
Don't get me wrong, I see a vacuum chamber, which is light years ahead of most of these enterprises, but I would not spend a dime on it until it has been proven to work in a region of space relatively far from the Earth's magnetic field.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_mugging
That said, Woodward does not seem to be an actual charlatan, so I don't have a problem with funding him. At least he might turn up something fun and/or interesting, even if I don't think it's going to usher in a new space age.
I strongly suspect that whether history remembers him as a charlatan will depend heavily on whether one of the supports of his branch proves false and it snaps off, or whether he's been right this whole time and we suddenly oops ourselves a propellantless drive that operates by coupling to the gravitational field and pushing distant objects around. ;)
And that's very close to the kind of thing we're talking about here.
A quick google search does not bring back any designs or research papers of such a system, as the results are swamped by the idea of using ground based lasers to push spacecraft instead of the craft itself containing the laser.
While this might sound insane, from a portfolio perspective, if a VC firm is invested in SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, or anyone else in the space, it seems negligent to not have some exposure to a company with someone like Lazar involved in it, unless you really knew for sure, as he and people like him present an existential risk to rocket-based tech companies. That guy is the ultimate hedge.
This is your answer.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and Lazar can't ever seem to manage the latter.
I'd bet the number of such people with unreasonable ideas will go drastically up if you start hiring them too.
However, this is also like saying you have to rule out every "free energy" conspiracy before starting a battery company as well, so it's not really that much of a forcing function at all.
There are far more likely ways for SpaceX to fail than that some random professor replaces rockets with a drive using novel physics. And even if said professor does produce that drive, it wouldn't threaten SpaceX's main business unless the drive was able to produce sufficient thrust to escape the Earth's gravity well. (Flash notice, not even the professor in question thinks it will.)
Therefore Musk should continue to be focuses on what he is doing and not even think about this unless there is a working prototype validated by NASA.
Surely people who know who Lazar is knew that in the 90s? Assuming they were alive then.
> Mike McDonald, an aerospace engineer at the Naval Research Laboratory in Maryland, will be among the first [attempt to replicate their results]. He leads an internal program for independently testing advanced propulsion systems, which has previously shot down promising results from the EmDrive.
While this doesn't have a lot to do with the original article (hence my "nit"), it was revolutionary at Newton's time. People had observed objects at rest staying there; that's why you can sit on a chair. But they had also observed that any object in motion (except for those in the sky) slowed down and eventually stopped, unless you kept pushing them. Newton attributed this to friction.
This theory--which contradicted what people could plainly observe with their eyes--is what makes possible satellites (and keeps the moon in orbit), since being outside the atmosphere, they experience very little friction. Of course the other thing necessary for man-made satellites is a way to get them moving fast enough, for which Newton's third law comes in handy (it's why rockets accelerate, even outside the atmosphere).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_drive
particularly this article
What's interesting about this one is that there is a theory at least. Experiments aside, someone whould be able to either confirm or reject the theory on its own.
Really, if you're curious, you should dig into the history of all kinds of devices like these, anything in the Impossible Class. The inventor spends decades grinding away at it, getting inconsistent, odd little results which are just tantalizing enough to keep them stumbling forward.
I have often considered a taxonomy of these sorts of enterprises, with three orthogonal systems of reckoning. The first, a type really, is what principle is being violated (Second Law of Thermodynamics, Newton's Third ...). The second is psychological: misunderstanding, self-deception, or duplicity (typically to bilk inventors), with the understanding that the inventor typically starts with misunderstanding and proceeds onward. The third would, finally, be the discovered actual source of the odd results, which could be bad experimental design, not accounting for oddly-radiating services, vibration, friction, and so forth.
I'm not an expert in general relativity, but there are some major unknowns (and in fact known problems) with it and to assume that our current interpretation (because as far as I can tell, the issue is mostly with the interpretation of inertia rather than the actual formalization of gravity itself) is 'correct' is just so arrogant and counter-productive. Does that mean all fringe ideas should have money poured into them? Certainly not. But if we have no funding going into experiments differing from the 'consensus', that's the surest possible approach to guaranteeing the consensus never improves.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity#Pe... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_p...
I do understand that others might think differently. I like moonshots.
Even if all of these experiments fail, chances are some of them will come across findings that are useful in unexpected ways.
If nothing else falsifying these theories will help create a baseline of effects that needs to be accounted for in the investigation of future theories like this.
There's an enormous amount of science denial, at least in the United States. A lot of things go into that, but I don't think it helps that stories like this present scientists as wedded to orthodoxy and general killjoys who hate imaginative iconoclasts. Instead, people lurch from one self-styled Galileo to another, as they fade from view without even reading the confirmation that their work was wrong.
Meantime, science produces a steady stream of advances both fundamental and practical. And those are taken for granted, unless scientists something you don't want to believe, when they can be presented as scientists are in stories like this.
Do you know why humans went to the moon in 1969?
It wasn't just that people suddenly woke up one day and wanted to. The earliest known story of a voyage to the moon was written by Lucian of Samosata, CE 125. It wasn't that people woke up one day and were smart enough; the orbital mechanics were hard math, but the basics were understood since Newton.
It was that in 1935, the Aluminum Association was founded. Extraction of aluminum was only started in 1825, and we only had the array of necessary technologies to do it in mass quantities, reliably, with the development of massive power stations. Aluminum is useful for several things, but most importantly: it can be hammered into a thin but solid material that can form aerodynamic shells and contain pressures against vacuum. It was, basically, a miracle metal. It made the aviation age cheap and (coupled with other breakthroughs like radio, which is still only a 100-year-old-technology) the space age possible. One generation after the founding of the AA, humanity set foot on the moon.
I believe people think magic is just around the corner because the previous two or three generations have lived through one miraculous invention after another. And you're right; these inventions don't spring from nowhere. They come from people observing unexpected phenomena, dogging that phenomena until it can be understood and reliably manifested or controlled, and putting ingenuity on what could possibly be done now that the rules of the world have changed, because, in a sense, magic just happened. At least from the point of view of the average person living through the technological revolutions as they come one after another.
Real revolutionary and amazing technology comes from physics that came way before, which in turn came from math that was even older.
Today people mostly can't imagine what the world was like, technologically and socially, a hundred years ago when relativity and quantum mechanics were on the cusp of being developed.
The things which will transform or devastate the world in the next few decades have been growing for the last 50 years even if most haven't noticed. It will look like coming out of nowhere, but it won't be in the way that this space drive is.
So win-win in the science space.
So if those scientist dudes have better PR skills or whatever is needed to attract funding then other scientist dudes, why is that a problem ?