From Tom Bearden's
website: NASA has conducted long-awaited experiments to prove that the fabled space drive, capable of generating its own thrust and breaking a fundamental law of physics, works. If the find survives fresh scrutiny, space ship construction will be revolutionized.
The drive’s creator, British scientist Roger Shawyer, has been facing criticism since his 2006 claims, based on the premise that thrust can be created without huge thrusters, instead using electricity to direct microwaves inside a special container.
Shawyer’s company, SPR Ltd., writes that it has “demonstrated
a remarkable new space propulsion technology. [It] has successfully tested
both an experimental thruster and a demonstrator engine which use patented
microwave technology to convert electrical energy directly into thrust. No
propellant is used in the conversion process. Thrust is produced by the
amplification of the radiation pressure of an electromagnetic wave
propagated through a resonant waveguide assembly.”
In short, if the results hold up, humanity can say goodbye to huge energy
consumption costs associated with space travel, and say hello to
deep-space missions and distant world exploration at a fraction of the
cost and at 100 times the speed.
But since its inception, the revolutionary drive had appeared to be
impossible because it breaks the laws of the conservation of momentum. Put
simply, acceleration in any rocket engine is achieved by a large amount of
fuel bursting out of the thrusters and pushing the vessel forward. The
drive promises to change this forever by creating its own momentum.
An independent, peer-reviewed Chinese team was the first to try and
replicated the results, and confirmed that their own EmDrive worked in
papers published on three occasions between 2008 and 2012. But the
skepticism didn’t end there. So, to test the technology on different soil,
NASA was brought in.
This was needed to reassure the scientific community that past results in
which the apparent violations of the laws of physics were side effect of
interference from the actual device, which messed with the measuring
equipment.
Five of the space agency’s researchers set about to replicate the
so-called EmDrive with another one they called the Cannae Drive, after
they were convinced to put it to the test by its creator, American
scientist Guido Fetta. The results were presented on July 30 at the 50th
Joint Propulsion Conference.
With its paper, entitled ‘Anomalous
Thrust Production from an RF [radio frequency] Test Device Measured on a
Low-Thrust Torsion Pendulum’, the scientists
describe the work carried out over six days, as they set up the equipment,
and the two days spent achieving results.
To do this, they created a ‘null drive’ – a replica of the real drive, but
built in a way that would make it unusable. Another device was then built
to simulate the load on the engine.
Although the new results produced much less micronewtons (30-50) than the
Chinese tests, NASA finally had its confirmation.
"Test results indicate that the RF resonant cavity thruster design, which
is unique as an electric propulsion device, is producing a force that is
not attributable to any classical electromagnetic phenomenon and therefore
is potentially demonstrating an interaction with the quantum vacuum
virtual plasma," the space
agency states in the paper.
The one thing the paper does not wish to do is explain how the drive
works, instead offering quantifiable results and the procedures used to
achieve them.
However, given that we now have several tests all confirming that thrust
can be generated out of thin air, a radically different future awaits
humanity. In it, the immense costs of satellites, space ships and stations
could be reduced to a mere fraction of what was previously thought. This
should open the world up to exciting deep-space missions and enable us to
survive a virtual lifetime in space.
Even more amazing, new propulsion technology based on the EmDrive should
take space travel to amazing speeds, enabling humanity to reach distant
worlds much more quickly.
Source: http://www.cheniere.org/references/emdrive.htm
