The scientific community met these NASA tests with skepticism and a number of physicists proposed that the measured thrust force in the US, UK, and China tests was more likely due to (external to the EM Drive cavity) natural thermal convection currents arising from microwave heating (internal to the EM Drive cavity).
However, Paul March, an engineer at NASA Eagleworks, recently reported in NASASpaceFlight.com’s forum (on a thread now over 500,000 views) that NASA has successfully tested their EM Drive in a hard vacuum – the first time any organization has reported such a successful test.
To this end, NASA Eagleworks has now nullified the prevailing hypothesis that thrust measurements were due to thermal convection.
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The applications of such a propulsion drive are multi-fold, ranging from low Earth orbit (LEO) operations, to transit missions to the Moon, Mars, and the outer solar system, to multi-generation spaceships for interstellar travel.
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Moving out from LEO, Mr. March, from NASA EagleWorks, noted that a spacecraft equipped with EM drive technology could surpass the performance expectations of the WarpStar-I concept vehicle.
If such a similar vehicle were equipped with an EM Drive, it could enable travel from the surface of Earth to the surface of the moon within four hours.
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a mission to Mars would result in a 70-day transit from Earth to the red planet, a 90-day stay at Mars, and then another 70-day return transit to Earth.
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This same elimination of inter-planetary conjunction-enabled launch windows would be applied to crewed missions to the outer planets as well.
For such a mission, such as a crewed flight to the outer planets – specifically, a Titan/Enceladus mission at Saturn – an EM Drive would allow for a 9-month transit period from Earth to Saturn, a 6-month in-situ mission at Titan, another 6-month in-situ mission at Enceladus, and a 9-month return trip to Earth. This would result in a total mission duration of just 32 months.
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Mr. Joosten and Dr. White stated that “a one-way, non-decelerating trip to Alpha Centauri under a constant one milli-g acceleration” from an EM drive would result in an arrival speed of 9.4 percent the speed of light and result in a total transit time from Earth to Alpha Centauri of just 92 years.
However, if the intentions of such a mission were to perform in-situ observations and experiments in the Alpha Centauri system, then deceleration would be needed.
This added component would result in a 130-year transit time from Earth to Alpha Centauri – which is still a significant improvement over the multi-thousand year timetable such a mission would take using current chemical propulsion technology.
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[And the warp drive hint:]
For the last three years, Dr. White’s team has been conducting experiments to find out whether it is possible to measure, with an interferometer, a distortion of spacetime produced by time-varying electromagnetic fields.
The ultimate goal is to find out whether it is possible for a spacecraft traveling at conventional speeds to achieve effective superluminal speed by contracting space in front of it and expanding space behind it. The experimental results so far had been inconclusive.
During the first two weeks of April of this year, NASA Eagleworks may have finally obtained conclusive results.
One possible explanation for the optical path length change is that it is due to refraction of the air. The NASA team examined this possibility and concluded that it is not likely that the measured change is due to transient air heating because the experiment’s visibility threshold is forty times larger than the calculated effect from air considering atmospheric heating.
Encouraged by these results, NASA Eagleworks plans to next conduct these interferometer tests in a vacuum.
