Jury is very much out -- Saw a meta analysis of this recently. More tests have failed to measure anything than those that did, and some of those that did measure were suspected of being errors - or noise level sized... But, you never know!
Well, I agree, the jury is still out. Of course the whole article may be a hoax.
Then again, people said gravity waves were nonsense up until a while back.
If thrust is being measured in vacuum as has apparently been done, then there has to be a rational explanation . . .
I don't think you'd use a machine like this to launch anything. Still a curiosity.
Then again, people said gravity waves were nonsense up until a while back.
If thrust is being measured in vacuum as has apparently been done, then there has to be a rational explanation . . .
I don't think you'd use a machine like this to launch anything. Still a curiosity.
If I had read about it in some fringe publication I'd probably not give it another thought. But getting a little traction with MIT is not an insubstantial thing.
I wonder if Caltech has anyone paying attention? With the storied rivalries between them and Massachusetts, I'd expect some fireworks.
One more item to strengthen my use of my adjective of the year so far: wacky.
I wonder if Caltech has anyone paying attention? With the storied rivalries between them and Massachusetts, I'd expect some fireworks.
One more item to strengthen my use of my adjective of the year so far: wacky.
No more wacky than the Casimir effect. What I can't figure is how does anyone propose making use of these other than closing loopholes in their theories of everything.
Lots of good data here that certainly deserves research, hardly fringe science. This is but one attempt to explain this...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flyby_anomaly
EDIT OTOH http://iopscience.iop.org/article/1...sessionid=0B3B06E480172C1A4EBAAE119F9AE88C.c1
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IIRC the suns gravitational field strength in the vicinity of the Earth is about 600 uNewtons. So, once you are in a micro gravity environment and you are headed in the right direction courtesy of a chemically fuelled rocket, you don't need much supplemental thrust to provide additional acceleration - you just need to keep it going over an extended period. I think this is where this technology, assuming its not a hoax, would be applied. There are other schemes which don't seem to violate any laws of physics - Rocketdyne just got a $67m award from NASA for example.
I don't see how this is any less plausible than the idea of the solar sail idea using photons to accelerate. Once you have some motion in space it doesn't seem that hard to keep accelerating as long as you have some excess energy you can direct. A small nuclear power source could produce microwaves and accelerate for a very long time it would seem.
Talk about kickstart, my question is when you point a G Watt laser at a photon sail what do you do with the reflection.
0 to .2c in 10min. a new record?
Breakthrough Initiatives
Thing is Ion Thrusters are now pretty well proven and, although they need fuel, the power requirements are a LOT less so on balance.
Was it AC Clarke who postulated picking up lumps of ice from the outer planets/moons to use for thrust purposes?
I think it was Carl Sagan who said somewhere that within 10k years, humans could be spread throughout the galaxy. Now I don't think he meant our body parts which means we are going to have to do a hell of a lot better than machines that can deliver just a few Newtons of thrust or worse. As JN remarked, we gotta have something other than chemical rockets that can rip the nuts off the mounts. And do it for months or years.
I love the starchip concept. I do worry about how a chip would fare after 20 years beyond the heliotrope. Rather large quantities of ionizing radiation. Standard memory would long forget it's ones and zero's.
They do mention worry about particles impacting at that speed, but the shielding against the radiation would certainly slow the chips down.
The reflections? Easy...positive feedback on position.
Just make sure the chip is not at the Focal point of the sail. Melting the chips at the get-go is not exactly a good thing. The folks at alpha centauri would thing we're shooting at them with silicon beads...
John
Yes, that was a fun idea... Reminds me of the plan punted around in the 50s to make a new Panama canal by detonating 26 nukes along the path to make it wider and deeper....
Where's the Boys Book of Fun Things to do with Nukes when you need it?!
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