It would be cool if accurate, but I'm gonna bet the measurements are an equipment error like those neutrinos a couple of years back
Well, it's been like two years now that NASA has been testing this, and they keep saying it seems to work.
I wonder how viable it would be, in monetary terms.
Potentially
extremely viable.
Again, they're using magnetrons. You have one in your microwave oven. That's basically what they're doing: firing microwaves around inside a enclosed metal chamber. That thruster they're talking about? It's powered by a device only about 100-200 times more powerful than the one you probably have in your microwave right now. Sure, "100 to 200 times" is significant, but this is super old, super cheap technology we're talking about.
To give you an idea, here's a
1000 watt magnetron on amazon for $60. It weighs two pounds and is about the size of a computer power supply.
So let's do some fun, off the cuff armchair math:
* 100kw magnetron generating 2000N of force
* acceleration of gravity at sea level is 9.8m/s per second
That's a break even point of 204kg/449 pounds. One of those thrusters could lift a craft weighing 448 pounds out of earth's gravity. No escape velocity math required. Let's now assume that there's no efficiency gain or loss when scaling up, and simply multiply the price and weight of that magnetron on amazon.com by 100. That's a $6000, 200 pound magnetron capable of meeting the requirements of that 2000N thruster. It weighs 200 pounds, and it can apply enough force to lift 448 pounds out of earth's gravity.
A
Cessna 180 is only 2600 pounds.
Yes, your spaceship will need to have vacuum sealing and oxygen, and other things the Cessna doesn't. But in terms of a general order of magnitude, we may be talking about 1-2 man spacecraft at costs comparable to similarly sized aircraft. Possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars. Single digit millions, easily. You might even see hobbyists building spaceships in their garage, just like there are people who build ultralights now. If 10 $6000 engines cost $60,000, weigh 2000 pounds and can lift 4480 pounds into space, somebody will find a way to make it happen.
This could potentially bring interplanetary space travel into a similar budget range as air travel is now.
interstellar travel might still be out of reach, but just being able to
casually travel between the planets in the solar systems would be a huge leap.
Yeah, depends on whether the warp bubble theory is correct. The numbers they're giving for the emdrive do make it look like casual planetary travel could be realistic. Again, mere weeks to Mars is looking attainable at extremely reasonable cost. But while the emdrive does solve a lot of problems, it doesn't solve the energy requirements, and even if you can accelerate at human-comfortable limits for years, it still takes years to travel between stars. And it's problematic to use stars as a power source when you're travelling light years away from them.
So...build something the size of an aircraft carrier, put a nuclear generator big enough to power a city on the thing, carry years worth of nuclear fuel, accelerate at 1g...you can probably get to the nearest star in under ten years. I don't know how to do the required relativistic math, but 1 year at 1g is .77c, and it's ~4.2light years to Proxima Centuri. We could do it. But we've had the
technological knowledge to travel between stars since the 60s. We've simply chosen to not do it.10 years is much better than the 50 years projected by
Project Daedalus, but even so, I'm not sure if we'd decide to do it even if we knew we could do it in ten years.
If the warp effect is real though, FTL travel may be on the table.
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Topic: Emdrive news: we might be about to become an interstellar civilization (Read 31962 times)