NASA’s experimental, allegedly impossible, reactionless drive has finally passed academic peer-review, and scientist Dr. Phil Mason said there are huge reasons to be skeptical of it.
Mason, a Cornell University chemist who makes science educational videos on YouTube, said the drive’s inventors overly hyped the possibilities of the EmDrive.
Mason described the EmDrive as the “scientific equivalent of saying ‘then a miracle happens.” He said it would only likely be better than conventional rocketry for extremely long missions and very specific scenarios, because it takes a very long time to build up speed.
EmDrive supporters say it could be used in flying cars, rockets and anti-gravity machines. But the EmDrive is extremely contentious among physicists since it allegedly uses exotic physics to violate Newton’s Third Law, which states that any action has an equal or opposite reaction.
Even if every claim EmDrive advocates make is correct, the drive isn’t very efficient. In order to lift a single human, it would take about a gigawatt of power, Mason estimates. that means it would take the U.S.’s entire electrical capacity to lift about 1,000 people into the air. Regular motors are about 100,000 times more effective than the EmDrive.
A study claiming that the EmDrive could exist recently published in the journal of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, which is one of the world’s largest technical societies dedicated to aerospace innovations.
Other physicists on Youtube are also skeptical of the EmDrive, but claim they’re willing to be persuaded and the paper’s passage through peer review is a good first step. They suspect that it is “highly likely” that the anomalous thrust detected in experiments is the result of an unknown experimental error.
Believers in the EmDrive claim that the drive generates thrust through radiation pressure. The EmDrive first gained prominence after NASA’s secretive Eagleworks lab published a non peer-reviewed technical report attesting it generated a small amount of thrust by an unknown mechanism. All three attempts to replicate the drive’s thrust results were successful, but the amounts of thrust generated were relatively low and could have been the result of experimental error.
NASA is not ready to officially confirm test results. The development of EmDrive was funded by the British government and licensed by aerospace manufacturing giant Boeing. Testing of the EmDrive has been plagued by experimental design issues and repeated delays.
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