Quantum drive promises cheap space flight, flying cars

INTERNET — A new propellantless drive technology first described by Roger Shawyer was confirmed and legitimated by NASA experiments, as a parallel technology has been shown to work in a Chinese lab that arrived at its similar propellantless design through a different theory. Even in its current primordial form, the propellantless (but not reactionless) drive makes much existing space technology hopelessly obsolete. Unlike an ion engine, the preferred technology for efficient maneuvers in orbital space, there is no propellant or need to move through a medium of ions. With the same solar panels as an ion drive, this new drive can produce nearly four times the thrust and operate for ten times longer with less than a tenth of the total weight, and that’s only in its most primitive prototype stage. The magnetron cathodes currently manufactured for satellites are rated for 15 years of operation and are expected to be the limiting factor for the drive’s operation in its current iteration.

Despite hysterical reporting that this drive is “impossible” or somehow breaks established laws of physics, the quantum drive, also known as Em(electromagnetic)Drive or relativity drive, creates motion with a microwave resonance differential in a supercooled chamber designed with a very conservative theoretical framework that has been around for nearly a century. One might assume that different resonances within the supercooled conical chamber could not result in motion because the cone is a closed system (like a man lifting the chair he is sitting in), but its designer says that each end of the chamber has a different frame of reference and is therefore an open system.

During the development of similar but non-conical microwave resonant chambers in the Tesla particle accelerator, “mechanical deformation due to internal EM radiation pressure” was found responsible for detuning the accelerator, yet another description of the effect demonstrated and duplicated in the quantum drive. NASA stated with a must of sour grapes, in contradiction with the assessment of its inventor, that the effect is not attributable to any previously known electromagnetic phenomenon but may work through an “interaction with the quantum vacuum virtual plasma.”

The quantum drive has also been described as a kind of solar sail in space applications, as in that application it transforms radiant energy into motion. Unlike previous solar sails, the quantum drive can direct and control this energy with incredible precision.

Shawyer’s mathematical models project that a more refined version of the technology will be able to lift over 3 tons per kilowatt, a possibility with boggling applications and consequences. Flying cars, space elevators, enormous construction projects in space, colonization of the solar system, geoengineering, terraforming, interstellar probes, and many other science fiction plot devices all of the sudden are more plausible than ever. Read more at emdrive.com.