Another Small Step Preparing for the Giant Leap?

Preliminary tests indicate that NASA Eagleworks may be a the verge of creating a "reactionless drive" that could get a spacecraft to the moon in four hours. A proposed trip to Mars would take less than eight months -- 70 days out, 90 days there and 70 days back.

The recent tests, performed in vacuum, indicated that the EM Drive produced thrust without any emitting any propellant. This defies the basic laws of classical physics put forth by Newton centuries ago -- the whole "for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction" thing.

Rockets work by ejecting propellant, pushing the vehicle forward. In the weightless vacuum of space, there's nothing to "grab hold" of, like the ground for cars, the water for boats or the air for planes.

The EM drive works by bouncing around microwaves inside a closed cavity, converting electricity directly to momentum. It's not a lot of thrust -- but it's constant. In a weightless vacuum you just keep going faster and faster because there's no friction or gravity to slow you down.

How does this work? They don't know for sure.

The head of NASA Eagleworks, Dr. Harold "Sonny" White, theorizes that the thrust comes from virtual particles of the Quantum Vacuum. Virtual particles are a real thing, though they seem pretty far out there -- but quantum mechanics is like that.

A 2014 test of the drive in in air was also successful, but thermal interaction with the air could have been responsible for thrust. The vacuum test eliminates that uncertainty.

This type of drive has more immediate applications closer to earth. One of the main problems for satellites is stationkeeping -- orbits decay over time to due to atmospheric drag. They need to use tiny rockets to maintain their orbits. But they have only a finite supply of propellant -- once it's gone, the satellite falls out of orbit. The lower the orbit, the more drag.

With the EM drive, no propellant would be needed -- just electricity, which is obtained from solar panels. An EM drive would drastically increase the useful lifespan of satellites. It would also allow photographic reconnaissance satellites, such as military spysats, weather satellites, low-earth orbit communications satellites, to reposition themselves without having to worry about running out of fuel. (Solving the whole, "Chloe, I need that satellite repositioned right now!" problem.)

The same Eagleworks team is looking at warping space, and has already had some preliminary successes. Those tests have yet to be validated in a vacuum.

The researchers are talking in terms of decades before EM drives will be ready for use. But I'm not so sure. These EM drives are relatively small electronic devices that depend on quantum mechanics for their operation.

That means they have more in common with semiconductor electronics -- which are tiny electronic devices that depend on quantum mechanics -- than the engines in giant rockets that have proven so difficult to master.

As evidenced by the billions of cell phones out there, if there's one thing we're really good at, it's making tiny electronic devices.