Fly to the moon in FOUR hours:
The British scientist who says he's found the secret of Star Trek's 'warp
speed'
Anyone who has ever watched an
episode of Star Trek or a Star Wars film will know how it works.
The good guys are minding their business in
outer space when suddenly the Klingons or the Dark Empire bear down on them out
of nowhere.
There is only one way out. At the flick of a
switch, our heroes are flashed — in a blur of passing stars — to safety elsewhere
in the universe.
Call it warp drive or a hyper drive, it adds up
to the same thing: a miraculous power source that allows a spacecraft to fly at
unimaginable speeds.
But while it’s so far confined to the realms of
sci-fi, the concept could become reality.
U.S. space agency Nasa is thought to have
successfully tested a revolutionary new power source that could enable
spacecraft to travel to the Moon in just four hours instead of more than three
days and to Mars in two or three weeks instead of seven months.
Compact enough to fit into a suitcase, this
whizzy new device could — it is claimed — keep flying for eons, at the
equivalent of an astonishing 450 million miles an hour.
Load up the spacecraft, we’re all off for a long
weekend on Venus!
The invention fuelling such hopes is called an
electromagnetic drive or EmDrive — and it’s powered by a device similar to that
found in a microwave oven.
It was invented by British scientist Roger
Shawyer, who has endured years of ridicule since he unveiled it nearly a decade
ago.
Critics insisted his invention was a scientific
impossibility because it broke one of the basic laws of physics governing the
universe.
This rule is Sir Isaac Newton’s third law: that
if you push in one direction, you accelerate in the opposite.
Indeed, every rocket engine ever made has fired
burning rocket fuel out behind it, thus powering the craft forward.
But the EmDrive doesn’t use a propellent. It
works by converting electric power — from solar panels or a small on-board
nuclear reactor — into forward thrust. According to some scientists, it is the
‘impossible drive’.
The scepticism, however, hasn’t stopped
EmDrive’s development rights being bought by aircraft giant Boeing and the UK
Government funding the early development of Mr Shawyer’s ideas.
Now retired, he acts as a consultant to a
British company that is continuing the research, and he says other countries
are developing similar designs. In fact, five years ago the Chinese claimed
they had built an EmDrive and proved it worked — but no one believed them.
It’s harder to be sceptical when the news comes
from Nasa — an organisation that put men on the Moon and sent rockets to Mars.
According to Nasa engineer Paul March, it has
conducted the first successful tests of an EmDrive in a vacuum, to recreate the
emptiness of outer space.
Some suggest the EmDrive is set to become one of
many wonderful British inventions which — for lack of investment and vision —
end up being hijacked by someone else.
Examples of this lamentable tendency include the
tank, the jet airliner and the programmable electronic computer.
When I tracked down Mr Shawyer to his base in
Havant, Hants, he said he was pleased Nasa was ‘having fun’ with his creation
and felt some vindication after years of scepticism.
That said, he seemed a bit peeved that the
Americans were grabbing all the attention.
An aerospace engineer who worked for the Galileo
space project to build a European satnav system, Mr Shawyer unveiled his idea
in 2006.
He promised it would not only speed us to new
galaxies, but ‘put an end to wings and wheels’ by making traditional forms of
transport redundant.
His prototype looks like something sci-fi writer
Jules Verne might have dreamt up to blast Victorians to the Moon.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3080846/Fly-moon-FOUR-hours-British-scientist-says-s-secret-Star-Trek-s-wrap-speed.html#ixzz3aApwtKSA
