God Speed: NASA showcases conceptual engine to propel rockets without fuel at the speed of light

One of the biggest concepts of physics, at least for regular folks like us who don’t have a degree in theoretical physics, is that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. In reality, no man-made object can even come close to the speed at which light travels. But what if that were to change? What if someone, let’s say an engineer at NASA made a rocket engine that can travel at the speed of light, without needing any fuel? Sounds like something straight out of Star Wars, doesn’t it?

That hasn’t stopped one NASA engineer from testing predictions about a conceptual engine called the EmDrive. The EmDrive is a hypothetical “helical” engine that defies all the commonly held notions of physics and generates forward thrust without the use of fuel.

The Origin of EmDrive
Back in 2001, a British physicist named Roger Shawyer proposed that we can produce propulsion by injecting microwaves into a conical chamber. Shawyer suggested that the microwaves would, in theory, bounce exponentially off the chamber walls, creating enough propulsion to power a spacecraft without fuel.

As futuristic and unattainably utopian as it may sound, some researchers working on Shawyer’s theories, do claim to have generated thrust in EmDrive experiments. The amount was so low, though, that the detractors believe the thrust may have even been caused by outside influences. Seismic vibrations or the Earth’s magnetic field, would be one example.

What’s NASA upto?
There can be no denying the fact that in the last decade or so, with SpaceX and other private space exploration ventures going mainstream, we are witnessing the second space race. Only this time, it isn’t exactly a big battle of the egos of the USA and the USSR.

Several engineers and scientists have taken opposing viewpoints on the EmDrive in recent months.

Some have argued that it is impossible, while others continue to work on what may be a useless undertaking, justifying their efforts by claiming that the payback would be huge.

The most recent of these is NASA engineer David Burns, as New Scientist reports.

“The engine itself would be able to get to 99 per cent the speed of light if you had enough time and power,” Burns told New Scientist.

The EmDrive has been a pet project of DARPA, the R&D wing of the United States Department of Defense, and it has had its challenges, becasue of which, it may lose its funding from the Department of Defense. As stated, a team had claimed to have generated thrust in EmDrive experiments, albeit, it generated very low thrusts.

Ahead of its time or downright impossible?
Critics of the theory say it violates the basic laws of physics. “When power flows into the EmDrive, the engine warms up,” says Martin Tamjar, a physicist at TU Dresden, who has published extensive papers refuting EmDrive. 

“This heat and flow of power strainss the scale’s fastening parts and warps it, forcing the scale to shift to a new zero point. We were able to avoid this with a better structure. By at least three orders of magnitude, our findings reject all EmDrive claims.”

And yet, the “Impossible Engine” as EmDrive has been called again and again, continues to fascinate engineers and scientists. Why? Because a fuel-less thruster would be a boon to human exploration of the cosmos, near and far, thus changing the course of human knowledge and discourse.