Imagine an engine with nothing powering it. There are no moving parts, nothing appears to be coming out the back, and when you look inside, there’s nothing there either. This is the unbelievable premise behind the "EM drive" — a hypothetical space drive that we’ve been promised might one day take us to Mars, but that experts say is likely the result of nothing more than wishful thinking and scientific error.
Like the machine itself, the coverage of the EM drive just keeps going and going, propelled, apparently, by nothing at all. A spate of articles earlier this month suggested that NASA itself had tested the drive and found it to work, something that the space agency refuted this week. "While conceptual research into novel propulsion methods by a team at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston has created headlines, this is a small effort that has not yet shown any tangible results," a spokesperson told Space.
People want the EM drive to be real for obvious reasons. It’s cool, it’s exciting, and it’s ludicrously optimistic. The drive was originally created by a British inventor named Roger Shawyer, who claimed if that if you bounced microwaves around a sealed metal container just so, you could create thrust at one end. No moving parts, no propulsion, just thrust. Such an engine would be a godsend for space travel, allowing scientists to build spacecraft without all that stupidly heavy, finite rocket fuel and instead launch something simply with enough solar panels to keep the engine functioning. With a working EM drive we could get to Mars in just 70 days, some have claimed, fulfilling that secular version of salvation — turning humanity into a multi-planetary species.
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