Since the beginning of the space race over half-a-century ago, humans have walked on the moon and remotely explored the surface of two other planets in our solar system with robots. But so far, only a single spacecraft has made it to interstellar space: Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is currently speeding through the void at a blistering 40,000 miles per hour and covering about 325 million miles per year. Yet even if it was headed in the direction of Alpha Centauri, our closest stellar neighbor, it would take Voyager over 80,000 years to arrive. For a little more perspective on the timescales involved here, 80,000 years ago on Earth the first homo sapiens were spreading out of Africa into Asia.
This is all to say that from a cosmic perspective, Earth is very, very isolated. Perhaps an intuitive idea of this isolation is why our science fiction stories have always been haunted by dreams of interstellar travel, but recently physicists have started to seriously consider how to turn those fictions into reality.
In a paper presented at the Aeronautics and Astronautics Association of France’s Space Propulsion conference this week, a team of German physicists announced SpaceDrive, a research program exploring exotic propulsion mechanisms that they hope will one day make interstellar space travel a reality.
In particular, they described their research results on the EmDrive, a type of “impossible” spacecraft engine that is theoretically able to generate thrust without any propellant. It’s a bit like trying to design a Formula One race car that doesn’t need any gas and is instead powered by the driver pushing on the inside of the windshield. While the researchers didn’t crack the secret to the propellantless-engine, they did manage to create a hypersensitive measurement device and identify sources of possible false positives that will help to better characterize EmDrive experiments in the future.
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