Is it strong enough to be used in our gravity well or is this something that requires a microgravity environment? The article seems to suggest it's a microgravity drive but it isn't explicit on the topic.
They've built some test engines, probably none to the scale of that of a rocket, but one of them they built was capable of producing 0.1 Newtons of Thrust at 300Watts, so they'd have to scale the engine up quite a bit. To put this in perspective, a Falcon 9 rocket generates between 5000-6000 kN (Kilo Newtons) of Thrust.
If we assume a linearly proportional scaling on the EmDrive (3kW per N), and we assume that Lockheed Martin's Fusion Reactor actually works and gets built in the next 15 years, we could realistically see spacecraft with pseudo-unlimited energy generation powering an EmDrive at over 30,000 N of thrust... Even at lower efficiencies it could theoretically generate enough thrust to escape Earth's gravity well.
* I'm not a rocket scientist or anything but we could totally see long-distance space travel become reality in the next 100 years!
I feel the same way! My life is most likely going to be petering out by the time real space travel is possible. I find hope that all it takes is one discovery to propel technology leaps and bounds.
Is it strong enough to be used in our gravity well or is this something that requires a microgravity environment? The article seems to suggest it's a microgravity drive but it isn't explicit on the topic.
They've built some test engines, probably none to the scale of that of a rocket, but one of them they built was capable of producing 0.1 Newtons of Thrust at 300Watts, so they'd have to scale the engine up quite a bit. To put this in perspective, a Falcon 9 rocket generates between 5000-6000 kN (Kilo Newtons) of Thrust.
If we assume a linearly proportional scaling on the EmDrive (3kW per N), and we assume that Lockheed Martin's Fusion Reactor actually works and gets built in the next 15 years, we could realistically see spacecraft with pseudo-unlimited energy generation powering an EmDrive at over 30,000 N of thrust... Even at lower efficiencies it could theoretically generate enough thrust to escape Earth's gravity well.
* I'm not a rocket scientist or anything but we could totally see long-distance space travel become reality in the next 100 years!
We'd better figure out how to reverse aging, then, because like hell if I'm going to miss that.
I feel the same way! My life is most likely going to be petering out by the time real space travel is possible. I find hope that all it takes is one discovery to propel technology leaps and bounds.