EmDrive

needs more testing

>>16939590
Nobody understands.

Let's start with the fact that NASA's budget keeps dropping.

...I'm just a civilian and I know that space exploration is THE most important thing in our existence. Someone with money knows this.

The "government's" black budget keeps increasing.

THAT'S the space program.

NASA is a television show.
It's the buffer, the mediator between what's ACTUALLY happening in space and the public.

Because the public wouldn't be able to handle the truth.

>>16939610
>THE most
Keeping the world stable enough to ensure we can reap the rewards of space exploration is more important

>>16939590
>Do you think it'll be whisked away in a blur of paper work and red tape?
This and/or no one will fund it due to perceived impracticality or outright intimidation.
Some agency is probably already working on something like it in secret.

>>16939709
I should add that it's simple enough that technical minded people can work on it themselves, so there is hope that it will eventually get out anyway.

>>16939724
>technical minded people
like Chinese and Iranian nuclear physicists?

>>16939590
Iirc this little present first appeared in 2006, and was initially deemed a hoax. Now it is not considered one, since it works. The only problem is that no one has been able to figure out how it works. That has never proven to be a problem for Team Bonobo though. I expect it will be scaled up and combined with a pulse drive. How do you feel about exploring the World Heritage Site Luna or Mars?
Welcome to the end of the beginning. :-)

Looks a little like a Dalek if you turn it sideways.

>>16939656
>Keeping the world unstable enough to ensure they can reap the rewards of space exploration is more important
FTFY

>>16939610
Keep in mind that most of the really exciting stuff is happening on the civilian side of things. We have better benefits. Namely that on the civilian side you get to publish, and take credit for, your own work as a scientist, engineer, or what have you! Plus no committees to suck off to get funding for a wrench!
Why do you think pro-humanity financial backers have financed civilian space exploration?

>>16940241
unstable in your eyes. Stability doesnt always /= peace

For example, the soviets were staging an invasion of Japan at the end of ww2, and America doesn't want Japan to be split like Germany, so... nuke.

And now to this day we have bases in japan, and russia doesn't.

>>16939610
NASAs budget got an increase last year.

>>16940309
NASA could be way more interesting, except only a minority of the states in the US are at all interested in funding science.

>>16941547
>but muh jesusaurus rex!!!

>>16941598
Bingo.

http://russianpatents.com/patent/232/2328640.html>16940229
> Pulse drive?

the distance needed to be traveled alone makes it unlikely there will be any manned trips out of this solar system in your life time

people need food and oxygen. to go any real distance you need outpost. those have to be made and expanded so there not just a mars base but a expansive colony with a surplus production of food. oxygen can be produced by splitting water

in short it wont allow "warp speed" travel

>>16939590
People have apparently designed larger versions that could hypothetically produce tons of thrust, and cube sat versions that could prove their use in space. Yet none of these have been built or tested yet. I want to give these things the benefit of the doubt in that we might be on to something new here, but so far they just seem to be a curiosity that may be nothing more than a error in the testing.

Put one of these in a cube sat, launch it cheaply into low orbit, and then have it use the emdrive to de-orbit itself. Same test has been done solar sails funded by kickstarter. Might not be a huge media sensation but it would prove the concept as a space drive.

Alternately get some funding and build the super conducting flying car version.

>>16942817

So?

If it pans out, it will make travel within the solar system easier for humans and probes.

>>16943067
The CubeSat versions just aren't practical. The math of power and cost comes out to the conclusion that it's both cheaper and more convincing to build and test an EmDrive statically on Earth than it is to try and definitively prove it that way.

>>16939590

I don't care about colonizing the galaxy right away, and with the EMDrive, it will still take 30 years to get to Alpha Centauri. There are plenty of rocks in this solar system with which to work. We may have to deal with some underground civilizations if hollow earth is real (real Martians likely live underground if they exist.) I think Venus would be good for satellite stations and eventual terraforming, and the Moon and Mars would be top candidates for building right away. Some of the distant Jupiter moons would be good, and the asteroid belt is a nice empty void to put artificial planets.

EmDrive is more similar to Impulse technology in Star Trek in terms of range and speed.

>>16943173
It may be cheaper, but its certainly not more convincing. Tests on Earth have too many factors that can call the results into question. The only test that will fully satisfy the critics is a test in space that proves it can adjust its orbit.

>>16943256
Spallation and temperature gradient caused the observed thrust.

IF the EmDrive actually produces any thrust at all and it's not just sloppy experimenting again (last one as i recall they forgot to test their gizmo in a vacuum and it was just "generating thrust" by cooling the air around one end and heating the air around its other end, making it merely a hilariously weak and inefficient electric jet engine), then it's not doing it through any literally magical breaks-the-rules-of-thermodynamics process. My guess: It's electromagnatically levering itself against the Earth's geomagnetic field, just like a needle in a compass. Take it out into deep space and test it, watch the thrust mysteriously disappear.

That's not to say the device is USELESS, necessarily; there are plenty of earth-orbiting satellites that use geomagnetism for maneuvering and stationkeeping. That's not really a reactionless drive though; there's a shitload of reaction mass involved and it's called "the planet Earth's molten iron core".

>>16939590
It's split pretty even with the fake news engine, which has the real thrust. Anything 'physics defying', nee 'gravity-defying' (superman) comes and validates the agnostic public's comfortable modern God, in the routine manifest destiny approach to space travel that brought us such features as The Space Landing and Curiosity: Resurrection of the Red Death. Ressurection? Check. Redemption? Check. Entitlement? Triple-check, ALL SYSTEMS GO, CAPTAIN.

>>16943067
>http://finance.yahoo.com/news/nasa-latest-tests-show-physics-230112770.html#cover-e35bae632a21d0c22129583f5b042df2
I literally work with a guy who im pretty sure is building one, he said its almost done and when he finishes hes gonna show me within the next month or so. Didnt know it had a name or schematics, he just said he is making an engine that can propel shit without using energy and it takes a lot of magnets to make it. ill ask him next time I work with him if this is it.

>>16940229
What I don't understand is this:
Why aren't they testing this shit in space ?!
It's been 9 fucking years since it has been "discovered" and they can't fucking test it in space ?

>>16944551
Because testing shit in space is expensive, and nobody with the money seriously believes it is likely enough to work to be worth the investment.

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Fuck the memedrive, the over-arching issue is that popsci is becoming religious as "geeky" shit is now cool and every normie claims to "love science."

The fedora atheists have it wrong, if traditional religions go away we'll just have newer shit with the veneer of being "sciency" that will replace it, and we're seeing it happen now.

We have the ayylmao horse shit that's pure cancer, the batshit crazy tier. Then you have the whole manifest destiny in space crowd / Elon Musk fanboys like >>16939610 . Assholes who watched too much Star Trek and have never done any study of astronomy, cosmology, or astrophysics on any level.

Then you have the "futurologists" / singularitarians who want to build a Computer God and say it's inevitable because something something exponents (remember, exponents are super secret and hard for us to comprehend.) These guys are usually atheistic Silicon Valley computer nerds or their fanboys with megalomaniacal complexes of delusional levels.

Finally Social Darwinism and pop evolutionary psychology has seen a huge resurgence by dumbfucks whose understanding of biological evolution is limited to memes and high-school classes they barely payed any attention to. These are the politicized redpiller/poltard idiots that act even worse than entitled millennial SJW's.

The usual crazy bullshit here I can't get very angry at because it's just funny and has no real chance of becoming a problem, but popsci quarter-truths are much more damaging.

>>16945088
I would rather live in a society focusing its energy on quarter truths than one that focuses on no-truths. Sure it would be lovely if every human being on the Earth would just study peer reviewed articles and base their scientific opinions on that, but it's not realistic.

>>16945122
The problem is that it goes beyond science into straight-up pseudoscience and bad philosophy, which is just as much no-truth.

I'm not asking for everyone to become scientists, I'm asking for them to have a basic level of self-awareness and be aware of the limitations of their own knowledge and understanding. Basically, if you aren't an expert in a field don't pretend to be one.

>>16945151
That's a reasonable demand.

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>>16945166
It ought to be, but perception of competence is inversely related to actual competence.
Dumb people have no clue how much they don't know, so they assume the pool of what there is to know is far smaller than it really is. As in roughly equal to what they do know. It's a large part of why teenagers think they know everything.

>>16945088
It's like a shitty chinese knock off of an actual point in time with a large amount of people getting into science.

>>16940241
This guy gets it.

>>16945166
It wasn't a demand.

It was a consequence.

>>16940243
If I could either work on a Mars atmosphere scoop in be in the lime light, or work on xenobiology from information picked up from an alien transmission. I'll take the cutting edge secret stuff every time.

Not everyone cares about how famous they can be. Many people care about what kind of discovers they can make out on the cutting edge of discovery.