Full Impulse Power, Mr Sulu

Assume standard orbit.
(Still courtesy Paramount Television)

How about a new form of microwave propulsion which could get us to Mars in 70 days, which breaks the laws of physics as we know them, but works anyway?

It’s real:

As efficient as this type of propulsion may sound, it defies one of the fundamental concepts of physics – the conservation of momentum, which states that for something to be propelled forward, some kind of propellant needs to be pushed out in the opposite direction.

For that reason, the drive was widely laughed at and ignored when it was invented by English researcher Roger Shawyer in the early 2000s. But a few years later, a team of Chinese scientists decided to build their own version, and to everyone’s surprise, it actually worked. Then an American inventor did the same, and convinced NASA’s Eagleworks Laboratories, headed up by Harold ‘Sonny’ White, to test it.

The real excitement began when those Eagleworks researchers admitted back in March that, despite more than a year of trying to poke holes in the EM Drive, it just kept on working – even inside a vacuum. This debunked some of their most common theories about what might be causing the anomaly.

Now Martin Tajmar, a professor and chair for Space Systems at Dresden University of Technology in Germany, has played around with his own EM Drive, and has once again shown that it produces thrust – albeit for reasons he can’t explain.

Tajmar presented his results at the 2015 American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics’ Propulsion and Energy Forum and Exposition in Florida on 27 July, and you can read his paper here. He has a long history of experimentally testing (and debunking) breakthrough propulsion systems, so his results are a pretty big deal for those looking for outside verification of the EM Drive.

To top it off, his system produced a similar amount of thrust as was originally predicted by Shawyer, which is several thousand times greater than a standard photon rocket.

A ten-week trip to Mars without the need for massive rocket engines changes everything.