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Space may even seem a bit mundane to you - the solar system variety, at least. You've probably set foot on the more interesting moons of Jupiter and Saturn. To us, it seems likely you'll have at least one moon base, that you're mining ridiculously mineral-rich asteroids (opens in a new tab), and that the long hard work of terraforming Mars has begun. What we have is a dream of the stars.I have no doubt that many of you have lived in, worked in, or at least visited space. What we do have is a piece of groundwork that could be used to develop such an engine. We don't exactly have the blueprints for a fully functional space travel engine here. But if we never even try to think about it, that "may" becomes a "definitely." What's that saying - you miss 100 percent of the shots you don't take?īurns notes the efficiency problem in his presentation, and also adds that his work hasn't been reviewed by experts, and there may be errors in his maths. Humans - not all of us, but still more than a few - desperately want to go to interstellar space. "The engine itself would be able to get to 99 per cent the speed of light if you had enough time and power," Burns told New Scientist.Īnd here's the other thing. It is horribly inefficient.īut in the vacuum of space? It just might work. So a lot of input for a teeny tiny output.
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That's the equivalent of a power station to produce the force required to accelerate a kilogram of mass per second squared. Around 200 metres (656 feet) long and 12 metres (40 feet) in diameter, to be precise.Īnd it would need to generate 165 megawatts of energy to produce 1 newton of thrust. But it's not without significant practical problems.Īccording to New Scientist, the helical chamber would have to be pretty large. It sounds really nifty, right? And it is - in theory. "The engine has no moving parts other than ions traveling in a vacuum line, trapped inside electric and magnetic fields." The engine then moves ions back and forth along the direction of travel to produce thrust," he wrote in his abstract. "The engine accelerates ions confined in a loop to moderate relativistic speeds, and then varies their velocity to make slight changes to their mass. It's helical, like a stretched out spring - hence "helical engine". So, if you replace the weight with ions and the box with a loop, you can theoretically have the ions moving faster at one end of the loop, and slower at the other.īut Burns' drive isn't a single closed loop. Hooray for special relativity! According to special relativity, objects gain mass as they approach light speed. Overall, the box would stay wiggling in the same spot - but if the mass of the weight were to increase in only one direction, it would generate a greater push in that direction, and therefore thrust.Īccording to the principle of the conservation of momentum - in which the momentum of a system remains constant in the absence of any external forces - this should be not completely possible.īut! There's a special relativity loophole. In a vacuum - such as space - the effect of this would be to wiggle the entire box, with the weight seeming to stand still, like a gif stabilised around the weight. And yes, even some headlines claiming the engine could 'violate the laws of physics'.īut while this concept is fascinating, it's definitely not going to break physics anytime soon.Īs a thought experiment to explain his concept, Burns describes a box with a weight inside, threaded on a line, with a spring at each end bouncing the weight back and forth. Understandably this paper has caused buzz approaching levels seen in the early days of the EM Drive. It has not yet been reviewed by an expert. He's posted it to the NASA Technical Reports Server under the heading " Helical Engine", and, on paper, it works by exploiting the way mass can change at relativistic speeds - those close to the speed of light in a vacuum. He's produced an engine concept that, he says, could theoretically accelerate to 99 percent of the speed of light - all without using propellant. And that's what NASA engineer David Burns has been doing in his spare time. But another human drive is finding solutions to big problems.