MSFC's Impossible Propulsion Research
NASA engineer’s ‘helical engine’ may violate the laws of physics, New Scientist
“Burns has worked on his design in private, without any sponsorship from NASA, and he admits his concept is massively inefficient. … I know that it risks being right up there with the EM drive and cold fusion,” he says. “But you have to be prepared to be embarrassed. It is very difficult to invent something that is new under the sun and actually works.”
Helical Engine, David Burns Manager, Science and Technology Office, Marshall Space Flight Center, NTRS (NASA Techncial Reports Server)
“This in-space engine could be used for long-term satellite station-keeping without refueling. It could also propel spacecraft across interstellar distances, reaching close to the speed of light. The engine has no moving parts other than ions traveling in a vacuum line, trapped inside electric and magnetic fields.”
“• Many technical challenges ahead”
Keith’s note: So … the person in charge of the NASA MSFC Science and Technology Office is publishing and presenting research with his NASA affiliation – research that most likely violates the laws of physics and has had no apparent peer review to check this stuff before it is posted on an official NASA server.
– JPL Falls For LaRC Cold Fusion / LENR Story, earlier post
– Quack Science: Why Are NASA Glenn and Langley Funding Cold Fusion Research?, earlier post
– Cold Fusion Update From LaRC (Update), earlier post
– NASA: We’re Not Working on Warp Drive, earlier post
– Clarifying NASA’s Warp Drive Program, earlier post
– Ellen Ochoa’s Warp Drive Nonsense Is Now Officially Published U.S. Government Research, earlier post
– other postings on NASA’s warp drive and cold fusion research.
To simplify to the easiest way to look at what is happening, lets make the metal hammer in the box out of Beryllium (Be) the lightest usable metal. When the hammer hits the left side of the box it’s effect is not much more then that of a feather, but to give an idea of the difference when going back to the right side the hammer turns into Lead (Pb). So this is where the confusion is, but the idea that matter when accelerated to near the speed of light in a particle accelerator become almost infinitely heavy is well known. This has nothing to do with the speed of the hammer but the effect of turning the hammer weight from that of Be to Pb. All this is because of turning on the circular particle accelerator when moving to the right and turning it off when moving to the left, the actual movement of the box is to the right when the hammer hits it each time.
I can see where this is coming from, but it’s still wrong. Special relativity does conserve momentum. It’s inherent to the equations Einstein developed. If I take that hypothetical box _and_ the ball bouncing around inside, and consider then as a closed system, the system’s momentum will not change without an outside force. That’s true regardless of what’s going on inside the box.
The idea that the ball will will have a higher mass when moving in one direction is sort of true. But relativity can be tricky. There are at least three reference systems involved: The outside (table the box is on) rest frame, the frame of the box (which would actually oscillate back and forth) and the frame of the ball inside the box. Actually, there are two more, since the box and the ball switch from moving to the left and to the right. It’s really easy to get those relativistic mass/momentum transforms wrong, when your constantly switching from one reference frame to another. And that means it’s really easy drop some term which would cancel out another. If you do the math right, those terms should cancel out and result in no net acceleration of the system.
That’s true because all those equations come from one, simpler one where momentum really is conserved. Actually working through what happens inside the box correctly would be an interesting exercise to assign a student, but I’m not going to do it myself. The whole thing is also an interesting example of how it’s usually possible to derive the same result in many ways. But the most direct one, with the fewest steps, is the best, since you’re likely to make fewer mistakes along the way.
Great explanation. =) Thanks.
“if you do the math right, those terms should cancel out and result in no net acceleration of the system” =)
Exactly. The third slide of his presentation claims that conservation of momentum is “not well understood”, but that’s not at all true: the mathematical model he’s using to predict these effects is proven to conserve momentum.
If there’s some loophole in reality that allows reactionless drives, the theory he’s trying to use is fundamentally incapable of modeling it. The fact that his attempt at modeling his drive does not conserve momentum means only that his analysis is flawed, and his gadget is no more likely to produce thrust than any other random machine.