Lifeboat Foundation

NASA tests the engine for the most powerful rocket ever built, designed for deep-space missions.

In August Hacked covered the rumor, then confirmed by NASA, that a paper by the NASA Eagleworks team, titled “Measurement of Impulsive Thrust from a Closed Radio Frequency Cavity in Vacuum,” to be published in December’s issue of American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA)’s Journal of Propulsion and Power, a prestigious peer-reviewed scientific journal, will reveal promising experimental results on the controversial, “impossible” EmDrive propulsion system. Now, a NASA Eagleworks paper that could be the December paper, or a draft, has been leaked.

The EmDrive results are often dismissed because they appear to violate the fundamental conservation laws of physics, but possible models for the anomalous thrust effect have been proposed that, while belonging to highly imaginative areas of theoretical physics, could explain the controversial results without violating fundamental conservation laws.

The leaked paper was first shared in the NasaSpaceFlight forum, which is often the primary source of updates for all things EmDrive, and a Reddit thread that was then removed at the request of the Eagleworks authors, then posted with a commentary by tech news site Next Big Future. Of course, the paper could be removed again, and therefore those who want to read it before December might want to download it now.

Continue reading “Leaked NASA Eagleworks Paper Confirms Promising EmDrive Results” »

The newest NASA emdrive paper concludes a force generation of 1.2mn/kw after errors measurement is accounted for.

A low thrust pendulum at the NASA Johnson space center was used.

The best conventional Hall thruster can produce 60 millinewtons per kilowatt which is an order of magnitude more than the emdrive that was tested.

Continue reading “New NASA Emdrive paper shows force of 1.2 millinewtons per kilowatt in a Vacuum and a low thrust pendulum and tests were at 40, 60 and 80 watts” »

On October 5th 2016, Ranga Dias and Isaac F. Silvera of Lyman Laboratory of Physics, Harvard University released the first experimental evidence that solid metallic hydrogen has been synthesized in the laboratory.

It took 495 GPa pressure to create. The sample is being held in the cryostat in liquid nitrogen.

Atomic metallic hydrogen, if metastable at ambient pressure and temperature could be used as the most powerful chemical rocket fuel, as the atoms recombine to form molecular hydrogen. This light-weight high-energy density material would revolutionize rocketry, allowing single-stage rockets to enter orbit and chemically fueled rockets to explore our solar system. To transform solid molecular hydrogen to metallic hydrogen requires extreme high pressures.

Continue reading “Co-discover of Metallic Hydrogen wrote paper on metallic hydrogen for rockets” »

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO says that a universal basic income will allow more time for leisure.

If successful, the cis-lunar space station (a space station in the vicinity of the Moon) will be the largest international space project to date, influencing the direction of human space flight for decades to come.

It may be a while before starship captains can race across the galaxy, but engineers and physicists have a few ideas for making it so.

SpaceX’s Elon Musk wants to put millions on Mars, but fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos envisions having them in rotating space habitats.

Society is about to take another big step into the age of space-based manufacturing.

Early next year, California-based startup Made In Space plans to launch a machine to the International Space Station (ISS) that will produce ZBLAN optical fiber.

ZBLAN has the potential to be much more efficient than the silica-based fiber currently used in the internet and telecommunications industries, but it’s tough to make here on Earth because the planet’s strong gravitational pull induces imperfections in the ZBLAN crystal lattice, Made In Space representatives said. [3D Printing: 10 Ways It Could Transform Space Travel].