

The EM Drive is here to get us to the Moon in 4 hours, without fuel - jxs41u
http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/134760-the-em-drive-is-here-to-get-us-to-the-moon-in-4-hours-without-fuel

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gus_massa
Please read: "No, German Scientists Have Not Confirmed the “Impossible”
EMDrive" [http://io9.com/no-german-scientists-have-not-confirmed-
the-i...](http://io9.com/no-german-scientists-have-not-confirmed-the-
impossibl-1720573809) (HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9973528](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9973528)
(5 points, 5 hours ago, 1 comment))

My abstract: It's very strange that the thrust don't appear almost instantly
when you turn on the device and disappear almost instantly when you turn off
the device. It's Is suspiciously similar to what you would expect from a
measurement error due to thermal effects.

The only comment in the HN submission is mine, and I'll copy it (with a few
modifications) because it's (more) relevant here.

Some numbers to compare:

The German experiment got 20uN with a 700W magneton, that is 20uN/700W = 0.03
mN/KW. (Probably some energy is "lost" and the "real" efficiency is higher,
but when you claim to break the physics law the measurements must be
foolproof.)

The maximal theoretical output of a device that don't break the currently
accepted physics laws is 1/c = 0.0033 mN/KW. So the German measurement is 10x
bigger than the theoretical maximum.

The 18-month-to-Pluto and 4-hous-to-Moon calculation use 0.4 N/KW = 400 mN/KW,
that is approximately one half of the maximum claim of any of this device
family, but most experiments get much smaller results. The 0.4 N/KW is
130,000x bigger than the theoretical maximum and 13,000x bigger than what they
got in the German experiment. So if a device with the same output of this
experiment, the trip to Pluto or the Moon will be much longer.

(Disclaimer: Just to be clear, I think this is only an experimental error.)

