There was a note above stating that Martin Tajmar's Magnetic coupling investigation of the EM Resonator was the only peer reviewed paper on the broader subject, and I just wanted to make note that this is not true. Woodward's theory papers have been peer reviewed since the 90's, and Fern's papers have been reviewed much more recently. It is the crank Quantum Vacuum nonsense that no one will admit for review, not Mach Effect physics.
Just wanted to be clear so you have an answer to your questions above.
QSP is a startup. We have been completely self-funded until very recently. We’ve just taken the lease at Kennedy Space Center and the lab is not yet open. Once it is open, our first work will be to bring the first antenna line to market. We’re hoping to fly our first demo antenna on orbit before the end of 2018, and with the interest already expressed by concerns such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Pumpkin, we intend to enter that market very quickly.
This is what mitigates the risk behind developing a Mach Effect Thruster. Almost all the materials and processes necessary to building our first antennas are steps along the path to building the thrusters, so gathering the low hanging fruit in radar and communications is not really out of the way in developing a commercial grade thruster.
That all said, Woodward has been publishing lab results regularly for many years, and the three replicating labs in Austria, Germany and Canada have all made their results public as well. The peer review papers on Mach Effect Theory have been reviewed for more than twenty years and the Fullerton lab results are presented at conferences regularly. NASA has already had The Aerospace Corp do their government funded evaluation and granted NIAC phase 1 funding as result. The results of that grant are publicly available and now NASA is providing the Fullerton team Phase 2 NIAC funding.
If this doesn’t answer your questions please feel free to press me on any points you like. Most of this is in our video pitch linked above.
Our advantage in this work is to make use of the scaling laws that govern Mach Effect Thruster efficiency. The force generated divided by the electrical power necessary to run the device, scales linearly with frequency, quartically (to the forth power) with Voltage and linearly with both the 1w and 2w mechanical Qs of the device. QSPs unique advantage is we have access to proprietary materials and designs that enable us to scale the thrust efficiency to much higher values.
The risk mitigation strategy is to provide another product line that does not rely upon Mach Effect physics, and by bringing that technology to market first, even if the thruster were to disappoint, we can provide exponential ROI.
There have been working prototypes of primitive METs for many years. Martin Tajmar who published the paper concerning magnetic coupling was responding to the EM Resonator work at NASA JSC's "Eagleworks" lab, not to the work at Cal State Fullerton. If you will read more carefully, Tajmar is one of the three replicating labs that have reported positive findings using the MET. I've known Martin for more than a decade and I can say he does good work.
NASA just awarded the MET research phase 2 NIAC funding.
If you will read the articles attached to my profile linked above, you will see that yes indeed, the EM Resonator does propose to violate the Conservation Principle, and should therefore be taken as pathological science. However, the Mach Effect Thruster does not propose to violate conservation.
Woodward is often six orders magnitude above his noise floor in his experiments. By contrast, the Eagleworks lab testing the EM Resonator was never able to get out of their noise floor.
The most consistent thrust efficiency coming from the four labs that have gotten positive results is E-8N/W though there have been tests with significantly higher results.
If you’re concerned with an answer to the Conservation Principle issue, I recommend that article. If you’re concerned with the broader issue of what makes good science, I recommend the one on Pathological Science.
https://physics.fullerton.edu/~jimw/
https://physics.fullerton.edu/~jimw/IAC2013.pdf
https://physics.fullerton.edu/~heidi/JSE13.pdf
https://physics.fullerton.edu/~heidi/JSE14.pdf
https://physics.fullerton.edu/~heidi/JMP-Mach0.pdf
https://physics.fullerton.edu/~heidi/JMP-MachI.pdf
https://physics.fullerton.edu/~heidi/JMP-MachII.pdf