The Bell Nucleus 2017-2018 BN Jan 2018 Issue | Page 17

parison, a ship would have to travel approxi-
The EM drive would throw all the
aforementioned issues out the window be-
Mars, the best candidate for a human colony, cause an EM drive-powered rocket would not
as it is closest to Earth. Without taking any need traditional rocket fuel; the Sun itself
other variables into account, math tells us would act as its fuel source. The EM drive
that for a one-way trip to Mars, a ship would takes solar power in the form of electricity
consume some twenty-nine million dollars in and then transforms the electricity into an
fuel. Thus, while not entirely crippling, the electromagnetic wave that is trapped in a res-
fuel cost definitely represents a significant onance-inducing chamber, meaning that the
obstacle in the Earth to Mars journey , and wave inside bounces around in the container
that’s without even considering the logistics but cannot escape. This, in turn, generates
of fitting all that fuel on a rocket, or having momentum which the EM drive then har-
actual humans and everything else that im- nesses and uses to push itself and whatever
plies. For example, NASA’s Saturn 5 rockets may be attached to it forward.
(the United States deployed the Saturn fami-
ly of rockets in the Apollo missions) con-
With this fuel-efficient setup, the EM
drive would be capable of reaching celestial
tained fuel tanks that in total took up approx- bodies tremendously quickly. A trip to the
imately 80% of the entire spacecraft. The
moon would take 4 hours, compared to Apol-
rockets’ longest journey consisted of a launch lo 11’s 6-day trip. A journey to Mars that
to the moon and back, which traveled about would take 600 hundred days today
one-hundred forty-five times less distance (assuming conditions similar to Apollo 11)
than a mission to Mars would cover. Evident- would take a mere 70, or slightly over ten
ly, fuel poses a crucial financial and logistical percent of the original timeline. Dr. Harold
barrier for human colonization of the solar G. White, head of NASA Eagleworks (an ad-
system. Luckily for us, the miracle that may vanced propulsion research group), projects
solve it all could be the electromagnetic that a journey to alpha centauri, the closest
drive, a new and potentially revolutionary al- star system to our solar system, would shrink
ternative to both the traditional rocket pro- from thousands of years to a measly 92 years.
pellor and propellant.
JANUARY 2018 |
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m ately 50 million miles in order to reach