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NASA Funded Scientists Claim Breakthrough in Propellantless Propulsion

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Re: NASA Funded Scientists Claim Breakthrough in Propellantless Propulsion

#51

Post by cwhiz »

ForHackernews wrote: post #29
cwhiz wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe a total of $620,000 over a span of several decades. I am personally quite happy to fund one-off random projects like this. The amount of money is a trivial rounding error. Funding 100,000 failures at this level would be worth it if one, just one, worked. I do understand that others might think differently. I like moonshots.

Referenced elsewhere in these comments https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_mugging

We spend about $150 billion per year on science funding in the US. I don't think we're being irrational by giving moonshots roughly 0.00003% of the funding. That's a generous percentage, too, considering the funding for Jim Woodward spans many decades.

Re: NASA Funded Scientists Claim Breakthrough in Propellantless Propulsion

#52

Post by nkoren »

sgt101 wrote: post #34
snowwrestler wrote: post #20

> On a clear night in March 1967, Woodward was stargazing on the rooftop of Pensión Santa Cruz, a hotel in the heart of Seville, in Spain.... As Woodward gazed up from atop his Spanish hotel, he saw a speck of light arcing across the sky and mentally calculated its path. But as he watched the satellite, it began deviating from its expected trajectory—first by a little and then by a lot. > Everything Woodward knew abo…

Or a bird. Less high up, nice white tummy, reflects the light.

Do you honestly think that somebody trained in astronomy could mistake a bird for satellite? Have you seen how satellites move? They traverse the sky in a perfectly straight and constant-motion fashion that is utterly unlike any bird.

Even a high-altitude plane such as the U-2 would be fairly difficult to misidentify as a satellite. For obvious reasons, U-2s and SR-71s and such didn't employ lights while operating at altitude; therefore the only way to see them would be via reflected light. It would need to be reasonably long after sunset, or else the sky isn't dark enough to credibly see a satellite -- but not so long after sunset that the plane would be in the earth's shadow. Satellites have a similar window of observability -- but it's much longer, because they're much higher. A high-altitude plane would have a very small window. Moreover, it would need to execute that turn without crossing the terminator: as soon as any reflecting object crosses the terminator, that reveals its altitude.

Re: NASA Funded Scientists Claim Breakthrough in Propellantless Propulsion

#54

Post by pluto9 »

kaiju0 wrote: post #38
sebringj wrote: post #30

Interesting caveat about traveling close to the speed of light...if you run into hydrogen atoms, which is near 100% likely, your ship violently explodes because at very high speeds, there is a huge reaction on tiny matter collisions. I just learned this and it was like learning that sound doesn't travel in space when I was young and ruined many a starwars movie effects. I keep learning how ignorant and dumb I am the…

Interstellar ships will be shaped like pencils to deflect rather than impact gasses. They will also have to have consumable nose cone sections with old ones in the front being removed and new ones installed at that back. Like a mechanical pencil.

What happens when the ship has to turn around to decelerate, with its engines facing the front?

Re: NASA Funded Scientists Claim Breakthrough in Propellantless Propulsion

#55

Post by xibalba »

motohagiography wrote: post #47

So, I have to ask: If Elon Musk is working on propulsion tech to go to Mars, and Bob Lazar claims to have worked on reverse engineering propellentless tech and is one of the single digit number of living people to have encountered it directly, and NASA is slow rolling their own understanding of it, given the limited available expertise in this area how can Musk afford to not hire Lazar? From a due diligence perspecti…

> know with a high degree of certainty that Lazar is full of crap

This is your answer.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and Lazar can't ever seem to manage the latter.

Re: NASA Funded Scientists Claim Breakthrough in Propellantless Propulsion

#56

Post by f154hfds »

simiones wrote: post #45
f154hfds wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does quack science end and legitimate science begin? There's a real bottleneck in theory right now and I don't see how pushing the envelope in various directions could be a bad thing (especially given the relatively low cost this seems to have been). The surest way we can stagnate is by NOT funding this type of thing.

There are other kinds of quack science, but in this area, anything that seems to contradict the basic laws of motion and/or conservation of energy is recognizably quack science. Especially when doing so experimentally first (instead of first coming up with a theoretical/mathematical framework). Even especiallier when using electrical effects in Earth's magnetic field and measuring minute effects.

Where did quantum mechanics come from [1]? Where did general relativity come from [2]? They came from _experiments_ and _observations_ that couldn't be explained by the current theories. You don't just take theories to produce experiments (though this can happen to verify or to gain accuracy) - usually it works the other way around. Experiments are done to power new theory. Except a growing number of people are becoming content as you are in the existing theories because it is costlier now to probe the edges of our theories than it used to be. There are major problems though even in established theory [3].

I'm not an expert in general relativity, but there are some major unknowns (and in fact known problems) with it and to assume that our current interpretation (because as far as I can tell, the issue is mostly with the interpretation of inertia rather than the actual formalization of gravity itself) is 'correct' is just so arrogant and counter-productive. Does that mean all fringe ideas should have money poured into them? Certainly not. But if we have no funding going into experiments differing from the 'consensus', that's the surest possible approach to guaranteeing the consensus never improves.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity#Pe... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_p...

Re: NASA Funded Scientists Claim Breakthrough in Propellantless Propulsion

#57

Post by undersuit »

pluto9 wrote: post #54
kaiju0 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interstellar ships will be shaped like pencils to deflect rather than impact gasses. They will also have to have consumable nose cone sections with old ones in the front being removed and new ones installed at that back. Like a mechanical pencil.

What happens when the ship has to turn around to decelerate, with its engines facing the front?

Turn on the drives as soon as you can for the deceleration burn and pray.

Re: NASA Funded Scientists Claim Breakthrough in Propellantless Propulsion

#58

Post by carry_bit »

motohagiography wrote: post #47

So, I have to ask: If Elon Musk is working on propulsion tech to go to Mars, and Bob Lazar claims to have worked on reverse engineering propellentless tech and is one of the single digit number of living people to have encountered it directly, and NASA is slow rolling their own understanding of it, given the limited available expertise in this area how can Musk afford to not hire Lazar? From a due diligence perspecti…

If he wasn't full of crap, then you also running the risk of the government/some other group not wanting the tech out there and then preventing the success of your investment.

Re: NASA Funded Scientists Claim Breakthrough in Propellantless Propulsion

#59

Post by motohagiography »

xibalba wrote: post #55
motohagiography wrote: post #47

So, I have to ask: If Elon Musk is working on propulsion tech to go to Mars, and Bob Lazar claims to have worked on reverse engineering propellentless tech and is one of the single digit number of living people to have encountered it directly, and NASA is slow rolling their own understanding of it, given the limited available expertise in this area how can Musk afford to not hire Lazar? From a due diligence perspecti…

> know with a high degree of certainty that Lazar is full of crap This is your answer. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and Lazar can't ever seem to manage the latter.

I'd agree, but if we're trading tropes, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence either. He's easy to discredit and dismiss, and it's meaningless to my life whether he's real or not, but if you've got billions on the line in the space propulsion game, I'd think you'd need to have gone deep into his claims to determine he's full of it.

Re: NASA Funded Scientists Claim Breakthrough in Propellantless Propulsion

#60

Post by pmoriarty »

nkoren wrote: post #52
sgt101 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or a bird. Less high up, nice white tummy, reflects the light.

Do you honestly think that somebody trained in astronomy could mistake a bird for satellite? Have you seen how satellites move? They traverse the sky in a perfectly straight and constant-motion fashion that is utterly unlike any bird. Even a high-altitude plane such as the U-2 would be fairly difficult to misidentify as a satellite. For obvious reasons, U-2s and SR-71s and such didn't employ lights while operating at…

That he made a mistake is much more plausible than that it was aliens.

That he was hallucinating is much more plausible than that it was aliens.

That he was lying or had a false memory is much more plausible than that it was aliens.

Pretty much any mundane explanation is much more plausible than that it was aliens.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

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