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Although not peer reviewed or replicated, a NASA veteran claims their Propellantless Propulsion Drive, that physics says shouldn’t work, just produced enough thrust to overcome Earth’s gravity (thedebrief.org)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 77 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (4 children)

Any time I hear claims that involve hitherto unknown laws of Physics I'm 99.99% sure I'm dealing with BS - but then again, some day someone will probably genuinely pull off such a discovery.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that NASA has physicists that understand how and why this thing works, and the article title is just bullshit.

[–] [email protected] 63 points 7 months ago (1 children)

they do, and tested it extensively... and determined it doesn't provide any thrust and the earlier tests that showed a tiny bit were just sensors malfunctioning from the microwaves...
i'm going go ahead and call this article:
probably bullshit

[–] corroded 26 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Are you sure? What you say is true of the EM drive, but this looks like it's a completely different technology. As far as the article is written, it doesn't sound like microwaves are used at all.

What has me skeptical is that they say the device produces enough thrust to counteract its own mass, which would be revolutionary. Why are we not reading about this all over the news?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Because it's a load of shite mostly.

[–] jordanlund 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Ion propulsion.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 7 months ago

This can't be ion propulsion because ion propulsion involves a propellant -- the ions.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago (1 children)

it would be so cool though... a new force...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

are you telling me this sucker runs on midichlorians?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

i'm pretty sure it runs on flux capacitance

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

How many giggawatts? Last one didn’t do anything and we fed it 1.20.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

9001 giggitywatts

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

It's very likely, but it's almost certainly going to involve an extreme thing we can barely measure. The whole reason physics is stuck where it is is that all the things we have access to are described perfectly by the system we have, even if it's not fully self-consistent.

[–] HappycamperNZ 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I mean, if there was any I would trust on physics NASA is pretty high up there

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

This wasn't NASA, though. This was a sci-fi writer, writing about a putative claim by someone who got paid by NASA at some point in the past.

Ditto for the couple ex-CIA guys that claim there's alien dissections or whatever. Big organizations inevitably employ all sorts.