The EmDrive Just Won’t Die
13th September 2020
When DARPA put money behind the controversial EmDrive in 2018, it looked like a big gamble. Many physicists had dismissed the revolutionary space drive as simply fake science. Now its EmDrive project is greenlit for Phase 2, DARPA told Popular Mechanics in February this year. Meanwhile, other teams are hoping to reach a final demonstration of the technology later this year.
“This is a technology which could transform space travel and see craft lifting silently off from launchpads and reaching beyond the solar system,” says Mike McCulloch, a lecturer in geomatics at the University of Plymouth, U.K., and leader behind DARPA’s EmDrive project. “We can also get an unmanned probe to Proxima Centauri in a (long) human lifetime, 90 years.”