All news is politics by other means.

In no place is crony capitalism so entrenched as in the former states of the Old Confederacy, and Florida is one of the worst. (And, note, I say that as a native of the South.)

Propose it to the NASA Cubesat Launch Initiative.

If I get to see this in a presentation, I will ask about these. The temperature control is especially relevant. My guess is that the systematic problem is related to leakage of magnetic fields, i.e., basically your big brushless motor idea.

Ah, I have been thinking about that. The Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft had ~ 5 watt radios that were always on, yielding a force of ~ 1.7 x 10^-8 Newtons, directed away from the Sun. With a mass ~ 250 kg, that's an acceleration of 7 x 10^-11 m/sec^2, directed away from the Sun. As it happens, thanks to the so-called "Pioneer anomaly" we can model the acceleration of Pioneer 10 and 11 to order 9 x 10^-10 m/sec^2 (or a little better), so we can say, with great confidence, that the radio system force is or ~ 10^-7 Newtons.

Now, this radio system does not have a large Q, but this about a factor of 400 smaller than the 40 microNewtons observed in the NAS Eagle Works paper. Note that radio is at prime focus, so photons do travel from there and reflect off the dish, so there is a Q of order 1. I would curious to see the predictions from the various theories for this case.

Well, if I had been asked to review a proposal to do this work, I almost certainly would have given it a poor review. If I had been on the NASA proposal review panel reviewing proposals and reviews (a task I have done in the past, and might do again in the future), and the proposal pile included this one, I almost certainly would have voted against it.

However, that was (hypothetically) then. This is (actually) now. As an experimentalist, with two (the Chinese, and this NASA) sensible looking papers claiming "anomalous" results, it can't just be ignored and it has to be looked into. And, this is cheap science - it won't take a LHC to disprove it. I don't have a University Lab, but, if I did, and if it was suitable, I would be thinking of getting physics undergraduates to do this test next term - which would be a good teaching opportunity, even if the ideas turn out to be BS.

Now, if you want to talk about the enormous opportunity cost from string theory, I would have a lot to say, but not in this thread.

Extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence to be accepted, but certainly not to be tested further.

And, yes, there has to be some judgement involved, and judgements can be wrong. Fortunately, it is a big planet with lots of people on it (and a few off of it), and so interesting ideas tend to get poked and prodded and put through the mill, regardless of the consensus viewpoint.

(Yes, I know this is likely wrong, and that in 10 years it will likely be forgotten except by a small cohort who claim "coverup!". To those people, I will say, "show me the spacecraft using your drive," just as I say "show me a functioning power plant" to the cold fusion coverup believers today.).

90% of the time

I agree that the theory (or, at least, that theory) is obviously wrong. Cool, but from experimentalist standpoint, irrelevant. This paper, and the chinese paper, do not appear to the written by charlatans, they claim positive results, and so this will have to confirmed or denied by experiment. I have seen some very bad experimental NASA studies of new physics (*cough*warp drive*cough*), but this one doesn't appear to be so. If you see an obvious flaw in the full paper, please post it and I will publicize it.

I would advise in general that you don't hyperventilate so much. This process will work out just as it should; I have no doubt that in a year there will be a dozen tests of this and we will likely know for sure one way or the other; in the meantime, I would take a $ 200 bet that the standard model will still prevail when this is over.

Sturgeon's law : 90% of everything is crap.

I thought that this take was pretty appropriate when all we had to go on was the conference abstract. Now, however, the full paper (still not peer reviewed) is out, and it is much better. I still think it is wrong, but I do not think it is bad science, and it will have to be refuted experimentally.

Comments

* the "null thruster" is something of a red herring from the abstract. Reading the paper, they have a true "null load," which shows no thrust, while the "null thruster" was a mod of a Cannae drive, and so more of a test of drive theory than the experimental setup, and, in any event, they tested several types of drives.

* they did pretty much all of the things you would like to see (such as reversing the direction and making sure the thrust reverses).

* they seem to have done a thoughtful and careful job, including testing in vacuum.

So, I still think they are likely wrong, but this ups the ante. In my opinion, you can't just say "this is obviously wrong." I bet there will be a bunch of attempts to replicate it in labs all over the place.

I find the theories here (and I have now read several in some depth) to be bad, either wrong, or handwavy, or both*. I would discount them entirely. In the unlikely event that this effect is real (and I mean, some non-standard physics effect), then the theory is likely to be something different than any of the proposals, The experiment's the thing, and the game now has to be disproving the Eagleworks results. Only once a bunch of people have failed to do that (or one person has done it) is there much else to say.

* On pushing on virtual particles or quantum spacetime or whatever. These are 1 GHz photons, more or less. Such pushing would cause a _vacuum_ dispersion. Vacuum dispersion limits are set by timing of high energy photons from Gamma ray bursts across cosmic distances. These tests use ~ 100 MeV photons over ~10^10 light years, and so are many orders of magnitude tighter than the NASA Eagleworks results. This in my opinion rules out any photon - vacuum interaction as the cause of these anomalous thrusts.

Anyone who thinks that Russia would deport Edward Snowden does not know much about the long history of Russian spycraft.

Rosetta carries within it a lander called Philae, which is intended to land on the comet in November. DLR is already picking out candidate landing sites - this video shows the current set (each green dot is an error ellipse, which get stretched out over sloping terrain).

Philae will harpon itself onto the surface, and one task will be to serve as one end of a low frequency radar system with Rosetta - it should be possible to image more-or-less the complete inside of the comet with this system.

Eventually, but not now.

Right now the are spending a few 100 gm of propellant per day or so to maintain these triangular orbits, and each leg is hyperbolic (well, probably actually parabolic, but you get the idea).

This is something they are choosing to do. My understanding is this basically a safety thing. If the spacecraft went into a safe mode, in these slow flyby orbits it would keep moving slowly away from 67P, at maybe a km / hour or so, until the problem could be fixed. I heard that they didn't want to risk being in an unstable orbit, and maybe hitting the comet if they went into safe mode.