WASHINGTON: Anyone who has ever watched an episode of Star Trek or a Star Wars film will know how it works.The good guys are minding their business in outer space when suddenly the Klingons or the Dark Empire bear down on them out of nowhere.
There is only one way out. At the flick of a switch, our heroes are flashed — in a blur of passing stars — to safety elsewhere in the universe.Call it warp drive or a hyper drive, it adds up to the same thing: a miraculous power source that allows a spacecraft to fly at unimaginable speeds.But while it’s so far confined to the realms of sci-fi, the concept could become reality.
U.S. space agency Nasa is thought to have successfully tested a revolutionary new power source that could enable spacecraft to travel to the Moon in just four hours instead of more than three days and to Mars in two or three weeks instead of seven months.
Compact enough to fit into a suitcase, this whizzy new device could — it is claimed — keep flying for eons, at the equivalent of an astonishing 450 million miles an hour.Load up the spacecraft, we’re all off for a long weekend on Venus! The invention fuelling such hopes is called an electromagnetic drive or EmDrive — and it’s powered by a device similar to that found in a microwave oven.
It was invented by British scientist Roger Shawyer, who has endured years of ridicule since he unveiled it nearly a decade ago.Critics insisted his invention was a scientific impossibility because it broke one of the basic laws of physics governing the universe.This rule is Sir Isaac Newton’s third law: that if you push in one direction, you accelerate in the opposite.
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