NASA-funded scientist says 'MEGA drive' could enable interstellar travel
An electric drive that will approach the speed of light.
So, what do we need? Something like a reactionless drive — an engine that moves a spacecraft without exhausting a finite stock of propellant. So far, such a device only exists in science fiction. But for the past few decades, physicist Jim Woodward has been trying to change that.
The 79-year-old physics professor has developed what a thruster design that he hopes will serve as a proof of concept for how humans can someday achieve interstellar travel. Called the Mach-effect gravitational assist (MEGA) drive, the device only requires a source of electricity to achieve thrust.
Early tests have shown mixed results. Woodward himself was only able to demonstrate miniscule amounts of thrust, while other teams reported little to no thrust when trying to replicate his experiments. Still, the design intrigued NASA enough to award Woodward $625,000 in funding between 2017 and 2018.
What's more, in 2019 Woodward and his collaborator and fellow physicist Hal Fearn reported a major breakthrough after redesigning the thruster's mount — a tweak that produced "more than 100 micronewtons, orders of magnitude larger than anything Woodward had ever built before," as a recent feature in Wired notes.
(To be sure, the level of thrust we're talking about is barely enough to visibly move an object across a table. But if the results are confirmed, it would suggest the technology could be scaled up.)
Woodward and his colleagues have even drawn up plans for a spacecraft that would utilize the MEGA drive. Called the SSI Lambda, the craft would feature piezoelectric crystals and a small nuclear reactor to produce electricity.
"The SSI Lambda probe using MEGA drive thrusters is a truly propellantless-propulsion spacecraft," the team wrote of the design in its report to NASA. "It can travel at speeds up to the speed of light in a vacuum with only consumption of electric power. No other method for travelling to the stars and braking into the target system has been put forward to date, which also has credible physics to back it up."