The Latest Patent For The 'Impossible' EM Drive Has Just Been Made Public - And It’s Wild

Back in May, NASA scientists publicized a successful 10-week trial of their EM Drive prototype, and designer Guido Fetta just got authorization to test his own EM Drive in space. And now the UK Intellectual Property Office has shared the up-to-date patent application from British EM Drive inventor Roger Shawyer.

And according to him millions of pounds rest on the achievement of design within.

[Featured Image by Bill Ingalls/NASA via Getty Images]

Shawyer told Mary-Ann Russon at the International Business Times:

The patent process is a very significant process, it's not like an academic peer review where everyone hides behind an anonymous review, and it’s all out in the open. This is a proper, professional way of establishing prior ownership done by professionals in the patent office, and in order to publish my patent application, they had to first carry out a thorough examination of the physics in order to establish that the invention does not contravene the laws of physics.

You can learn the complete backstory of this revolutionary engine here.

According to Harold White, director of the research group over at NASA's Eagle work Laboratories, a manned mission to Mars in an EM Drive-backed spacecraft could reach Mars in a mind-bending 70 days. This is even less than half the time NASA has expected it will take using present technology.

Since Shawyer suggested such an engine nearly two decades ago, he’s been busy trying to beat everyone else to the punch, applying for patent after patent with every tweak he makes.

His up-to-date patent has just been revealed to public, and defines a new thruster design that contains a single flat superconducting plate on one end, with a distinctively shaped, non-conducting plate on the other. He said:

This is pretty significant, because it enables you to easily manufacture these things, and we want to produce thousands of them. The patent makes the construction of a viable superconducting thruster easier, and it will produce a lot of thrust.

You can access the patent here.

 

Here’s a view of the contents, with a rundown of just one constituent - the control circuit.

According to Russon, Shawyer is working with a non-crewed UK aerospace firm to improve his second generation EM Drive, which he says will yield thrust many orders of magnitude better than that produced by NASA’s Eagleworks group or any other laboratory.

American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) has finally approved that a research paper by the Eagleworks group has been peer-reviewed and recognized for publication in December.

Updated version of the previous article.