Renewed hope for EmDrive with NASA validation ... is this a Chicago Pile moment ?

We are getting new Star Wars movies. Blacklight Power is back and claiming they have made breakthroughs which overcome past problems.

The Chicago Pile was the first artificial nuclear reactor. The first man-made self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was initiated in CP-1 on 2 December 1942, under the supervision of Enrico Fermi. Fermi described the apparatus as “a crude pile of black bricks and wooden timbers.” Made of a large amount of graphite and uranium, with “control rods” of cadmium, indium, and silver, unlike most subsequent reactors, it had no radiation shield and no cooling system.

A Chicago Pile moment is when a radical new technology achieves technological takeoff.

I have background on what EmDrive would mean below from articles in 2009. Success and validation that aligns with what is believed about EmDrive means powerful mainly static thrust. It would be an alternative way to achieve effects that would mimic antigravity. It would enable super efficient planes, better flying cars, and cloud city like applications in a full expression of a mature EmDrive. In the nearer term it would be better satellite propulsion.

a US scientist, Guido Fetta, has built his own propellant-less microwave thruster, and managed to persuade Nasa to test it out. The test results were presented on July 30 at the 50th Joint Propulsion Conference in Cleveland, Ohio. Astonishingly enough, they are positive.

The Nasa team based at the Johnson Space Centre gave its paper the title “Anomalous Thrust Production from an RF [radio frequency] Test Device Measured on a Low-Thrust Torsion Pendulum”. The five researchers spent six days setting up test equipment followed by two days of experiments with various configurations. These tests included using a “null drive” similar to the live version but modified so it would not work, and using a device which would produce the same load on the apparatus to establish whether the effect might be produced by some effect unrelated to the actual drive. They also turned the drive around the other way to check whether that had any effect.

Last year a Chinese team built its own EmDrive and confirmed that it produced 720 mN (about 72 grams) of thrust, enough for a practical satellite thruster. Such a thruster could be powered by solar electricity, eliminating the need for the supply of propellant that occupies up to half the launch mass of many satellites. The Chinese work attracted little attention; it seems that nobody in the West believed in it.

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