The flying car is just about here!

[Watchman]

The flying car has been promised for years. Well, a man is thinking out of the box will final deliver on that promise. Presenting the Moller Sky Car!

 

Read all about it here. http://www.moller.com/medi.htm

 

Now that the exciting introduction is over, there is a catch, it is not ready just yet. But it is closer than anything else and that gets me excited.

 

The way I see it, whoever gets there hands on a flying car first will have a sea of freedom. Even if it is not Moller that delivers, there will be a absence of laws and traffic jams. Oh MAN! Imagine that!

 

I doubt that I am the only one that loves this idea. I think they would sell like hot cakes.

[Weiser_Cain]

It'll never happen there will always be laws and the first in city accidents will doom this. I foresee a future where daily travel is unnecessary. There's also the matter of terrorism.

[Tale]

There's also the matter of terrorism.

It's everywhere! Quick, lock yourself in your house because there's terrorism!

 

On topic, ABOUT TIME! These buggers are late and I felt lied to that my flying automotocar is taking so long.

[LadyCrimson]

Still looks more like a small plane than a car, but pretty nifty.

275-375mph... midnight snack run in record time.

[Gorth]

This reminds me of, that I hevent seen The Fifth Element for way too long

[Diamond]

Now that the exciting introduction is over, there is a catch, it is not ready just yet.

Every "the most exciting technology ever that is not quite ready yet" so far has been vapourware. Especially such far-fetched and ambitious like this one.

[LadyCrimson]

The first video on their list is pretty....silly.

[karka]

Homemade Harrier!

 

It seems pretty unstable.

[Walsingham]

I think the fact that I gave that german scientist my foot YEARS ago should be taken into consideration.

[Sand]

Did he ever give it back?

[Walsingham]

Man, have NONE of you seen the short film about the flying car?

[karka]

It was awful.

[Walsingham]

It was awful.

 

Well... yes. OK it was awful. But it gave us the phrase "But it's the FLYING CAR!"

[Sand]

Any car can fly... if you use the right sized catapult.

[alanschu]

That's not flying.

[Weiser_Cain]

There's also the matter of terrorism.

It's everywhere! Quick, lock yourself in your house because there's terrorism!

 

On topic, ABOUT TIME! These buggers are late and I felt lied to that my flying automotocar is taking so long.

I am locked in my house.

[Watchman]

It'll never happen there will always be laws and the first in city accidents will doom this.

 

I did say the first ones would be free of restricting laws right? I know the later ones will get told you can't .... That is why the first are lucky.

 

I foresee a future where daily travel is unnecessary.

 

You mean like live at work? Or have all work done from home? I don't so. We are too many to cram into a small area. Transport is in our future.

 

There's also the matter of terrorism.

 

What, are you going to live in hole the rest of your life. Get out there face the day! Get your flying car and see the world!

 

Homemade Harrier!

 

It seems pretty unstable.

 

Until they get the stabilizing down it may come this sea sickness pills.

 

Another thing that will get put onto them are proximity sensors to avoid objects and help you to steer clear of accidents involving running into something.

[Sand]

When a bus and a car hit each other it can get pretty messy. It would be ten times worse if an airbus collides with an aircar.

[thepixiesrock]

Plus, the entire idea of having this in our day and age seems rather unesessary and ridics.

[LostStraw]

It'll never happen there will always be laws and the first in city accidents will doom this.

 

I did say the first ones would be free of restricting laws right? I know the later ones will get told you can't .... That is why the first are lucky.

 

The first ones will not be free of restricting laws. The FAA (replace with your local flight organization if you don't live in the U.S.) has plenty of rules when it comes to aircraft, these things are not "cars". It doesn't even look like this thing would meet the criteria for a sport aircraft, so it's a minimum of 40 hours of training to get a pilots license (in the U.S.) and then there are many rules and regulations one has to follow after that.

 

Flying cars have been "coming soon" for decades now.

[metadigital]

Fly by Light

Wings and wheels are so last century.

Justin Mullins meets the man who would replace them with pure radiation.

 

 

THE trip from London to Havant on the south coast of England is like travelling through time. I sit in an air-conditioned train, on tracks first laid 150 years ago, passing roads that were known to the Romans. At one point, I pick out a canal boat, queues of cars and the trail from a high-flying jet - the evolution of mechanised travel in a single glance.

 

But evolution has a habit of springing surprises. Waiting at my destination is a man who would put an end to mechanised travel. Roger Shawyer has developed an engine with no moving parts that he believes can replace rockets and make trains, planes and automobiles obsolete. "The end of wings and wheels" ishow he puts it. It's a bold claim.

 

Of course, any crackpot can rough out plans for a warp drive. What they never show you is evidence that it works. Shawyer is different. He has built a working prototype to test his ideas, and as a respected spacecraft engineer he has persuaded the British government to fund his work. Now organisations from other parts of the world, including the US air force and the Chinese government, are beating a path to his tiny company.

 

The device that has sparked their interest is an engine that generates thrust purely from electromagnetic radiation - microwaves to be precise - by exploiting the strange properties of relativity. It has no moving parts, and releases no exhaust or noxious emissions. Potentially, it could pack the punch of a rocket in a box the size of a suitcase. It could one day replace the engines on almost any spacecraft. More advanced versions might allow cars to lift from the ground and hover. It could even lead to aircraft that will not need wings at all. I can't help thinking that it sounds too good to be true.

 

When I meet Shawyer, he turns out to be reassuringly normal. His credentials are certainly impressive. He worked his way up through the aerospace industry, designing and building navigation and communications equipment for military and commercial satellites, before becoming a senior aerospace engineer at Matra Marconi Space (later part of EADS Astrium) in Portsmouth, near where he now lives. He was also a consultant to the Galileo project, Europe's satellite navigation system, which engineers are now testing in orbit and for which he negotiated the use of the radio frequencies it needed.

 

Dangerous idea

With that pedigree, you'd imagine Shawyer would be someone the space industry would have listened to. Far from it. While at Astrium, Shawyer proposed that the company develop his idea. "I was told in no uncertain terms to drop it," he says. "This came from the very top:" What Shawyer had in mind was a replacement for the small thrusters conventional satellites use to stay in orbit. The fuel they need makes up about half their launch weight, and also limits a satellite's life: once it runs out, the vehicle drifts out of position and must be replaced.Shawyer's engine, by contrast, would be propelled by microwaves generated from solar energy. The photovoltaic cells would eliminate the fuel, and with the launch weight halved, satellite manufacturers could send up two craft for the price of one, so you would only need half as many launches.

 

So why the problem? Shawyer argues that for companies investing billions in rockets and launch sites, a new technology that leads to fewer launches and longer-lasting satellites has little commercial appeal. By the same token, a company that offers more for less usually wins in the end, so Shawyer's idea may have been seen as too speculative. Whatever the reason, in 2000, he resigned to go it alone.

 

"How can photons confined inside a cavity make the cavity move? Thisis where relativity and the strange nature of light come in"

 

 

Surprisingly, Shawyer's disruptive technology rests on an idea that goes back more than a century. In 1871 the physicist lames Clerk Maxwell worked out that light should exert a force on any surface it hits, like the wind on a sail. This so-called radiation pressure is extremely weak, though. Last year, a group called The Planetary Society attempted to launch a solar sail called Cosmos1 into orbit. The sail had a surface area of about 600 square metres. Despite this large area, about the size of two tennis courts, its developers calculated that sunlight striking it would produce a force of 3 millinewtons, barely enough to lift a feather on the surface of the Earth. Still, it would be enough to accelerate a craft in the weightlessness of space, though unfortunately the sail was lost after launch. NASAis also interested in solar sails, but has never launched one. Perhaps that shouldn't be a surprise, as a few millinewtons isn't enough for serious work in space.

 

 

But what if you could amplify the effect? That's exactly the idea that Shawyer stumbled on in the 1970S while working for a British military technology company called Sperry Gyroscope. Shawyer's expertise is in microwaves, and when he was asked to come up with a gyroscopic device for a guidance system he instead came up with the idea for an electromagnetic engine. He even unearthed a 1950S paper by Alex Cullen, an electrical engineer at University College London, describing how electromagnetic energy might create a force. "It came to nothing at the time, but the idea stuck in my head," he says.

 

In his workshop, Shawyer explains how this led him to a way of producing thrust. For years he has explored ways to confine microwaves inside waveguides, hollow tubes that trap radiation and direct it along their length. Take a standard copper waveguide and close off both ends. Now create microwaves using a magnetron, a device found in every microwave oven. If you inject these microwaves into the cavity, the microwaves will bounce from one end of the cavity to the other. According to the principles outlined by Maxwell, this will produce a tiny force on the end walls. Now carefully match the size of the cavity to the wavelength of the microwaves and you create a chamber in which the microwaves resonate, allowing it to store large amounts of energy.

 

What's crucial here is the Q-value of the cavity - a measure of how well a vibrating system prevents its energy dissipating into heat, or how slowly the oscillations are damped down. Forexample, a pendulum swinging in air would have a high Q, while a pendulum immersed in oilwould have a low one. If microwaves leak out of the cavity, the Q will be low. Acavity with a high Q-value can store large amounts of microwave energy with few losses, and this means the radiation will exert relatively large forces on the ends of the cavity. You might think the forces on the end walls will cancel each other out, but Shawyer worked out that with a suitably shaped resonant cavity, wider at one end than the other, the radiation pressure exerted by the microwaves at the wide end would be higher than at the narrow one.

 

Key is the fact that the diameter of a tubular cavity alters the path - and hence the effective velocity - of the microwaves travelling through it. Microwaves moving along a relatively wide tube follow a more or less uninterrupted path from end to end, while microwaves in a narrow tube move along it by reflecting off the walls. The narrower the tube gets, the more the microwaves get reflected and the slower their effective velocity along the tube becomes. Shawyer calculates the microwaves striking the end wall at the narrow end of his cavity will transfer less momentum to the cavity than those striking the wider end (see Diagram, below). The result is a net force that pushes the cavity in one direction. And that's it, Shawyer says.

 

Hang on a minute, though. If the cavity is to move, it must be pushed by something. A rocket engine, for example, is propelled by hot exhaust gases pushing on the rear of the rocket. How can photons confined inside a cavity make the cavity move? This is there relativity and the strange nature of light come in. Since the microwave photons in the waveguide are travelling close to the speed of light, any attempt to resolve the forces they generate must take account of Einstein's special theory of relativity. This says that the microwaves move in their own frame of reference. In other words they move independently of the cavity - as if they are outside it. As a result, the microwaves themselves exert a push on the cavity.

Each photon that a magnetron fires into the cavity creates an equal and opposite reaction -like the recoil force on a gun as it fires a bullet. With Shawyer's design, however, this force is minuscule compared with the forces generated in the resonant cavity, because the photons reflect back and forth up to 50,000 times. With each reflection, a reaction occurs between the cavity and the photon, each operating in its own frame of reference. This generates a tiny force, which for a powerful microwave beam confined in the cavity adds up to produce a perceptible thrust on the cavity itself.

 

Shawyer's calculations have not convinced everyone. Depending on who you talk to Shawyer is either a genius or a purveyor of snake oil. David Jefferies, a microwave engineer at the University of Surrey in the UK, is adamant that there is an error in Shawyer's thinking. "It's a load of bloody rubbish," he says. At the other end of the scale is Stepan Lucyszyn, a microwave engineer at Imperial College London. "I think it's outstanding science," he says. Marc Millis, the engineer behind NASA's programme to assess revolutionary propulsion technology accepts that the net forces inside the cavity will be unequal, but as for the thrust it generates, he wants to see the hard evidence before making a judgement.

 

Thrust from a box

Shawyer's electromagnetic drive - emdrive for short - consists in essence of a microwave generator attached to what looks like a large copper cake tin. It needs a power supply for the magnetron, but there are no moving parts and no fuel- just a cord to plug it into the mains. Various pipes add complexity, but they are just there to keep the chamber cool. And the device seems to work: by mounting it on a sensitive balance, he has shown that it generates about 16 millinewtons of thrust, using 1kilowatt of electrical power. Shawyer calculated that his first prototype had a Q of 5900. With his second thruster, he managed to raise the Q to 50,000 allowing it to generate a force of about 300 millinewtons -100 times what Cosmos 1 could achieve. It's not enough for Earth-based use, but it's revolutionary for spacecraft.

 

One of the conditions of Shawyer's

[Watchman]

Fly by Light

Wings and wheels are so last century.

Justin Mullins meets the man who would replace them with pure radiation....

New Scientist, 08 September 2006

 

Wow!, that is impressive.

Edited February 20, 2007 by Watchman

[Walsingham]

When these things finally are engineered I intend to steal it by use of a large rock.

[metadigital]

There's also the matter of terrorism.

It's everywhere! Quick, lock yourself in your house because there's terrorism!

 

On topic, ABOUT TIME! These buggers are late and I felt lied to that my flying automotocar is taking so long.

I am locked in my house.

And the world emits a collective sigh ...

[alanschu]

I fail to see how flying cars will make laws disappear.