The following post was submitted by Wolfgang Reimer
Today (2016-03-23) at 8 pm UTC a story on gravity control will be broadcasted on BBC2. It also mentions Podkletnov and the EM drive.
Background regarding the story is here:
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35861334
Here are some quotes from the article:
One device survived, almost unnoticed, from the Greenglow days – a propellant-less electromagnetic or EmDrive, created by British aerospace engineer Roger Shawyer. What sets the EmDrive apart from other concepts? As Shawyer puts it: “We’re no longer looking to control gravity itself. We’re beating gravity the smart way.” Because the EmDrive actually appears to do something. In tests, it seems to move under its own steam.
Shawyer claims his concept uses a known property of microwave energy called “cut-off” to generate thrust. According to Shawyer, the conical shape of the closed box causes the microwaves to effectively stop at one end of the cavity, while continuing to vibrate against the other, creating a difference in pressure.
With a solar power supply, Shawyer claims he would be able to accelerate the EmDrive in any direction almost continually. “You would suddenly have a lift engine, which simply hovers there, or indeed accelerates upwards. So you can envisage launching large payloads into space on an EmDrive-driven space plane.”
The theorists are deeply sceptical of these claims because the EmDrive seems to defy Newton’s law of conservation of momentum. John Ellis at Cern is particularly scathing: “With the EmDrive, unlike a rocket, nothing comes out of it. So I don’t see how you can generate momentum out of nothing.”
Info on the BBC 2 program can be found here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0752f85
