Jerry Pournelle on the New "Dean Drive"

Pournelle considers the the "microwave thruster" that's been getting internet attention.

An inventor named Norman Lomer Dean claimed to have created his own reactionless drive in the 60s. Science fiction writers took to calling the reactionless drive the "Dean Drive" in the wake of Dean's claims.

Pournelle was actually part of that story -- he was working for an aerospace firm at the time, and endeavored to buy the Dean Drive for the company. However, Pournelle (or his company, or both) wanted a demonstration of the device's alleged capabilities before paying for it -- but Dean never permitted that.

No deal went through. Pournelle recounts the story here.

Dean may or may not have been sincere, but he was certainly hard to deal with. He was so afraid -- or purported to be afraid -- that his gadget would be stolen that he wanted lots of money up front before he'd show it to us. Why he showed it to John and Harry [two scientists] I don't know; it was from their report that I concluded it was worth going back East and trying to buy the thing, and I convinced the General that we ought to put up the money. They decided to make it in a letter of credit valid if signed by me, the other science type, and a finance troop who was instructed to sign if both of us did. We went east, and I now know -- didn't then -- that 3M had sent a team with almost the exact same instructions to try to buy it if they thought it would work.

It may be that Dean thought that with at least two potential buyers (there's some evidence of a third but I don't know who it was) he could play tight and up the price. Perhaps he could have -- I'd have recommended far more than half a million if it worked -- but he wasn't going to get any takers until he showed the darn thing, and he wouldn't DO that. Oh. He also wanted a promise of a Nobel Prize. In my case I was perfectly willing to promise it. Of course I had no idea how I'd go about getting it for him, but I suspected that if he really could overcome Newton's third he'd have no trouble on that account.

Anyway, nothing came of it all. If it worked I never saw it work, and neither did the 3M team. The original device as described by Campbell and Stine was never found after Dean died, and the thing described in the patent doesn't work and isn't, according to Stine, what Dean showed as a working device.

Now of course Dean is dead and the new microwave thruster is not derived from Dean's device (whatever that was). But while he's open to proof, he's skeptical:

I fear I have over the years seen many of these papers with charts and equations and diagrams, but until I see an actual demonstration of inexplicable thrust I will wait to celebrate -- and even then I suspect it is more likely that they have discovered a flaw in the testing procedure.

He publishes emails from correspondents who are similarly skeptical.

D-Lamp notes, however, there is reason for hope that this is real. The guy who created this new drive was a NASA engineer who kept noticing that satellites drifted off course in the direction opposite their microwave emissions. This put him, I guess, on to the idea that microwaves could provide thrust.

Popular Mechanics also revisits the story about the 2012 near-miss of a powerful electromagnetic jet emanating from Our Common Enemy, The Sun.

Apologies: Two mistakes: 1, I left out the link to Pournelle's thoughts on the new microwave thruster. That link is now included.

2, I said Pournelle calls the new drive the "Dean Drive." What I meant to say was that proposed reactionless drives are frequently called, generically, "Dean Drives," due to the popularization of that particular claimed device in the 60s and 70s.

Finally, I included a link to my own discussion of the allegedly plausible reactionless drive. (First link.)

I also forgot to say: I love science.

posted by Ace at 02:34 PM

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