Jim Woodward’s peers have long dismissed his ideas. But he now believes he has the data that could make interstellar travel possible for humans. (From 2020)
A homemade vacuum chamber houses Woodward’s Mach-effect thruster and test stand. The smallest breeze would invalidate the results.
Woodward’s favorite Einstein quote is “Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous,” and his cancer ordeal only reinforced his belief in its fundamental truth. “There was just one coincidence after another,” Woodward says. “By all rights, I should have been dead and gone 15 years ago.” Soon, he was hooked. He offered to help, and the duo quickly became inseparable, a professional relationship that’s part, part Watson and Crick. Although he didn’t fully buy into Woodward’s theoretical explanation for his Mach-effect thrusters, Fearn couldn’t resist the challenge. “How many people can say they’re trying to build a propulsion system to send spaceships to the stars?” Fearn says. “That’s what we’re doing here.”Photograph: Rozette Ragocommunity is a small one.
The work was enough to earn Woodward and Fearn a coveted spot in NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts program. In 2017 the duo secured a $125,000 grant from the space agency. It was the first funding Woodward had ever received to work on his device. Over the years, he had poured about $200,000 of his own money into building the thrusters.
In early 2019, Fearn flew to Germany to deliver another thruster to Tajmar. He stayed long enough to help Tajmar and his team set up the thruster and run some preliminary tests. Although these tests registered thrust, they were much smaller than what Woodward and Fearn had detected in their own lab. Tajmar visited Woodward and Fearn in California later that summer with more bad news. After Fearn had left, he’d run more tests in different configurations and again failed to detect thrust.
Seeing may be believing, but Woodward and Fearn both say they reacted to their results with more suspicion than jubilance. “I was shocked at the huge increase in measured force,” says Fearn. He initially thought that the movement might be due to the device’s balance recalibrating, but he says that doesn’t explain how the device is generating enough force to overcome the friction in the ball bearings so that it could move forward. Woodward is also suspicious, although less than Fearn.
There’s a problem, though: No one is sure what the right vibration frequency is for the device. When Woodward and Fearn conduct their tests, they cycle through a broad spectrum of frequencies, and it’s only when they pass a resonant frequency that they detect thrust. But that resonant frequency constantly shifts as the device heats up. It also varies with the experimental setup.
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