IVO, NASA, DARPA and Another Group Are All Working to Test Quantum Drive’s in Space

Here is information of the Quantized inertia drive and experiments. There is information from several of the papers, video discussions and direct communication that I, Brian Wang, had with Mike McCulloch.

Mike McCulloch is working with two other teams planning to launch cubesats with propellentless thrusters, one of them with connections to NASA.

DARPA is no longer working directly with McCulloch but DARPA has launched a program called Otter, to demonstrate ability to maneuver without regret. DARPA is putting $17.4 million in 2024 into Otter.

The Otter program will develop and demonstrate space technologies that enable operations in new orbital domains that are currently inaccessible. Capabilities demonstrated will provide increased mission duration and ability to maneuver without regret. Key efforts include the development of new propulsion systems, improved ground test capabilities, and analysis tools to support system development. The anticipated transition partner is the U.S. Space Force. Otter will progress through development of analysis and test tools, design of candidate propulsion systems, build of a demonstrator satellite, and complete with a space demonstration.
FY 2024 Otter Plans:
– Conduct selection of propulsion system vendors, test facilities, and analysis tools developers.
– Develop analysis tools to support system design.
– Upgrade test facilities to support component testing.
– Develop and mature propulsion systems through a Preliminary Design Review (PDR).

In 2023, they are getting good results from a capacitor with a dielectric between plates with 8 micron separation. McCulloch uses Aluminium plates and kapton dielectric but IVO uses a solid dielectric. There are at least three groups working on the propulsion experiments and six labs worked on ground experiments. In Mike McCulluch lab at Plymouth, they saw 0.25 milliNewtons. IVO saw 52milliNewtons. The works is at about 1 watt of power because attempts to increase power causes problems at this time. There is still times when the system does not work.

The IVO drive system weighs about 200 grams. A Hall Effect thruster weighs about 100 kilograms. The IVO drive uses about one watt of power. The Hall effect thruster uses about 1-7 kilowatts of power.

IVO has the best results and have been able to make their system space worthy and had the funding to launch it. Mike McCulloch had the DARPA funding of $1.3 million. IVO seems to be privately funded. I do not know the IVO groups funding sources.

The IVO Quantized Inertia drive experiment is a capacitor cavity experiment using a solid dielectric. They can have made other improvements to achieve substantially more power than the other groups. The system could theoretically scale by finding ways to scale power, possibly making an array of devices and multiplying the effect. However, there are many unknowns and highly reliable operation has been elusive.

NORAD tracks all satellites and the IVO Barry-1 satellite with the Quantum drive experiment is being tracked. It is NORAD id code 58338.

It is traveling at 4.72 miles per second. If over the next few months it increases in speed instead of falling out of orbit then this would be evidence that the Quantum Drive works. They want to raise the orbit by 100 kilometers (60 miles). This should start sometime in the next 1-8 weeks and the drive will be on for a month or more.

The capacitor cavity approaches are getting the best results. It is a subtle effect. One has to start Fowler-Nordheim tunneling between the plates (leakage current). Tricky to do. If you ramp up the power too high it sparks and the effect is lost. There are other ways to enhance but those approaches need to be tested. There is a lot of trial and error and somewhat educated guesses.

In 2021, engineer Frank Becker read Mike McCulloch papers, remembered a capacitor-based Biefeld-Brown-type experiment he had done, and with a few discussion with Mike, Frank Becker and Ankur Bhatt tried it and produced milliNewtons of thrust. DARPA, who was funding Mike from 2018-2022 emailed Mike saying something like “What the heck is this!?”.

The Becker and Bhatt capacitors tested in the experiments have a performance above 0.4 [N/kW]; a benchmark often used by NASA to define a thrust ratio sufficient for interplanetary travel. This simple technology, in fact, has the advantage of being completely electric, thus suitable for fuel-less electric propulsion in vacuum. Moreover the scalability of this architecture, coupled with adequate energy source generation, might be appropriate for interstellar travel and precise maneuvering in space.

For some tests, typically associated with higher thrust force values, the overall capacitor was preheated for testing up to approximately 50 ◦C before placing the device onto the measurement apparatus. This also denotes that testing attempts at low ambient temperatures without pre-heating may lead to a thrust force too low to be detected.

One problem was that Becker and Bhatt had used a high voltage with a digital balance so there was a potential for glitches. Richard Mansell of IVO Ltd tried it with an analogue method and agreed with them. This new Mansell group has also blazed the path in innovation as well.

The method is to setup a potential difference of 5kV between the plates of a capacitor, and separate them by about 8-10 micron with a dielectric. You then allow electrons to quantum tunnel across the gap at a very low current (1 microAmp) but at a massive acceleration. The theory of quantized inertia says that they will see a field of nice hot Unruh radiation everywhere, except between the capacitor plates, as for the old Casimir effect. There will be then a quantum void between the plates that will pull the electrons out of the cathode faster than expected and this will add momentum to the system which will thrust towards the anode. A thrust from ‘nothing’. QI predicts the results of Becker and Bhatt and Mansell exactly, even the changes as you vary the plate separation.

The thrust depends most strongly on plate separation, but also linearly on current and power. The predicted thrust does not depend on the voltage, because although a higher voltage increases the amount of power between the plates it reduces the time the electrons spend there by the same proportion. Indeed Becker and Bhatt (2018) found a linear dependence with both current and power, which suggests that indeed voltage was not important. Equantions predicts a dependence on capacitor area.

It should be noted that this is only an approximate model, that assumes, for example, that metal plates completely block Unruh radiation. A factor which is simply unknown. The model cannot cope with more complex arrangements. For example, when the cathode was thickened, the result was that the thrust reduced and when a neutral conductor was positioned between the cathode and the Rindler horizon the force reversed (Becker and Bhatt, 2018). The reason for this is not clear.

In the case of the capacitor itself, it was assumed that the plates completely enforce a node on the Unruh waves at the position of the plate. In the case of arbitrary arrangement of metal plates this is more dicult to model since more than one node will be enforced and the thickness of the plates and the damping factor will have to be considered.

Finally, a metal plate placed to the right of the calculated position of the Rindler horizon caused a reversal, but when the plate was placed to the left of the Rindler horizon it had no effect. This makes sense in quantized inertia since events beyond the horizon cannot be ‘known’ by the accelerated electrons by denition. Therefore this test by Becker and Bhatt (2018) may be the first direct observation of a Rindler horizon.