|
 All
spacecraft have one thing in common: No matter the details of
design, they all work on the rocket principle. Remember the last time
you went duck hunting, got really drunk and decided that it would be a
laugh to sit in a toy wagon and use the shotgun blast to make it go?
You don't? That's probably for the best. Anyway, that is
basically how a rocket works. You fire reaction mass in one
direction and the craft goes off in the opposite.
But what if you could make a space drive that
didn't need rockets?
 Enter Norman L.
Dean, who in the 1950s declared that he'd invented a machine that
could do for Newton's laws of motion that file sharing did for the
music industry. He claimed that he'd constructed a collection of
spinning weights and rods powered by an electric drill that could
produce a thrust of 0.056 Gs without anything like a rocket, jet,
propeller or anything similar. It was the space travel version of the
perpetual motion machine.
We don't know how it works because the plan of the "Dean Drive", as it
came to be called, was kept a deep, dark secret by its inventor,
who claimed to be afraid that government and industry were bent on
stealing it. In fact, he was so secretive that he refused to
demonstrate it unless huge sums of money were paid to him upfront.
And the promise of a Nobel prize thrown in for good measure.
All
things being equal, Dean would probably have been dismissed and
forgotten as a charlatan or a crackpot except that he showed the Dean
Drive to John W. Campbell Jr., the editor of Astounding Science
Fiction magazine, who after a brief examination of the
machine championed it as the next great potential in space travel that
was being ignored by scientist out of pure prejudice. Campbell,
on the other hand, saw the Dean Drive as not just possible, but actual
and practical and only to be accepted by blinkered scientists
for the United States to conquer Mars inside of a year and a half:
The modern nuclear submarine is, in fact, a fully competent
space-vehicle, lacking only the Dean drive.
With the Dean drive, the ship, if it can lift off the Earth at
all, can generate a one-G vertical acceleration. Since that
acceleration is being generated by engines capable of continuous
operation for months --- if not years --- at a time, the
acceleration can simply be maintained for the entire run; there
would be no period of free-fall for the ship or crew. Therefore the
present ship structure, equipment, and auxiliary designs would be
entirely satisfactory. Also, a sub has various plumbing devices with
built-in locks so the equipment can be used under conditions where
the external pressure is widely different from the internal.
In flight, the ship would simply lift out of the sea, rise
vertically, maintaining a constant 1000 cm/sec drive. Halfway to
Mars, it would loop its course, and decelerate the rest of the way
at the same rate. To the passengers, and to the equipment on board,
there would be no free-flight problems.
There is one factor that has to be taken in to account,
however; the exhaust steam from the turbine has to be recondensed
and returned to the boiler. In the sea, seawater is used to cool the
condenser; in space, the cold vacuum would do the job.
The tough part would be the first 100 miles up from the Earth;
ice could be used.
As a crash program, this could have been done --- if work
started when Dean first applied for his patent --- in 15 months. The
application went in in July 1956; 15 months later would have been
October 1957.
Under the acceleration conditions described above, a ship can
make the trip from Earth to mars, when Mars is closest, in less than
three days. And even when Mars is at its farthest possible point, on
the far side of the Sun, the trip would only take 5 days.
It would have been nice if, in response to Sputnik I, the US
had been able to release full photographic evidence of Mars Base I.
 Such enthusiasm
isn't surprising, if a bit over the top. Nuclear submarines to
Mars aside, even a very small thrust from an engine that
required no fuel would open up the entire galaxy to mankind in a
matter of decades-- if it worked. If being the
operative word. In 1959 and 1960
Campbell ran a number of articles and editorials in support of the
Dean Drive and berating scientists for not taking it seriously.
Campbell even included pages of mathematical formulae of what he
called "Davis Mechanics", named after the author William O. Davis,
that purported to prove that Newton's Laws could be amended.
Campbell's own description was singularly charming and much easier to
follow: "(It) digs its fingers and toes into the very warp and weft of spacetime and
_pulls_!".
 However,
Campbell's condemnation of scientific scepticism was a bit unjust.
The fact that scientists had nothing to actually study beyond Dean and
Campbell's assertions, that a very simple workshop test could have
demonstrated Dean's claims one way or another far better than the
bathroom scales that Campbell used, that even Dean's patents described
nothing like the device they claimed to be, and that Davis's opaque
formulas were merely opaque shows that Campbell was overlooking the
sceptic's case. However, defending Newton against
this machine turned out to be very simple even without a working Dean
Drive on the bench. Even if one granted that the Dean Drive did
what it claimed to do, it affected much more than Newton's laws.
It also impacted special relativity and a whole raft of physical laws
that couldn't be waved away by invoking the word "breakthrough" and if
it did work it would probably produce so little thrust for so much
energy that it would be almost impossible to measure on anything
except the most sensitive of instruments. In this face of this,
the matter proved a bit more complicated than tacking an amendment on
Newton's third law. Even Campbell realised this in
the end and by December 1960 he was backpedaling furiously, claiming
that he never really believed that the Dean Drive worked, but that he
was merely pleading with the scientific community to have an open
mind. Meanwhile, Von Braun kept tinkering with
rockets. |
