The SpaceDrive project – Developing revolutionary propulsion at TU Dresden
Martin Tajmar · Matthias Kößling · Marcel Weikert · Maxime Monette
Summary and citation · read the original at the source · none found
In one page
Martin Tajmar and his team at the Institute of Aerospace Engineering in Dresden set out here what the SpaceDrive project is for. Their premise is that propellantless propulsion is the right architecture for interstellar flight, and that the propellantless options already in hand — photon rockets and solar sails — deliver so little thrust that only nano-scale craft pushed by very high-power lasers could cross to the nearest star inside a working lifetime. So since 2012 Dresden has kept a dedicated breakthrough-propulsion group whose job is to test concepts that claim at least ten times more thrust for the same power, most of which work by modifying inertial mass. Two are under test: the EMDrive, microwaves fed into a truncated cone-shaped cavity, and the Mach-Effect Thruster, which is expected to produce a time-averaged force from mass fluctuations driven in a stack of piezoelectric crystals. Around both, the group is building thrust balances good enough to tell a real force from a laboratory artefact — which is the actual point of the programme.
Why it matters hereThis is the paper that puts a named university group, a funding line and a hardware plan behind the idea that thrust can come from modifying inertia rather than throwing mass overboard — chapter 8’s subject exactly. It also sets the standard chapter 1 asks for: measure the candidate and the artefact side by side, on instruments built to tell them apart.
What it claims
01Since 2012 a dedicated breakthrough propulsion physics group has been running at the Institute of Aerospace Engineering at TU Dresden, investigating concepts that claim to be at least an order of magnitude more efficient at producing thrust than a photon rocket. Most of the schemes it tests rely on modifying the inertial mass, which in turn could lead to a new propellantless propulsion method.Publisher’s abstract, sentences three and four
On the bench now02The group’s stated intention is to develop research infrastructure that can test new ideas and measure thrusts or artefacts with high confidence, so as to determine whether a concept works and, if it does, how to scale it up. That is a deliberate reordering of the usual priority: the instrument comes before the result.Publisher’s abstract, sentence five
On the bench now03The first concept under test is the EMDrive, which feeds microwaves into a truncated cone-shaped cavity and is claimed to produce thrust. The authors note that it is not clear on which theoretical basis this can work, but that several experimental tests have been reported in the literature, which warrants a closer examination. Dresden is building several models of different sizes to understand scaling laws and the interaction with the test environment.Publisher’s abstract, sentences six to eight
On the bench now04The second concept is the Mach-Effect Thruster, which the authors describe as theoretically much better understood: it is believed to generate mass fluctuations in a piezo-crystal stack that create non-zero time-averaged thrusts. Alongside theoretical models the group is testing and building several such thrusters in novel setups to investigate their thrust capability further.Publisher’s abstract, sentences nine and ten
On the bench now05Several cutting-edge thrust balances are under development so that thrust measurements can be compared across different measurement setups, both to gain confidence and to identify experimental artefacts. Running the same article on more than one balance is the design decision that lets a null result count for as much as a positive one.Publisher’s abstract, final sentence
Designed, not yet built06What to watch: whether either device produces a force that survives the instrument. The programme also runs side-experiments into other experimental areas that may be promising for revolutionary propulsion, so the same balances serve more than the two headline concepts. The measurements that answer the question are the ones the group published next, on a purpose-built balance with the thruster reversed and the power chain instrumented.Publisher’s abstract, sentence eleven; companion paper, Acta Astronautica 161, pages 139 to 152
What to watch
The way in
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actaastro.2018.10.028SOURCE NOT REACHED IN FULL. Published as Acta Astronautica volume 153, pages 1 to 5, December 2018, by Martin Tajmar, Matthias Kößling, Marcel Weikert and Maxime Monette of the Institute of Aerospace Engineering, Technische Universität Dresden. Licence checked on 2026-09-08: Crossref carries only Elsevier’s text-and-data-mining user licence, which is not a Creative Commons grant, and Unpaywall, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar and CORE all report the article closed with no repository deposit and no open conference version under this title. No text of the paper is reproduced here. The claims below are written from the publisher’s own structured abstract, retrieved through the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph on 2026-09-08, which runs to about three hundred words and states the programme’s founding, its two lead concepts and its instrument plan directly; each locator names the sentence of that abstract it comes from. Where a locator says ’companion paper’, it points to the group’s follow-up campaign, already summarised on this site, which reports the measurements this overview announces. SpaceDrive is funded by the German space agency DLR from Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs funds approved by the German Parliament, grant 50RS1704. When an open copy of this paper can be read, this sheet should be rewritten from it.
How to cite it
Martin Tajmar, Matthias Kößling, Marcel Weikert, Maxime Monette (2018) The SpaceDrive project – Developing revolutionary propulsion at TU Dresden. doi:10.1016/j.actaastro.2018.10.028
Where it sits in the curriculum
Gravity control and superconductorsInertia and gravity from the vacuumInertial mass reduction and transmedium craftThe evidence ladder