It is thrilling to know that the first spacecraft designed to test for thrust from quantised inertia (QI) is now up there. Designed and built by IVO Ltd, and launched on the 11th November aboard a SpaceX, Falcon 9 and sharing a cubesat belonging to Rogue Space Systems, it is now in a good low Earth orbit and IVO are monitoring it for a month to get statistics good enough to provide a baseline. At some point soon they will switch on the quantum drive and see if the orbit changes. If it does then the world will change with it. Very appropriately to the spirit of QI physics which has always been open to all, hence this blog, you can monitor the orbital data of the satellite (called Barry-1) for yourself here:
https://db.satnogs.org/satellite/QDDY-8878-5291-1819-3935#data
For more information you can see an article in The Debrief by Christopher Plain, with quotes from Richard Mansell, the CEO of IVO Ltd:
There's also a good article in Forbes by David Hambling, who has been following QI and related issues for a few years now, so he has a good grasp of it. It has quotes from Shawyer and myself:
Little did I know when I started scribbling on bits of paper back in 2006 (I was then a lowly scientist at the Met Office), that two years later I'd get an academic post and start this blog, six years later be invited to write a book, 11 years later get £1M in DARPA funds and 17 years later a US company would launch a test of QI into space! More will follow. It's been a thrilling ride, with a few temporary downs, but massive ups, including this launch. The pace is accelerating as well. My main hope is that I can continue to think calmly about fundamental physics as this all takes off!
