Amazing! said the rest of the Internet. A drive that can run without heavy propellant opens up travel to the farthest reaches of space. Not only that, but the NASA-based group testing the drive had detected a slight spatial distortion around it—a warp, in other words. As in "warp speed" and "warp drive." Not only could humans get to deep space unencumbered by fuel, but they could even travel faster than the speed of light!

Does that sound too good to be true? Excellent. This isn't the first time that this theoretical drive—tested by a small lab called Eagleworks, based at NASA's Johnson Space Center—has surfaced. Every time it comes up, it gets the space nerds frothing about the possibility of interstellar travel. And every time, physicists have to settle everyone down.

This time is like those times.

Last year, the Eagleworks lab—headed up by Harold "Sonny" White—said at a conference on propulsion technologies that they had measured thrust from an electromagnetic propulsion drive. The basic idea behind an EM drive, which is based on a design from a British engineer named Roger Shawyer, is that it can produce thrust by bouncing microwaves around in a cone-shaped metal cavity.