This sounds, like the EM drive, too much like trying to move your car by sitting inside and pushing on the dashboard....
Still, a "vacuum propeller" would be a massive revolution (no pun intended) if it is at all possible.
Still, a "vacuum propeller" would be a massive revolution (no pun intended) if it is at all possible.
Don't get me wrong, I see a vacuum chamber, which is light years ahead of most of these enterprises, but I would not spend a dime on it until it has been proven to work in a region of space relatively far from the Earth's magnetic field.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_mugging
That said, Woodward does not seem to be an actual charlatan, so I don't have a problem with funding him. At least he might turn up something fun and/or interesting, even if I don't think it's going to usher in a new space age.
I strongly suspect that whether history remembers him as a charlatan will depend heavily on whether one of the supports of his branch proves false and it snaps off, or whether he's been right this whole time and we suddenly oops ourselves a propellantless drive that operates by coupling to the gravitational field and pushing distant objects around. ;)
And that's very close to the kind of thing we're talking about here.