Understandably, the scientific community (and the pseudo-scientific online community) leapt onto Shawyer's designs with quite a bit of rancor.

This is because Shawyer's designs are in clear and direct violation of Newton's third law: there is an action (the microwaves pushing their vehicle forward) without any form of pushback that didn't come from the public outcry against his design. Note that although I am personally incredibly excited for the EmDrive and its potential, I have stayed away from calling Shawyer's design for the drive an invention because despite its promising math and more-than-promising tests, Shawyer's drive is still that — a promise.

A promise that NASA itself has decided to back by inducting the EmDrive into its Advanced Propulsion Physics Laboratory, nicknamed Eagleworks by the physicists stationed there, whose entire purpose is to research strange methods of spacecraft propulsion.

The EmDrive was reconstructed and tested by NASA's Eagleworks in November 2015, and it found the machine produced thrust. They repeated the tests again, with equipment designed to correct for any tremors and once again, the results were in Shawyer's favor.