Here’s what you’ll learn from reading this story:
-
The discovery of an engine that could somehow produce thrust without releasing propellant would be a game changer for human space travel. There’s just one problem—such a device defies the laws of physics.
-
This limitation has not stopped people from investigating the possibility, and the latest addition to the propellant-free club is an electrostatic design developed by a former NASA engineer.
-
While the company behind the drive, Exodus Propulsion Technologies, says that the drive can achieve thrust to counteract Earth’s gravity, such a claim still requires independent verification and a healthy dose of skepticism.
In 2001, British Electrical Engineer Roger Shawyer introduced the first “impossible drive”, known as the EmDrive. It was called “impossible” because its creator claimed that the thrust was without reaction, meaning no propellant needed—in other words, it defied the known laws of physics (specifically, the conservation of momentum).
As with anything that seems to thumb its nose at Newton and Einstein, scientists raised more than a few eyebrows, and two decades of testing eventually boiled down to an inevitable (and somewhat predictable) conclusion in 2021: the EmDrive was bunk. But that’s the nature of the scientific method—take a seemingly impossible idea, put it through rigorous testing, and hopefully come to an unassailable conclusion (or new discoveries that lead in other directions).
The dream not based in physics of a propellant-less engine, however, did not die with the EmDrive. Instead, a new challenger approaches, and this one has a former NASA scientist backing him.
While at NASA, Charles Buhler helped establish the Electrostatics and Surface Physics Laboratory at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida—a a lot an important laboratory that basically ensures rockets don’t explode. Now, as co-founder of space company Exodus Propulsion Technologies, Buhler told the website The Debrief who have created propulsion powered by a “New Force” outside our current known laws of physics, giving propulsion without propellant enough to overcome gravity.
“The most important message to convey to the public is that a major discovery has occurred,” Buhler said The Debrief. “This discovery of a New Force is fundamental since electric fields alone can generate a sustainable force on an object and allow the translation of the center of mass of this object without expelling the mass.”
Buhler emphasized that this work is not affiliated with NASA, and that he recently presented his findings at the Alternative Propulsion Energy Conference (APEC), which is a club of engineers and enthusiasts eager to find ways to overcome the limitations of gravity and physics—and not always in the most scientifically sound ways.
In an interview with APEC co-founder Tim Ventura, Buhler explained how his background in electrostatics led to the discovery. He says his team—made up of people from NASA, Blue Origin, and the Air Force—investigated propellantless drives for decades before arriving at electrostatics. For years, their devices produced negligible boost, but saw increases with each new iteration. This reached its climax in 2023, when this drive powered by the “New Force” generated enough thrust to overcome Earth’s gravity.
“Essentially, what we discovered is that systems that contain asymmetry in either electrostatic pressure or some kind of electrostatic divergent field can give a center-of-mass system a non-zero force component,” Buhler said. The Debrief. “So, what that basically means is that there is some underlying physics that can essentially put a force on an object if these two constraints are met.”
Of course the claims of Buhler are rather “woah, if true,” but the history of drives without propellant is full of apparently positive results that are eventually turned on the rocks of scientific reality. For the EmDrive, hopes for the device skyrocketed after NASA’s Eagleworks team, which is dedicated to the investigation of new forms of propulsion (ie warp drives), claimed to measure the thrust from the “impossible” drive in 2016. However, subsequent studies-including an exhaustive one (no pun intended) one at the University of Dresden zero technology—found.
Before any alternative propulsion enthusiasts should start throwing corks, rigorous third-party research would have to verify the results once again. While it is not impossible that Buhler et. al stumbled with some unknown quirk of physics, is an extremely unlikely result.
For now, let’s call it an “improbable machine.”
You can also Love