As you read this story, you will learn the following:
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Discovering a machine that can generate thrust without releasing propellant would be a game-changer for human space travel. There’s just one problem – such a device violates the laws of physics.
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This limitation hasn’t stopped people from investigating the possibility, and the latest member of the propellant-free club is an electrostatic design developed by a former NASA engineer.
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While the company behind the drive, Exodus Propulsion Technologies, says the drive can achieve thrust that counteracts Earth’s gravity, that claim still requires independent verification and a healthy dose of skepticism.
In 2001, British electrical engineer Roger Shawyer first introduced the “impossible drive”, the EmDrive. It’s called “impossible” because its creators claim the drive is non-reactive, meaning no propellant is required – in other words, it defies known laws of physics (in particular the law of conservation of momentum).
Like anything sniffing at Newton and Einstein, scientists were puzzled, and two decades of testing finally led to an inevitable (and to some extent predictable) conclusion in 2021: EmDrive is bullshit. But that’s the nature of the scientific method – take a seemingly impossible idea, subject it to rigorous testing, and hope to arrive at an indisputable conclusion (or new findings that lead in other directions).
However, the dream of a propellant-free machine based on physics did not end with the birth of EmDrive. Instead, a new challenger is looming, and this one has the backing of a former NASA scientist.
While at NASA, Charles Buhler helped establish the Electrostatics and Surface Physics Laboratory at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida – Very A vital laboratory that basically makes sure the rocket doesn’t explode. Now, as co-founder of aerospace company Exodus Propulsion Technologies, Buhler told the site report They created a drive powered by a “new force” outside of our currently known laws of physics, giving the propellant-free drive enough push to overcome gravity.
“The most important message to convey to the public is that a significant discovery has occurred,” Buhler told report. “The discovery of the new force is fundamental because an electric field alone can generate a sustainable force on an object and allow the center of mass of said object to translate without displacing mass.”
Buller, who emphasized that the work is not affiliated with NASA, recently presented his findings at the Alternative Propulsion Energy Conference (APEC), a club of engineers and enthusiasts eager to find ways to overcome the limitations of gravity and physics, but 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 this discovery. He said his team, which includes people from NASA, Blue Origin and the Air Force, conducted decades of research on propellant-less drives before studying electrostatics. For years, their devices produced negligible thrust, but each new iteration increased the thrust. This situation reaches its peak in 2023, when this “new force” drive generates enough thrust to overcome the Earth’s gravity.
“Essentially, we found that systems that contain asymmetries in electrostatic pressure or some kind of electrostatic divergence field can provide a non-zero force component to the center-of-mass system,” Buhler told us report. “So, what this basically means is that if these two constraints are met, there are some fundamental physical principles that can exert a force on an object.”
Obviously, Bühler’s statement was quite a “wow, if that’s true,” but the history of propellantless drives is full of seemingly positive results that were ultimately shattered by scientific reality. As for the EmDrive, hopes for the device have soared since NASA’s Eagleworks team, which is working on a new form of propulsion called a warp drive, claimed to have measured the thrust of an “impossible” drive in 2016. However, subsequent studies, including an exhaustive (no pun intended) study at Dresden University of Technology, found that the thrust was zero.
Rigorous third-party studies must verify the results again and again before any alternative propulsion enthusiast can get started. Although it is not impossible that Buhler et al. Al stumbles upon some unknown quirk of physics, a highly unlikely outcome.
Now, we call it the “Incredible Engine.”
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