“The most important message to convey to the public is that a major discovery occurred,” Dr. Charles Buhler, former NASA engineer and co-founder of Exodus Propulsion Technologies, told The Debrief in an interview. His brash assertion, which has been candid, has elicited a swooning wave of interest and skepticism from scientists. Buhler asserts that his company has created a propulsion system that can escape the Earth’s gravity without consuming propellant a feat that violates the basic laws of physics.
The key to the success is what Buhler refers to as a “New Force,” an effect that he characterizes as the power of electric fields alone to create sustainable thrust. “This discovery of a New Force is fundamental in that electric fields alone can generate a sustainable force onto an object and allow center-of-mass translation of said object without expelling mass,” said Buhler. If it holds up, the idea can revolutionize space travel over the next few centuries, with a propulsion system that does away with traditional fuels and exhaust systems.
Ideas of propellantless propulsion are not new. In 2001, British engineer Roger Shawyer had developed the EmDrive, an invention that was said to generate thrust without propellant by reflecting microwaves inside a cone-shaped cavity. While originally in conflict with accepted principles, the EmDrive could not withstand examination, such as testing in 2021 at Dresden University of Technology with no measurable thrust. That the EmDrive failed illustrates the difficulty of manufacturing reactionless propulsion devices, which seem to defy simple concepts such as conservation of momentum. Buhler’s approach is different from the EmDrive.
His area of study is electrostatics, and he has extensive experience there as he was involved in creating NASA’s Electrostatics and Surface Physics Laboratory at the Kennedy Space Center. In Buhler’s view, the key lies in systems with electrostatic pressure asymmetry or divergent fields. “Essentially, what we’ve discovered is that systems that contain an asymmetry in either electrostatic pressure or some kind of electrostatic divergent field can give a system of a center of mass a non-zero force component,” he told Popular Mechanics. This achievement wasn’t overnight. Buhler’s team of researchers from the Air Force, Blue Origin, and NASA worked for decades studying propellantless drives before landing on electrostatics. Their experiments initially produced very minute levels of thrust, in milliNewtons enough only to hold aloft a minuscule apple. But incremental gains over time eventually paid off in 2023, when their device was able to produce enough thrust to overcome Earth’s gravity.
The size of the thrust is in units of gravity, and the goal is “unity,” or one gravity of thrust the amount of thrust a device would require to leave the ground. Later in 2023, Buhler’s team achieved this feat, with their device producing one complete Earth gravity of thrust. “Our materials are composed of many types of charge carrier coatings that have to be supported on a dielectric film,” Buhler told Futurism. “Our aim is to make it as lightweight as possible, but that is sometimes difficult since the films and their coatings have to have a high dielectric breakdown strength.” All of that aside, cynicism runs rampant.
History is replete with claims later determined to have been nothing more than under scientific testing. The EmDrive, for instance, had looked promising at one time after NASA’s Eagleworks team recorded a thrust in 2016, which led to follow-up testing to attribute the result to experimental faults. Buhler does admit his team’s results need to be strictly, third-party tested. “It’s very hard to reconcile, from a scientific point of view because it does seem to violate a lot of energy laws that we have,” he conceded in an interview at the Alternative Propulsion Energy Conference (APEC), one of the conferences working on finding out-of-the-box concepts for propulsion.
Buhler’s group is also seeking money to attempt the devices in space, where outside forces such as air currents and heat impacts are eliminated. “We’re hoping to do some demos,” Buhler stated. “Some space demos. That’s what we’re trying to get some funding to do. I think that would be a great way to show off the technology.”
Successful trials would open the door to a new generation of space flight. Propellantless propulsion technology would make space travel easier and less expensive, with the capacity to travel longer distances and participate in larger-scale endeavors. Furthermore, understanding the physics of this “New Force” could have deep implications for our understanding of the universe and potentially shed light on such enigmas as dark energy or the nature of space-time itself.
For the time being, Buhler is optimistic but guarded. “You can’t dismiss this,” he continued. “There’s not a lot to this. You’re just charging up Teflon, copper tape, and foam, and you have this thrust.” Whether his results will survive scrutiny by the scientific method remains to be seen, but this is certain: the search for propellantless propulsion continues to open doors to the unknown and the unimagined.
