Propellant-less propulsion

Yeah, I know. It sounds weird and impossible. "Every action has an equal and opposite reaction". That's how jet engines and rocket engines work. But this scientist has discovered a way to turn electricity directly into propulsion. Note that it doesn't break all the laws of physics---just that one.  Energy is still needed to create lift. There's just no intermediate step of propellant ejection. Fascinating.

If it's true, and if it's workable, here's what it means.  Most of the weight of a rocket at launch is fuel, the fuel it burns and pushes out the back to accelerate to escape velocity---just to get into orbit.  That means its payload is a tiny percentage of its total weight at launch.  But with propellant-less propulsion, you'll need a power source, and the rest will be payload, several orders of magnitude more than with chemical rockets.  And on flights to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and the stars, you'll be able to accelerate indefinitely, as long as you have electricity.  In the inner solar system, that'll come from solar panels.  In the outer system, from nuclear (fusion or fission).  With chemical rockets, it'll take at best 6 months to get to Mars.  With the Buhler Drive, it'll take a few days.  And that changes everything.  If it's true and if it works.

[From The DeBrief ]

Dr. Charles Buhler, a NASA engineer and the co-founder of Exodus Propulsion Technologies, has revealed that his company’s propellantless propulsion drive, which appears to defy the known laws of physics, has produced enough thrust to counteract Earth’s gravity.

A veteran of such storied programs as NASA’s Space Shuttle, the International Space Station (ISS), The Hubble Telescope, and the current NASA Dust Program, Buhler and his colleagues believe their discovery of a fundamental new force represents a historic breakthrough that will impact space travel for the next millennium.

“The most important message to convey to the public is that a major discovery occurred,” Buhler told The Debrief. “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.”

“There are rules that include conservation of energy, but if done correctly, one can generate forces unlike anything humankind has done before,” Buhler added. “It will be this force that we will use to propel objects for the next 1,000 years… until the next thing comes.”

To document his team’s discovery as well as the process behind their work, which Dr. Buhler cautions is in no way affiliated with NASA or the U.S. Government, the outwardly amiable researcher presented his findings at a recent Alternative Propulsion Energy Conference (APEC). Filled with both highly-credentialed career engineers and propulsion hobbyists, APEC is an organization The Debrief once referred to as the World’s Most Exclusive (And Strange) Anti-Gravity Club.

A quick look at Dr. Buhler’s background confirms that he is indeed one of NASA’s top experts in electrostatics. In addition to overseeing the management of electrostatic discharge (ESD) and ESD safety for the Space Shuttle, the ISS, and Hubble, Dr. Buhler also established NASA’s Electrostatics and Surface Physics Laboratory at Kennedy Space Center.

His Exodus Propulsion Technologies team is equally impressive. According to a slide from his APEC presentation, “the Team consists of a mix of engineers and scientists from NASA, Blue Origin, Air Force, ExxonMobil as well as successful legal and businessmen.”

Somewhat surprisingly, Buhler says that when he and his colleagues first began looking into propellantless propulsion ideas over two decades ago, they did not expect electrostatics to be the answer. Instead, he and his team explored other avenues for as many as 25 years before landing on electrostatics as the key to unlocking the door of this new force.

“Nature has its own way of doing things,” Buhler explained, “and it is our job to uncover what nature does. It just happened to fall into my lap in what I’m the expert in.”

Throughout his APEC presentation, Buhler highlights his team’s long chain of experiments, with a more detailed focus on the last decade. That in-depth account, which includes a lot of the mathematics behind what they discovered, not only shows how he and his team developed different models and configurations of their propellantless propulsion drive but also the significant breakthroughs many of these steps uncovered.

For example, from 2016 to the end of 2020, their best devices were producing a little more than one hundred thousandth of a gravity. In the coming years, that would go up exponentially. For clarification, Buhler told The Debrief that measuring thrust in terms of a percentage of gravity reflects the force generated divided by the test article.

“The aim is to approach and exceed unity,” he explained, “which means the article would generate enough thrust to lift itself in Earth’s gravity, and that’s defined as 1 gravity of thrust.”

Buhler says they commonly measured the forces in milliNewtons, but they prefer to describe the thrust in terms of gravity since that is the ultimate goal of propulsion physics.

“The highest we have generated on a stacked system is about 10 mN,” Buhler told The Debrief. “The magnitude is not important, really, since anything above zero would work in space!”

In the years and months leading up to the breakthrough thrust measurement, Buhler and his team took great care to methodically eliminate anything else that could account for the tiny yet measurable force they were seeing. This detailed and painstaking work resulted in the team’s overriding patent, which was granted in 2020.

With fresh momentum, Buhler says they also began construction of a custom-made vacuum chamber that would allow them to simulate the environment of deep space. If something else was causing the force, this chamber was built to identify it.

According to the APEC presentation, that chamber was completed at the end of 2020. Between January and September 2021, 146 separate articles were tested, each seemingly confirming the presence of measurable thrust. The team also tested different configurations that eliminated the old designs using asymmetrical capacitors and instead employed models with opposing asymmetrical plates.

“Our materials are composed of many types of charge carrier coatings that have to be supported on a dielectric film,” Buhler told The Debrief. “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.”

After employing these new designs, the next series of tests produced even more encouraging results. The team once again confirmed the thrust, but the new approach resulted in an order of magnitude jump to one ten-thousandth of a gravity. This was still not enough to leave the planet, but it was enough to know they were on the right track.

With an end seemingly within sight, the team immediately began to try newer and better designs. They continued to measure thrust while also pretty much ruling out every conventional explanation they could come up with. This was not anything they had ever measured before.

Then, in 2022, something astounding happened. According to Buhler, his team began to see significant jumps in the force being generated.

A quick look at a chart he presented to APEC shows that tests performed between early 2022 and November 2023 resulted in a rapid climb, moving from one thousandth, one hundredth, and even one-tenth of gravity all the way up to one full Earth gravity. This means that their current devices, which Buhler told The Debrief “weigh somewhere between 30-40 grams on their own” without the attached test equipment, were producing enough thrust to counteract the full force of one Earth gravity.

A slide from Dr. Buhler’s APEC presentation highlights just a few of the hundreds of tests his team ran on their propellantless propulsion drive between 2016 and 2023. Image Credit: Exodus Propulsion Technologies, Buhler, et al.

 

After decades of research, Buhler says he and his team had shown unequivocally that a new, fundamental force was at work and that his devices were tapping into that force to produce thrust without emitting any mass or propellant.

“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,” Buhler explained. “So, what that basically means is that there’s some underlying physics that can essentially place force on an object should those two constraints be met.”

While a potentially game-changing breakthrough, Dr Buhler’s team is not the first to claim the ability to generate thrust with only an electrical charge and no propellant. The Debrief previously covered some of the most notable entries, including the EM Drive and IVO LTD’s Quantum Drive.

Although the former has had its thrust confirmed by NASA Warp Drive specialist Harold G. “Sonny” White’s EagleWorks Lab and a second test in China, both of which still remain controversial, neither has yet to be tested in space. The Quantum Drive came close after a launch last November, but a failure in the satellite’s electrical systems unrelated to the drive scuttled that test before it could confirm the drive’s thrust.

A slide from Dr. Buhler’s APEC presentation highlights some of the other propelantless propulsion concepts and scientific mysteries that may be explained by his team’s findings. Image Credit: Exodus Propulsion Technologies, Buhler, et al.

 

The Dream Chaser space plane

 Competition is good, because it cuts costs.  The Dream Chaser space plane by SNC is another way to get to and from Low Earth Orbit (LEO), competition to SpaceX's Starship.  Like the Space Shuttle, it can land like a plane on a runway.  

The Space Shuttle was supposedly reusable, to cut the costs of launching to LEO, but in practice, checking and replacing the heat shield tiles was so expensive that it still cost billions each launch.  It was also not very safe, with two shuttles blowing up, one during launch, and one during re-entry.  It was retired 13 years ago, and all astronauts had to use the Soviet/Russian Soyuz rocket system to get to and from the International Space Station (ISS) until SpaceX's Dragon Crew Capsule started work.  

Musk's Starship is intended to colonise Mars, though it will be essential to launching all the Starlink satellites that will be needed to set up a mass universal satellite internet/phone system.   So the Starship lands vertically using retro-propulsion (the atmosphere on Mars isn't thick enough for wings to work).  This is tricky, though I don't doubt that SpaceX will eventually make it work.   

So, two alternate, competing technologies.  It --- at last! --- looks as if Dream Chaser will make its first test flight soon.  That is, if the rocket that is supposed to launch it is ready by then, which seems unlikely.  Perhaps SNC should have a chat with SpaceX, and use the Falcon 9 rocket to launch its Dream Chaser.

This video is a good explanation of Dream Chaser.

Astroclipper spaceplane

Earth's gravity well is too deep for single-stage-to-orbit spacecraft.  For example, though SpaceX's Starship would make it to orbit, it would have no fuel to return, let alone be able to carry a payload.  So we need two stages to lift a payload into orbit, and to make launches and space travel cheap (relatively), each stage needs to be re-usable.   SpaceX has done this already, with its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, though Crew Dragon, the re-usable capsule to take crew to the ISS  (International Space Station) hasn't yet flown, and suffered a nasty setback when a previous prototype blew up during testing.  SpaceX's Starship/Super Heavy duo hasn't yet flown, though early tests have been promising.  If Starship/Super Heavy works it will be able to lift 100-150 tonnes into LEO (low Earth orbit) at 1000th the cost of existing launch systems.  But SpaceX's rockets lift off and land vertically, and that is on purpose—Starship is designed to work on celestial bodies where there is no atmosphere, such as the Moon.  Since the earliest days of space travel, the dream has been to have space vehicles which can take off from and land at airports just like planes.

Fraser Cain has done a good video about Astroclipper, a combined plane/rocket, which will do just that.

(All images from Fraser Cain's video)

The X-33, a single-stage-to orbit spaceship which was planned by NASA and then cancelled.  It would take off vertically then coast to a landing like an aircraft.  A 1/3rd size mockup was built, but the project was then cancelled.

But a winged spaceship (to assist re-entry and re-use) was first planned in 1957, and was called the Dynasoar.  It too was cancelled, for budgetary reasons.  This is the wind tunnel test model.

NASA toyed with this version of a re-usable booster, which would take off from an airport (instead of vertically) and then land at an airport.

Exodus Space Corp's solution is a two stage spaceplane.  It takes off from an airport like a jet, using conventional air-breathing jets.  At about 20 kilometres altitude, the rocket engines take over.  In an interesting wrinkle, the oxidiser isn't liquid oxygen (which means cryogenic fuel tanks with all their problems) but hydrogen peroxide.  At 75 to 110 k's, the two stages separate, and the first stage coasts back to land at an airport.

This is the timeline which Exodus Space Corp suggests.  The competitive advantages they point to seem plausible.  The timeline does not. 

The thing is, there is a ferment of new developments in space exploration right now.  SpaceX plans to have commercial launches of Starship by mid 2021, Blue Origin's New Glenn will have commercial launches in 2022, and Sierra Nevada Corporation's Dream Chaser in 2021.  By the mid 2030s, competing technologies will have gone through a couple of iterations.  Exodus Space Corp's offering will be competing against seasoned and familiar technology which will be hard to beat.  Given how rapidly SpaceX is developing its technologies, it's hard to see that they won't see off this competition.  If this two-stage spaceplane is cheap and convenient enough, SpaceX or Blue Origin or Virgin Space will easily be able to copy what Exodus Space Corporation is doing, because these ideas can't be patent-protected, and all the other players will be able to diversify from their existing technologies to produce something comparable.

Extremely interesting, all the same.