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.
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| 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.
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| 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. |
