An engineer says he has found a way to overcome Earth’s gravity

Here’s what you’ll learn as you read this story:

• Finding a machine 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 would defy the laws of physics.

• This limitation hasn’t stopped people from exploring the possibility, and the newest addition to the propellant-less club is an electrostatic design developed by a former NASA engineer.

• While the company behind the drive, Exodus Propulsion Technologies, says the drive can achieve force to resist Earth’s gravity, such a claim still needs independent verification and a healthy dose of skepticism.

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In 2001, British electrical engineer Roger Shire introduced the first “impossible drive”, called EmDrive. It was called “impossible” because its creator said the drive was reactionless, meaning no propellant was needed – in other words, it defied the known laws of physics (specifically, conservation of momentum).

As with anything that looks like thumbing the nose of Newton and Einstein, scientists raised more than a few eyebrows, and two decades of testing finally led to an inevitable (and somewhat predictable) conclusion in 2021: EmDrive was bunk. But that’s the nature of the scientific method – take a seemingly impossible idea, put it through rigorous testing, and hopefully arrive at an unassailable conclusion (or new discoveries that lead in other directions).

The non-physics-based dream of a propellant-less machine, however, did not die with the EmDrive. Instead, a new challenger is coming, and it has a former NASA scientist backing it.

While at NASA, Charles Buhler helped establish the Electrostatics and Surface Physics Laboratory at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. a lot An important laboratory that ensures rockets don’t explode. Now, as co-founder of space company Exodus Propulsion Technologies, Buhler told the website. Debrief That they have created a drive powered by a “new force” outside of our currently known laws of physics, giving the propellant-less drive enough boost to overcome gravity.

“The most important message to convey to the public is that a major discovery has been made,” Buhler said Debrief. “This discovery of a new force is fundamental in that only electric fields can produce a sustained force on an object and allow the object to translate the object’s center-of-mass.

Buhler emphasized that the work is unrelated to NASA, and he 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 — and not always in 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 — researched propellant-less drives for decades before arriving at electrostatics. For years, their devices produced negligible thrust, but saw an increase with each new iteration. It ended in 2023, when this “new force”-powered drive generated enough thrust to overcome Earth’s gravity.

“Essentially, what we’ve discovered is that systems involving an asymmetry in the electrostatic pressure or some kind of electrostatic divergent field can give the system a center of mass zero force component,” Buhler said. Debrief. “So, what this basically means is that there is some underlying physics that can put a force on an object if those two constraints are met.”

Obviously Buhler’s claims are “wow, if true”, but the history of propellant-less drives is littered with positive results that eventually dash against the rocks of scientific reality. As for EmDrive, NASA’s Eagleworks team, which claims to have measured thrust from an “impossible” drive in 2016, which is dedicated to exploring new forms of propulsion (namely warp drives), has hopes for the latter device. However, with subsequent studies – a device (disteno) in an expository university. zero thrust.

Before any alternative propulsion enthusiasts start popping corks, rigorous, third-party research will have to verify the results time and time again. While it is not impossible that Buhler et. Stumbled upon some unknown quirk of physics, this is a highly unlikely outcome.

For now, let’s call it the “Impossible Engine”.

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