In 2001, British electrical engineer Roger Shawyer first introduced the “impossible drive”, known as EmDrive. It was called “impossible” because its creator claimed that it required no reaction or propellant, that is, it defied the laws of physics (specifically, the conservation of momentum).
As with everything that seems to mock Newton and Einstein, scientists did not hesitate and, after two decades of testing, in 2021 an inevitable (and somewhat predictable) conclusion was reached: the EmDrive was fake. But that’s the nature of the scientific method: taking a seemingly impossible idea, putting it through rigorous testing, and hopefully arriving at an irrefutable conclusion (or new discoveries that lead in other directions). But the non-physics-based dream of a propellant-less machine didn’t die with the EmDrive. Now a new candidate is approaching, and this one has the backing of a former NASA scientist.
During his time at NASA, Charles Buhler helped create the Electrostatics and Surface Physics Laboratory at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, a very important laboratory that is basically responsible for ensuring that rockets do not explode. Now, as co-founder of space company Exodus Propulsion Technologies, Buhler told the website The Debrief who have created a thruster powered by a “New Force” outside of our current known physical laws, giving the propellantless thruster enough momentum to overcome gravity.
“The most important message to convey to the public is that there has been a great discovery,” Buhler told The Debrief. “This discovery of a New Force is fundamental in the sense that electric fields alone can generate a sustainable force on an object and allow the translation of the center of mass of said object without expelling mass.”
Buhler stressed that this work is not affiliated with NASA, and that he recently presented his findings at the Alternative Propulsion Energy Conference (APEC), which is a club of engineers and enthusiasts eager to find ways to overcome the limitations of gravity and physics, and not always with the most scientifically sound methods.
In an interview with Tim Ventura, co-founder of APEC, Buhler explained how his training in electrostatics led to the discovery. He says his team — made up of people from NASA, Blue Origin and the Air Force — researched propellantless thrusters for decades before getting to electrostatics. For years, his devices produced negligible thrust, but increased with each new iteration. It all culminated in 2023, when this “New Force” generated enough thrust to overcome Earth’s gravity.
“Essentially, what we’ve discovered is that systems that contain an asymmetry in electrostatic pressure or some sort of divergent electrostatic field can give a center-of-mass system a non-zero force component,” Buhler told The Debrief. “So what that basically means is that there is some underlying physics that can, essentially, exert force on an object if those two constraints are met.”
Obviously, Buhler’s claims are pretty “woah, if they’re true,” but the history of propellantless thrusters is full of seemingly positive results that end up crashing on the rocks of scientific reality. In the case of the EmDrive, hopes for the device soared after NASA’s Eagleworks team, dedicated to researching new forms of propulsion (i.e. warp engines), claimed to measure the thrust of the “impossible” thruster in 2016. However, later studies – including an exhaustive one (no pun intended) from the Dresden University of Technology – found no push.
Before alternative propulsion enthusiasts start popping the cork, rigorous third-party research will have to verify the results again and again. While it is not impossible that Buhler may have stumbled upon some unknown quirk of physics, it is an extremely unlikely outcome.
For now, let’s call it the “improbable engine.”
Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff from him at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.
