A NASA Veteran Claims to Have Used Mind-Bending Physics to Conquer Gravity

In April 2024, Charles Buhler, an electrostatics specialist who helped establish a laboratory at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, made a remarkable claim. His company, Exodus Propulsion Technologies, had built a device that could produce thrust without expelling propellant. He attributed the push to what he called a “New Force.”As we reported in our earlier coverage, Buhler’s claim would have big consequences for spaceflight. That promise depends on whether researchers outside Exodus can reproduce the push and rule out an ordinary explanation.One physicist has spent years investigating similar claims. Martin Tajmar, a professor and chair of space systems at Dresden University of Technology in Germany, has spent two decades measuring the forces produced by charged capacitors, including lopsided ones like the designs Buhler describes.“It’s all negative,” he tells Popular Mechanics. Meaning, his tests found no evidence of that force within the limits of his equipment. He hasn’t tested Exodus’s hardware, but his experiments show what an independent test would need to account for.Air can do the pushingA capacitor stores electric charge. Apply a high enough voltage to certain designs, and they can set the surrounding air moving, producing a push on the device itself. Tajmar calls this corona wind, “a discharge in air that drags air molecules with it.” In those cases, the device moves by pushing air backward, much as a fan does.Tajmar’s team wanted to see whether a capacitor would still produce a push with almost all the air removed. For their 2024 study in Scientific Reports, they put the capacitor and its battery-powered electrical equipment together on a sensitive balance inside a vacuum chamber. At 10,000 volts, an asymmetric capacitor produced no clear sign of an unexplained force, even with instruments sensitive enough to detect a push measured in billionths of a newton.Exodus hasn’t sent Tajmar a device, so he built his own capacitors for those experiments. He says his asymmetric design follows the principles in the company’s patent, though he doesn’t know the exact dimensions of its hardware.“It’s Exodus who have to say why my asymmetric capacitor does not produce any thrust,” he says.He believes his results challenge the company’s explanation, but he’d need its hardware to put its particular device through the same checks.The whole experiment has to behaveKeeping the battery and high-voltage equipment on the balance removes outside power cables that could interfere with the reading. Researchers also have to watch for electromagnetic forces or parts shifting as they heat up, either of which could look like thrust.Tajmar also recommends swapping the device for an electrical dummy that draws power but should produce no thrust. If the balance still registers a push, something else in the setup is causing it. Researchers would need to track that down before treating the reading as evidence of a working drive.Buhler has also said the devices can keep producing thrust after the power is switched off. Electrical charge can linger in insulating materials, leaving an electric field even after the supply is disconnected. Researchers would need to work out whether that leftover charge explains the reading and, if there really is a push, where it comes from.In a short white paper, Exodus says other experimenters have reproduced the effect and argues that the device pushes against the vacuum itself, allowing momentum to be conserved. But it doesn’t include their laboratory reports. Without those details, readers can’t tell how the experiments were done or whether the researchers ruled out other causes of the push.What leaving the propellant behind could changeSpacecraft have to bring along the propellant they’ll use to speed up, slow down or change course. That adds weight, which takes more propellant to move. The rocket equation puts numbers to that trade-off, showing how much a spacecraft can change its speed with the supply it carries.If a drive could produce useful thrust without using up propellant, engineers could plan missions differently. A spacecraft could keep changing course as long as it had enough power and the drive kept working. Some of the weight now devoted to propellant tanks and their contents could go toward other equipment.But the drive would bring its own baggage. It would need a power source and a way to get rid of waste heat, and all of that would have to travel with it. Engineers would need to find out whether the thrust was worth the weight of the complete system. Getting a reliable push in the lab would give them a reason to start working that out.Light can give a spacecraft a push, too. When a laser sends light in one direction, the laser gets a tiny push in the other, because light carries momentum. Tajmar points out that this already offers a way to produce thrust without using up material propellant.“If you just power a laser with the power that we use in our experiments, the thrust is also propellantless and actually already exists,” he says.The catch is how much power it takes. To hold up a 1.2-ounce object, roughly the weight of the devices Buhler described, a laser would need to send about 100 million watts of light downward. A drive that produced a useful push with much less power would be worth engineers’ attention. Researchers would also have to explain what carries momentum in the opposite direction, as the light does for a laser.The result has to travel“You have to test it in an independent laboratory. And then with a different method,” Tajmar says. He wants the results published so other experts can examine the work, including the equipment itself. Getting the same push on a different instrument would help show that the device deserves the credit.Nobody needs to make the whole apparatus float. Even a small sideways push would warrant attention if it survived those checks and other researchers could reliably reproduce it. Then engineers could start asking whether it was strong enough to put to work aboard a spacecraft.Buhler’s claim promises freedom from the propellant tank, which would change how we travel through space. The next move is closer to home. Put the drive in another lab, let someone else take the controls, and see whether the promise still has any push behind it.Eric Spitznagel is a frequent contributor to magazines like Playboy, Esquire, and the New York Times, and was employed for over two decades by the Second City comedy theater, where Stephen Colbert was his Secret Santa _twice.