A patented experimental propellantless propulsion drive is finally ready to go to space, according to its inventor, a veteran NASA scientist with decades of expertise in electrostatics.
Dr. Charles Buhler, the technology’s creator, says the propulsion system may represent a working version of Quantized Inertia, a theory first proposed by University of Plymouth professor Mike McCulloch. The proposition has been subjected to criticism from mainstream scientists in the past because it seemingly violates Newton’s third law of motion.
The controversial technology, which The Debrief covered in April, is privately owned by Exodus Propulsion Technologies and is not affiliated with NASA.
After almost a decade of research, design, and testing, Buhler says he and his team are confident they have verified the force, one his team calls the Exodus Effect(TM), in “nearly every way conceivable on Earth.” The final step required to officially demonstrate the validity of their discovery is to send the propulsion drive unit into space.
“We’ve done everything we could have in vacuum chambers here on Earth. We’ve tested it every which way you can, but the real validation is to have this thing move in space,” Buhler told The Debrief in a lengthy interview. “That’s the bottom line.”
Propellantess Propulsion Drives in Space
After numerous delays, a similar device dubbed the Quantum Drive did successfully make it to space last November. However, a failure in a satellite component unrelated to the drive scuttled that effort. To date, none of the propellantless drive inventions that physicists say shouldn’t work have actually been tested in space, including the infamous EMDrive, which Buhler believes his work may help explain.
“The idea not only violates Newton’s third law of motion,” wrote Rochester Institute of Technology astrophysicist Brian Koberlein in a May 2017 Forbes piece that scrutinized the EMDrive, adding that “it violates special relativity, general relativity, and Noether’s theorem. Since these are each well-tested theories that form the basis of countless other theories, their violation would completely overturn all of modern physics.”
“There are rules that include conservation of energy,” Buhler countered in a statement provided to The Debrief in April, “but if done correctly, one can generate forces unlike anything humankind has done before.”
“It will be this force that we will use to propel objects for the next 1,000 years,” Buhler said.
“Until the next thing comes.”
New Test Video Shows How the Technology (Allegedly) Works
Along with several test videos that appear on the company’s website, the Exodus Propulsion Technologies team recently allowed Tim Ventura, the host and co-founder of the Alternative Propulsion Engineering Conference (an organization The Debrief once termed “The World’s Most Exclusive (and Strange) Anti-Gravity Club”) to film a series of live tests in Exodus’ laboratory in Lake Merit, Florida.
According to Ventura, the film shows two failed tests, one successful test, and an artificially sped-up version of a pair of previously completed tests used to depict a more dramatic example of the Exodus Effect.
“I wanted to show the failed tests and the successful one, just so people know how hard this is,” Ventura told The Debrief.
Along with the video, Ventura also conducted numerous interviews with Buhler and his colleagues, all of which are available on the APEC YouTube channel.
When asked by The Debrief to explain the construction of the devices shown in the successful test video, Buhler said that his team’s test articles utilize basic materials and don’t require exotic or expensive rare earth metals. In fact, one of the most valuable components in the original drive designs is ordinary styrofoam.
“Most of the videos that you will see are Styrofoam thrusters,” Buhler explained. “They have the asymmetrical capacitive plates. We encompass them in Styrofoam.”
Encompassing the propellant mass in styrofoam not only keeps the ion wind down, but according to Buhler, the versatile and low-cost material can also stand the high voltages that air thrusters require. Other lightweight materials can experience sparking at these high voltages, which can cause an experimental failure and damage to the test article.
“You’re putting about 30, 40 thousand volts on these guys, and you just don’t want them to spark through,” Buhler told The Debrief. “So styrofoam helps to kind of prevent that breakdown. And it also protects the air from breaking down, too, and creating an ion wind. We do not want ion wind. We don’t want to break the gas down, don’t want to cause a spark.”
Buhler said that styrofoam is also very light, which is particularly beneficial in Earth-bound tests.
“When you are trying to do motion, you want as little mass as possible,” he explained.
Notably, Buhler said that the drive configurations they tested in vacuum chambers, which best approximate the environment of outer space, did not contain Styrofoam. That’s because the material is notoriously difficult to use in this environment.
“I think it explodes,” Buhler said with a smirk.
PODCASTS: Learn more about the Quantum Drive on The Debrief Weekly Report Podcast.
Exodus Prepares Scientific Paper Following Two Year ‘National Security’ Patent Delay
In addition to preparing a scientific paper detailing the years of exhaustive research and testing and their recent successes, Buhler told The Debrief that his company has finally received a long-delayed patent for the Exodus Effect.
“After being released from a 2-year national security hold, the first patent describing the Exodus Effect(TM) has finally been issued by the USPTO,” the company’s website explains. “The process of generating the Exodus Effect(TM) is repeatable, predictable, published and well-understood. Both acceleration and thrust (Newtons) are quantifiable and supported by 3rd-party validations.”
With the patent now in hand, which will help them protect the value of their research should it prove to work in space, the Exodus team says they are preparing to write a potentially peer-reviewed paper breaking down their research and the discovery of what Buhler and his colleagues firmly believe is a new force currently unrecognized by science.
However, with over 1,500 test articles and over 3,000 data sets to date, the affable researcher says it will be a monumental task to go through it all for a proper, comprehensive scientific paper.
“My partner [Exodus co-founder Andrew Aurigema] is too good at making these,” Buhler quipped. “So there’s a lot of data to go through.”
Buhler Clears Up Controversy over “One Gravity of Propulsion” Claim
In April, The Debrief reported that Buhler’s team claimed their device was able to counteract the full force of Earth’s gravity. As many scientists and journalists rightly pointed out, a test apparatus that weighs “30 t0 40 grams,” as Buhler specified at that time, would be too heavy for a drive producing a mere 10 millinewtons of thrust to counteract the full force of gravity exerted on it.
When asked to clarify the discrepancy, Buhler told The Debrief that his team stands by their claim that their most successful tests produced enough force to lift the actual propellant mass, hence the “one gravity of thrust” claim. The confusion, he explained, comes from the fact that the test article, rig, and accessories used to show the force acting on a device weigh roughly 30 to 40 grams, whereas the actual propellant mass is much lighter.
“What I meant to say is the thruster itself that generates 10 millinewton forces weighs only about 760 milligrams,” Buhler explained. “The framework that we put these things in weighs about 30 to 40 grams.”
Buhler says this means that although the entire rig doesn’t lift off of the ground, the most powerful results tested using his device show it is exerting enough thrust to counteract the force of Earth’s gravity on the apparatus’ tiny propellant surface.
“It’s just the thrust-making surface itself,” said Buhler. “All of the peripherals we don’t add into that. That’s how we kind of quantify from one test to another to validate our performance. That’s the metric that we use. How much thrust does the surface area make? What is the thrust it makes per a given weight? That’s where we see the ‘one gravity’ come in.”
Ion Wind and How-To Videos for Testing the Exodus Effect
Although Buhler and his partner have built and tested hundreds of different designs and configurations, the team says they have found that shape is not important. Instead, the NASA veteran told The Debrief that what matters to him and his team is being able to verify the force through good old-fashioned science.
“The configuration is just a different way to test the thrust,” Buhler explained. “Some may be more fun to watch—spinners, rotators—but we want to see it on the force meter. As scientists, we can quantify exactly the thrust because we measure the force of these devices within Faraday cages.”
For their latest experiments, Buhler says his team used a commercial omega force meter that is accurate down to a resolution of about 100 micronewtons. Notably, the researcher says his team isn’t measuring the force of the article. Instead, it is metering the force it is creating inside the Faraday cage since it is a more reliable form of measurement that helps eliminate other outside electromagnetic fields that could potentially skew the results.
“We measure the force on the actual Faraday cage itself,” said Buhler. “It’s completely encased, so the electric fields can’t escape.”
Next, the Exodus team says they would like to make additional detailed videos on how to build these thrusters.
“They’re very simple to make,” Buhler explained. “The challenge is testing them.
“That’s the challenge. It’s a very small force.”
However, the career electrostatics expert cautioned against casual efforts to build Exodus Effect thrusters due to the incredibly high voltages required.
“[We] don’t want people without high-voltage experience experimenting with this,” he cautioned.
Instead, the founder of NASA’s Electrostatics and Surface Physics Laboratory at Kennedy Space Center said he would recommend colleges and commercial laboratories that have the proper equipment and experience reach out to him for the details so they can build and test their own devices. In fact, Buhler says he hopes his devices can follow the path of easy-to-build ion thrusters that popped up on the internet a couple of decades ago, turning them from a hobbyist toy to a valuable tool for educators looking to teach their students about the effect of ion wind.
“This is the analog to that (ion thruster),” Buhler told The Debrief. “This is the same. I would like to see this go through the same process. Where people can build them in their homes and garages or even at universities and then test them and see this new force. Because it’s different than the ion wind.”
Efforts to Increase and Stack the Exodus Effect
When asked about the possibility of amplifying the force to increase its utility, Buhler says they have likely exhausted the current path to improving its strength. However, he does note that advancements in chemistry could lead to improvements in the thruster’s performance.
“Chemistry is a very useful field to help us,” he said. “They know all types of electronic properties of different materials, microscopic versions of these forces. We’re trying to get bound charges. All kinds of electrostatic processes we could take advantage of.”
“The chemists are really very good at understanding charges, charge flow, and all of those things,” he added.
When asked about the possibility of increasing the Exodus Effect using newly discovered metamaterials like graphene, Buhler said there are a number of scientific disciplines, including advanced materials, that may help improve the thruster’s output. However, he also said that in his experience, the best path forward might be perfecting the generation of the force at a smaller scale and then seeing if you can scale it up to a larger, more practical space drive.
“There’s almost endless possibilities when you’re talking about making high electric fields,” he explained. “So you try to do that on a microscopic scale if you can and try to see if you see the forces.”
“Once you get something that is small enough and light enough that you are happy with it, you see if they stack. You see if they add up. You then see if you can compile them together. So instead of worrying about making the force itself stronger, let’s just see if we can add ‘em all up.”
External Validation and Going to Space
When asked if anyone has validated his team’s experimental results outside of hobbyists, Buhler recounted an odd encounter he had with a fellow scientist at last month’s Electrostatic Society of America Conference.
“One of the scientists came up to me, a fellow who does ion wind propulsion, and he told me he was able to see this effect in his vacuum chamber,” Buhler told The Debrief. “And I said, ‘I bet it went in the other direction, of the ion wind.’ And he said ‘yes, it actually did go in the other direction.’ Another thing that’s so interesting about this discovery is that it actually moves in the direction of the ion wind. Think about that: rockets are moving in the direction of their propulsion!”
The other scientist in question had been Adrian Ieta, a professor at Oswego State University in New York. Also an electrostatics expert, Ieta was recently awarded a patent for his own ion propulsion technology breakthrough.
“He was very perplexed by the negative mass he was seeing on his scale,” Buhler noted with a bemused shrug. He also said that based on their conversation at the conference, the two researchers hoped to collaborate in the future.
“I think we’ll work together,” Buhler said.
Buhler also says his team would welcome anyone with the proper equipment and experience to try to replicate their results, particularly given their goal of publishing the discovery of the Exodus Effect in a peer-reviewed scientific publication.
“If anyone’s willing to validate it in high vacuum systems, that would be helpful,” he said. “I think that’s worth doing.”
Fortunately, Buhler says that more help may be on the way, thanks to the significant recognition his team’s work received following publication of The Debrief’s April story regarding his work, which he says has opened up a lot of possibilities.
“It’s been fantastic!” Buhler said. “We’ve gotten a lot of interest (from) all around the world. A lot of scientists have reached out to me. A lot of people from all walks of life have reached out, which has been nice.”
“I have a lot of emails backed up that need attention,” he added.
When asked about any reactions he received from his NASA colleagues based on the previous coverage (a process he described as “making me famous”), Buhler says the response has been overwhelmingly positive.
“A lot of them have reached out. A lot of them are trying to help, to help me get it into space.”
As for when his device may finally get the chance to go to space, Buhler remained optimistic that the money would soon become available.
“We have a lot of contacts now to help us down that direction,” Buhler said of the often tens of thousands of dollars required to hop a ride aboard a commercial satellite launch.
“So thank you for that.”
Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.