Back in 2001, British electrical engineer Roger Shawyer introduced something that made physicists do a double take—the EmDrive, a so-called “impossible drive.” Why impossible? Because it claimed to work without any propellant, seemingly flipping Newton and Einstein by defying the conservation of momentum.
Unsurprisingly, scientists weren’t buying it. For two decades, researchers put the EmDrive through its paces, testing and re-testing, hoping to find a breakthrough—or at least a solid answer.
In 2021, the verdict was in: the EmDrive was a dud. Turns out, the laws of physics don’t like to be ignored. But that’s the beauty of science—throw wild ideas at the wall, test them to their limits, and either confirm them or debunk them so thoroughly that we move on to better things.
And guess what? The dream of a propellant-less drive didn’t die with the EmDrive. Enter a new contender, this time with a former NASA scientist leading the charge.
From EmDrive to ‘New Force’ Drive
Charles Buhler, a veteran scientist who helped set up NASA’s Electrostatics and Surface Physics Laboratory (you know, the place that makes sure rockets don’t blow up), is now co-founder of Exodus Propulsion Technologies. And he’s claiming that his team has cracked the code on a drive that produces thrust without expelling mass—powered by what he calls a “New Force” that doesn’t fit within our current understanding of physics.
“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.”
Sounds crazy, right? Well, Buhler himself admits that this work has no official NASA backing, but he did present his findings at the Alternative Propulsion Energy Conference (APEC). That’s a gathering of engineers and enthusiasts who are all about breaking the known rules of physics—sometimes with questionable scientific rigor.
So, How Does This Thing Work?
In an interview with APEC co-founder Tim Ventura, Buhler broke it down. His team—composed of folks from NASA, Blue Origin, and the Air Force—has been looking into propellant-less drives for years, experimenting with electrostatics. Their early prototypes barely generated any thrust, but each iteration improved. Then, in 2023, they claimed to have hit the jackpot: a drive that produced enough thrust to overcome gravity.
“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. Translation? If you mess with electrostatic fields the right way, you might be able to push an object without traditional propulsion.
Science or Sci-Fi?
It all sounds like a headline straight out of Star Trek, but history tells us to stay skeptical. We’ve been down this road before—remember the EmDrive? Back in 2016, NASA’s Eagleworks lab thought they detected thrust from the EmDrive, giving everyone a glimmer of hope.
But then came further testing, including an extensive study at the Dresden University of Technology, which found exactly zero thrust. Ouch.
So before we start talking about a future of fuel-free spaceships, there’s a long road ahead. Third-party researchers will need to rigorously test these claims again and again to confirm whether Buhler’s team has actually uncovered a hidden force of nature—or if we’re just seeing another case of wishful thinking colliding with hard science.
For now, let’s call it what it is: an improbable engine.
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