Цахилгаан орон ашиглан масс ялгаруулалгүйгээр хөдөлгөх хүч үүсгэх туршилтыг судлаачид хийж байна.
NASA-гийн электростатик судлаач асан доктор Чарльз Бюлер болон түүний үүсгэн байгуулсан Exodus Propulsion Technologies компанийн баг түлш шаардлагагүйгээр хөдөлгөх хүч үүсгэх боломжтой төхөөрөмжийг туршиж байна. Судлаачдын мэдэгдэж буйгаар 2023 оны арваннэгдүгээр сард хийсэн туршилтаар уг төхөөрөмж нь Дэлхийн таталцлын хүчийг сөрөхүйц хэмжээний түлхэх хүчийг үүсгэжээ.
Уг технологи нь цахилгаан орныг ашиглан биетийн төв цэгийг масс гадагшлуулахгүйгээр шилжүүлэх зарчимд суурилдаг. Доктор Бюлерийн баг 2021 онд вакуум камерт 146 төхөөрөмжийг туршсан бөгөөд туршилтын явцад үүсэх хүчний хэмжээ аажмаар нэмэгдэж, таталцлын хүчтэй тэнцэхүйц үзүүлэлтэд хүрсэн гэж үзэж байна.
Туршилтын явцад ионы салхи, хананы таталцал болон соронзон орны нөлөөг үгүйсгэхийн тулд төхөөрөмжийг хамгаалалтын уутанд хийж, битүү хайрцагт байрлуулан 180 градус эргүүлэн туршжээ. Хэдийгээр патентлагдсан уг технологи нь сонирхол татаж байгаа ч шинжлэх ухааны үүднээс эрчим хүчний хуулиудтай зөрчилдөж болзошгүй гэсэн эргэлзээ байсаар байна.
Төслийн баг 2026 оны гуравдугаар сар хүртэл 2000 орчим вакуум туршилт хийгээд байгаа боловч бие даасан лабораториудаар үр дүнг дахин баталгаажуулах асуудал нээлттэй хэвээр байна. Шинжлэх ухааны стандартаар бол уг хүчийг хүлээн зөвшөөрөхийн тулд өөр лабораториуд өөрсдийн багаж хэрэгслээр ижил үр дүнг гаргах шаардлагатай юм.
Дэлгэрэнгүйг эх сурвалжаас харах
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Inside a plastic bag, a nine-bladed device sat on a foam stand, tethered to a force meter. The meter registered a push. No propellant was being expelled, its inventors claimed. So what was pushing it?
Physics has been wrestling with versions of that question for decades. In 2001, British engineer Roger Shawyer unveiled a copper cone he said could propel itself through space without burning a drop of fuel. He called it the EmDrive. Critics called it the “impossible drive.”
The problem was conservation of momentum. Rockets move forward by throwing exhaust backward. A reactionless drive, like the EmDrive claimed to be, would somehow move without throwing anything out.
The EmDrive eventually fizzled under closer testing. But Dr. Charles Buhler, a NASA electrostatics scientist and co-founder of Exodus Propulsion Technologies, says his team has found something the earlier experiments missed. In November 2023, he claims, their propellant-free devices generated enough thrust to counter Earth’s gravity.
“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,” he told The Debrief.
The “Impossible Drive” Fizzled Once the Battery Went on Board
For years, the EmDrive kept producing small, intriguing signals. The best-known result came in 2016, when NASA’s Eagleworks lab reported detecting a slight thrust from the device inside a vacuum chamber.
Then came the harder tests. At the Dresden University of Technology, a team led by Martin Tajmar rebuilt NASA’s design and started chasing down anything that might trick a sensitive scale. One test involved bolting the copper cavity firmly to its mount. As the metal heated and expanded, it produced a convincing false thrust of about 20 micronewtons.
For their final setup, the researchers suspended a 9-kilogram (20-pound) EmDrive from a single bolt inside a vacuum chamber, with the machine running on its own battery pack. The 2021 paper reported no thrust above a noise level of 10 to 30 nanonewtons. Years of excitement over a fuel-free engine had come down to tiny forces, expanding metal and the difficulty of telling a genuine signal from experimental noise.
The Dresden group also tested capacitors charged to 10,000 volts, the basic hardware behind many electrostatic propulsion claims, and reported in the Journal of Electrostatics in 2020 that they detected no force.
A NASA Electrostatics Expert Says He Found a “New Force”
Buhler brings an unusually substantial résumé to a field crowded with fringe claims. He helped establish the Electrostatics and Surface Physics Laboratory at Kennedy Space Center and managed electrostatic discharge safety for the space shuttle, the International Space Station and Hubble. The Exodus work, he stresses, is a private undertaking based in Titusville, Florida, with no NASA affiliation.
According to Buhler, his team includes people from NASA, Blue Origin and the Air Force, and the group spent about 25 years pursuing propellant-free ideas before settling on electrostatics. For a long time, the results were barely measurable. Between 2016 and 2020, their best devices managed about one hundred-thousandth of a gravity.
After completing a vacuum chamber at the end of 2020, the team tested 146 devices inside it between January and September 2021, with reported results climbing through a thousandth, a hundredth and a tenth of a gravity before reaching one.
The equipment itself sounds almost absurdly simple. “You’re just charging up Teflon, copper tape, and foam, and you have this thrust,” Buhler told APEC co-founder Tim Ventura. He has also described devices that continue pushing for days after their power supply has been disconnected.
“It’s very hard to reconcile, from a scientific point of view because it does seem to violate a lot of energy laws that we have,” he said.
A Nine-Bladed Device SAT in a Plastic Bag on a Foam Stand
The plastic bag shows up in an international patent application filed in 2019 by Buhler and Exodus co-founder Andrew Aurigema. Their test article had nine blades, each about 4 inches (10 centimeters) long. The blades were coated in conductive paint and sealed in high-voltage epoxy.
For the test, the apparatus rested on a foam stand, tied by string to a force meter and connected to a power supply capable of 40,000 volts. The measured push averaged about 237 millinewtons, roughly the weight of 24 grams (0.85 ounce).
The bag was meant to stop ion wind, the breeze that high-voltage electrodes can whip up in surrounding air. In other runs, the team placed the device inside a grounded box and flipped it 180 degrees to rule out attraction to the walls. According to the filing, the force did not come from ion wind, wall attraction or Earth’s magnetic field.
As the APEC community’s own profile of Buhler points out, a patent documents a claim. It does not validate it.
Exodus Is Courting Investors, and the Replication Question Remains
Much of the public discussion has unfolded through the Alternative Propulsion Engineering Conference, a community covering everything from serious engineering to ideas still in need of far more rigorous testing. APEC listings in January, March and May 2026 described continued “testing and refinement” by Aurigema. During a March 2026 interview, Buhler said the team had carried out roughly 2,000 vacuum chamber experiments.
The project has moved into the commercial arena, too. At Deep Tech Week in New York, Exodus hosted a meet-and-greet on April 4, 2026, inviting physicists and investors to meet Buhler as the company’s founder and CEO.
As of May 2026, no outside laboratory had published a replication using its own apparatus, instruments and uncertainty budget. APEC’s profile of Buhler identifies independent replication as the biggest unresolved issue. The standard it lays out is specific: documented test protocols, uncertainty budgets and separate laboratories reproducing the claimed force with equipment of their own.
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