Former NASA Engineer Claims Propellantless Engine That Defies Gravity
A former NASA engineer and his private team say they have developed a propulsion system that generates measurable thrust using only electric fields—no propellant, no exhaust, and enough force in laboratory tests to counteract Earth’s gravity on the device’s active mass. The claim, if verified, would rewrite the rules of spaceflight. For now, it remains an extraordinary assertion waiting for independent confirmation.
Charles Buhler spent decades at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, where he helped establish and lead work at the Electrostatics and Surface Physics Laboratory. His expertise focused on electrostatic discharge hazards, surface charging, and dust mitigation—practical problems that can damage spacecraft or endanger missions. He contributed to programs including the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station, and the Hubble Space Telescope. Today he co-leads Exodus Propulsion Technologies with aerospace engineer Andrew Aurigema. The company has patented a system that generates force through asymmetrical electrostatic pressure.
According to Buhler and Aurigema, carefully designed solid-state devices create divergent or asymmetric electric fields. These fields, they argue, produce a net force on the object’s center of mass without expelling mass. They call the phenomenon a “New Force” or the “Exodus Effect.” In public statements, Buhler has described it as fundamental: electric fields alone can generate a sustainable force that allows center-of-mass translation without reaction mass.
The experimental record, as reported by the team, spans years of iterative work. Early devices produced forces on the order of one hundred-thousandth of Earth’s gravity—detectable with sensitive instruments but useless for practical propulsion. Performance improved through successive design changes, including thin-film constructions, different dielectric materials, and attention to free versus bound charge. By 2022–2023 the team reported a rapid rise in measured force. In vacuum-chamber tests they say certain configurations reached the “unity” threshold: thrust equal to one Earth gravity relative to the mass of the thruster element itself.
Those thruster elements are tiny. Reported forces fall in the millinewton range—often cited around 5 to 10 millinewtons. A force of 10 millinewtons can counter the weight of roughly one gram under Earth gravity. The active surfaces can weigh well under a gram, so the team claims the force is sufficient to “lift” the thruster relative to its own mass. The larger test fixtures and support structures do not lift off the ground. Measurements have been made with scales, pendulums, force plates, and rotary or spinner setups. The team reports testing more than 1,500 individual articles and roughly 2,000 experimental runs across air, oil, and high vacuum, employing Faraday cages, polarity reversals, sealed enclosures, and long pump-downs to reduce conventional artifacts such as ion wind.
Some descriptions include an especially puzzling observation: apparent force that persists for a time after electrical power is removed. Buhler has linked the effect, at least tentatively, to higher-order terms in quantum electrodynamics and interactions with the quantum vacuum. These theoretical suggestions remain speculative and have not been presented in a widely accepted peer-reviewed framework.
Propellantless propulsion claims are not new. The EmDrive of the early 2000s generated years of headlines and laboratory tests before more careful measurements attributed apparent thrust to thermal expansion, measurement error, or other mundane effects. Conservation of momentum is a foundational principle of physics. Generating net force without expelling mass or interacting with an external medium in a conventional way requires either a previously unrecognized interaction or an unrecognized experimental bias. History has repeatedly shown that the latter is more common.
Skeptics therefore demand rigorous independent replication. As of mid-2026, no outside laboratory has published results reproducing the claimed force using its own apparatus, instrumentation, and uncertainty analysis. Popular Mechanics and other outlets have noted this gap explicitly. Patents establish intellectual property but do not constitute scientific validation. Videos and conference presentations at venues such as the Alternative Propulsion Energy Conference generate interest but fall short of the standard required to revise textbook physics.
Exodus has moved from relative quiet into a more public phase. In 2026 the company participated in investor-facing events, including a meet-and-greet during Deep Tech Week in New York. Co-founder Andrew Aurigema has given detailed interviews describing construction methods, measurement techniques, and efforts to exclude false positives such as electrostatic attraction to chamber walls, thermal drift, cable forces, and residual gas effects. The team has spoken of developing larger vacuum facilities and assembling a more professional engineering staff. Buhler and colleagues consistently state that the decisive test must occur in space. Only an orbital demonstration can fully eliminate Earth-bound artifacts and allow long-duration observation of free motion.
If the effect survives that scrutiny, the implications would be substantial. Conventional chemical and electric thrusters must carry their reaction mass. For satellites, that means finite lifetime for station-keeping and orbit adjustments. For interplanetary missions, propellant mass dominates the vehicle budget. A reliable, scalable, propellantless system operating on electrical power alone could enable long-duration station-keeping, precise formation flying, continuous low-thrust trajectories, and more ambitious exploration architectures. Even modest continuous thrust in the millinewton-to-newton class would be valuable for many orbital applications. Scaling to higher forces remains an open engineering challenge.
For the present, the claim sits in a familiar and uncomfortable position: an experienced experimentalist reports repeatable laboratory results that appear to contradict established understanding, yet the wider scientific community has not independently confirmed them. Buhler’s background in operational electrostatics at NASA lends the work more credibility than the average fringe propulsion pitch. That background does not, however, exempt the results from the ordinary standards of evidence.
The next decisive steps are clear. Detailed methods, raw data, and uncertainty budgets must be shared in forms that allow outside groups to attempt replication. Ideally, a well-instrumented, self-contained unit should fly in orbit under transparent conditions. Until those tests occur and succeed under independent scrutiny, the Exodus Effect remains an intriguing experimental claim rather than an established new force of nature. Spaceflight has always advanced by testing bold ideas against unforgiving reality. This one will face the same test.
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