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• Propellantless Propulsion Systems

  Michael > April 28th, 2024, 01:13 AM

  Science fiction stories are loaded with all sorts of impossible "drives" and inexplicable propulsion systems that magically scoot ships across the galaxy with ridiculously small amounts of mass.
  
  Nonetheless, a former NASA engineer now says his startup has developed a "propellantless propulsion drive" that actually works and can now produce enough thrust to break free of Earth's gravity.
  
  
  Once details of the drive's presumed physics (they don't actually understand how it works - so that's problematic) are published, science fiction writers should be able to start integrating the concepts into their stories.
  
  Source: NASA VETERAN’S PROPELLANTLESS PROPULSION DRIVE THAT PHYSICS SAYS SHOULDN’T WORK JUST PRODUCED ENOUGH THRUST TO OVERCOME EARTH’S GRAVITY
  
  
  Here is an excerpt from the article:
  

  
  

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  Throughout his APEC presentation, [Dr. Charles] Buhler highlights his team’s long chain of experiments, with a more detailed focus on the last decade. That in-depth account, which includes a lot of the mathematics behind what they discovered, not only shows how he and his team developed different models and configurations of their propellantless propulsion drive but also the significant breakthroughs many of these steps uncovered.
  
  For example, from 2016 to the end of 2020, their best devices were producing a little more than one hundred thousandth of a gravity. In the coming years, that would go up exponentially. For clarification, Buhler told The Debrief that measuring thrust in terms of a percentage of gravity reflects the force generated divided by the test article.
  
  “The aim is to approach and exceed unity,” he explained, “which means the article would generate enough thrust to lift itself in Earth’s gravity, and that’s defined as 1 gravity of thrust.”
  
  Buhler says they commonly measured the forces in milliNewtons, but they prefer to describe the thrust in terms of gravity since that is the ultimate goal of propulsion physics.
  
  “The highest we have generated on a stacked system is about 10 mN,” Buhler told The Debrief. “The magnitude is not important, really, since anything above zero would work in space!”
  
  In the years and months leading up to the breakthrough thrust measurement, Buhler and his team took great care to methodically eliminate anything else that could account for the tiny yet measurable force they were seeing. This detailed and painstaking work resulted in the team’s overriding patent, which was granted in 2020.
  
  With fresh momentum, Buhler says they also began construction of a custom-made vacuum chamber that would allow them to simulate the environment of deep space. If something else was causing the force, this chamber was built to identify it.
  
  According to the APEC presentation, that chamber was completed at the end of 2020. Between January and September 2021, 146 separate articles were tested, each seemingly confirming the presence of measurable thrust. The team also tested different configurations that eliminated the old designs using asymmetrical capacitors and instead employed models with opposing asymmetrical plates.
  
  

  
  
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