Peering Into The Future: Non-Propellant Drives For Spacecraft (Updated)

 A couple articles from The Drive this past month on some unusual spacecraft drives.

• "NASA Veteran’s Propellantless Propulsion Drive That Physics Says Shouldn’t Work Just Produced Enough Thrust To Overcome Earth’s Gravity"
• "Warp Drive Breakthrough Could Enable Constant-Velocity Subluminal Travel, Physics Team Says"

    The first article reports that "Dr. Charles Buhler, a NASA engineer and the co-founder of Exodus Propulsion Technologies, has revealed that his company’s propellantless propulsion drive, which appears to defy the known laws of physics, has produced enough thrust to counteract Earth’s gravity." The drive uses electrostatics, according to the article. Exodus Propulsion Technologies produced a vacuum chamber to test the drive in 2020, intended to eliminate any outside interference with the equipment and rule out other forces acting on the experimental drive. Dr. Buhler indicates that the company performed 146 tests in 2021, all of which seemed to produce measurable force. 

    Testing different configurations and materials, the company saw dramatic increases in thrust through 2022 and up to the latest test that produced a full 1 G of force.

“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. “So, what that basically means is that there’s some underlying physics that can essentially place force on an object should those two constraints be met.”

 Their next step is to move to actual tests in space. This seems interesting. I hope that it proves to be true.

    The second article, on using a warp drive, is mostly conjecture and mathematics at this point. Briefly, using the concept of warping space-time as used by the hypothesized "Alcubierre drive", the physicists behind this idea have figured that by eliminating faster-than-light travel from the equation, the same process could produce a warp field without resorting to exotic matter. The article explains:

According to their new research, the physicists propose integrating a stable shell of ordinary matter with the shift vector of a warp drive similar to the famous “Alcubierre drive” first proposed decades ago. This would allow a “warp bubble” to be achieved that will allow the movement of objects very rapidly through space within the bounds of light speed.

This is all based on computer modeling and not something that could be constructed in the foreseeable future, even if the theory was sound.

Update: Here is a video discussing the Exodus findings in the first article. The producer of the video throws in a bit at the beginning and end concerning UFOs, but about half of the video is about Exodus' findings including excerpts from an interview that Buhler gave:

VIDEO: "NASA Scientist's Propellantless Thrust Breakthrough - The Key to UAP Propulsion?"

Chris Lehto (16 min.)

Update 2: I found the full interview that is excerpted in the video above:

VIDEO: "Charles Buhler - Propellantless Propulsion Device"

Tim Ventura (31 min.)