Charles Buhler of Exodus Propulsion Technologies reports success

[natecull]

A news story from three days ago (based on a Youtube interview from three months ago) reports an apparent success for an electrostatic propellentless-propulsion drive.

This is pinging my Townsend-o-scope. Could it be the long-awaited first actual credentialled unclassified-world replication of something in the electrostatic weird-stuff department? Or yet another disappointment? One gravity of thrust in a lab is basically a moonshot level of success.

Note also the timeline. If this breakthrough began happening in 2022... when did the US Congress suddenly get scared about weird tech in private-corporate SAPs not being disclosed to them, and potential scooping of advanced propulsion technology by foreign countries because of that secrecy? Wasn't it last year, 2023, that something lit a fire under Chuck Schumer? Was it this?

I want to believe. I want to believe so very badly.

1942 (Townsend's Vega notebook) to 2022 is 80 years. Is it finally time?

The Tim Ventura Youtube interview : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhsKMWOYuYo

The "The Debrief" article: https://thedebrief.org/nasa-veterans-pr ... s-gravity/

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.

A veteran of such storied programs as NASA’s Space Shuttle, the International Space Station (ISS), The Hubble Telescope, and the current NASA Dust Program, Buhler and his colleagues believe their discovery of a fundamental new force represents a historic breakthrough that will impact space travel for the next millennium.

“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.”

There are rules that include conservation of energy, but if done correctly, one can generate forces unlike anything humankind has done before,” Buhler added. “It will be this force that we will use to propel objects for the next 1,000 years… until the next thing comes.”

The Serendipity of Discovering the propellantless Propulsion Drive

To document his team’s discovery as well as the process behind their work, which Dr. Buhler cautions is in no way affiliated with NASA or the U.S. Government, the outwardly amiable researcher presented his findings at a recent Alternative Propulsion Energy Conference (APEC). Filled with both highly-credentialed career engineers and propulsion hobbyists, APEC is an organization The Debrief once referred to as the World’s Most Exclusive (And Strange) Anti-Gravity Club.

In conjunction with that presentation, “The Discovery of Propellantless Propulsion: The Direct Conversion of Electrical Energy into Physical Thrust,” Dr. Buhler also sat down with APEC co-founder and moderator Tim Ventura to explain how his past in electrostatics, which is his primary area of expertise, ended up being a key component of his discovery of this new force.

“You are NASA’s subject matter expert in electrostatics,” Ventura clarified in the first part of the interview. “So, if anyone would know about conventional explanations for anomalous measurements (for the measured thrust), it would be you, right?”

“That’s true,” Buhler conceded with an outwardly humble shrug.

A quick look at Dr. Buhler’s background confirms that he is indeed one of NASA’s top experts in electrostatics. In addition to overseeing the management of electrostatic discharge (ESD) and ESD safety for the Space Shuttle, the ISS, and Hubble, Dr. Buhler also established NASA’s Electrostatics and Surface Physics Laboratory at Kennedy Space Center.

His Exodus Propulsion Technologies team is equally impressive. According to a slide from his APEC presentation, “the Team consists of a mix of engineers and scientists from NASA, Blue Origin, Air Force, ExxonMobil as well as successful legal and businessmen.”

Somewhat surprisingly, Buhler says that when he and his colleagues first began looking into propellantless propulsion ideas over two decades ago, they did not expect electrostatics to be the answer. Instead, he and his team explored other avenues for as many as 25 years before landing on electrostatics as the key to unlocking the door of this new force.

“Nature has its own way of doing things,” Buhler explained, “and it is our job to uncover what nature does. It just happened to fall into my lap in what I’m the expert in.”

“Our materials are composed of many types of charge carrier coatings that have to be supported on a dielectric film,” Buhler told The Debrief. “Our aim is to make it as lightweight as possible, but that is sometimes difficult since the films and their coatings have to have a high dielectric breakdown strength.”

After employing these new designs, the next series of tests produced even more encouraging results. The team once again confirmed the thrust, but the new approach resulted in an order of magnitude jump to one ten-thousandth of a gravity. This was still not enough to leave the planet, but it was enough to know they were on the right track.

Breakthrough in 2023 Produces One Gravity of Thrust

With an end seemingly within sight, the team immediately began to try newer and better designs. They continued to measure thrust while also pretty much ruling out every conventional explanation they could come up with. This was not anything they had ever measured before.

Then, in 2022, something astounding happened. According to Buhler, his team began to see significant jumps in the force being generated.

A quick look at a chart he presented to APEC shows that tests performed between early 2022 and November 2023 resulted in a rapid climb, moving from one thousandth, one hundredth, and even one-tenth of gravity all the way up to one full Earth gravity. This means that their current devices, which Buhler told The Debrief “weigh somewhere between 30-40 grams on their own” without the attached test equipment, were producing enough thrust to counteract the full force of one Earth gravity.

“Knowledge of gas breakdown, corona generation, brush discharges, streamers, glow discharges, plasma physics, etc., is usually too much for engineers to bear alone,” he told The Debrief, “and the number of experts in Electrostatics is very, very few.

Now that surprises me. One of my long-time causes of skepticism (combined with faint hope) toward the Townsend Brown mythology is that I assumed electrostatics was extremely well explored and that there must be lots of experts - and therefore that Townsend's weird force might not have many places to hide. Yet here's an actual NASA electrostatics expert saying there aren't many others!

That poses the question: Why are there so few experts in electrostatics? It's not like it's a hard thing to study, compared to say particle physics! What's stopping physics departments from getting interested in this extremely obvious subject? It's literally where electricity began!

Another unusual result from their tests was that sometimes the tested devices did not require a constant input of electrical charge to maintain their thrust. Given that the device already appears to violate the known laws of physics by creating thrust without propellant, this result even stumped Dr. Buhler and his team.

“We can see some of these things sit on a scale for days, and if they still have charge in them, they are still producing thrust,” he told Ventura. “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.”

“You can’t deny this,” he told Ventura. “There’s not a lot to this. You’re just charging up Teflon, copper tape, and foam, and you have this thrust.”

So, while his team believes their experiments speak for themselves, the veteran scientist says he also believes it is the job of science to analyze and understand this discovery. If successful, he thinks it may even address some of the harder questions in science, including the nature of dark energy or even space/time itself.

“It’s easy to make these things,” he said, “so it’s a tool for the scientific community to use to try to explore those hard questions.”

These sound like all the hallmarks of Townsend's tech.

Reddit UFOs forum discussions (multiple):
https://old.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/ ... of_thrust/
https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/ ... oaNGem3cec

The patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2020159603A2/en

Ah, it's that "electrostatic pressure force" one we've seen before. Interesting. I had shelved that as probably being just one weird guy with a strange "loophole in physics" idea, but.....


Nate

[natecull]

Having watched the video: Very interesting. Tim Ventura is a great interviewer with a good grasp of all the previous history - I remember following him in the heady days of the early 2000s when it felt like disclosure was about to happen, until it didn't. I'm glad he's stayed in the game. Like Ventura, I feel like this one is more interesting than previous Townsend replication attempts.

Exodus started doing "gravitator" like devices, then moved to thin film systems which performed better, then moved to "chemical battery-like" liquid systems. At each stage the mass of the device was less but the force remained the same. That's a little suspicious (feels easily misled by noise: I want to see the device staying the same size and the force getting bigger), but still feels in line with what Townsend was thinking.They've been doing vacuum chamber tests for only the last two or so years.

This particular device definitely depends on pure electrostatic charge - "the thrust goes away if there is any current". That means it's very much not in line with ideas about force involving the change of current over time. What, then, about stories of tubes and cables that supposedly jerk when rapidly charging or discharging? (Such as the origin story of Transdimensional Technologies, the people who first made the Lifter). That one must be some other force, perhaps? But the pure electrostatic force is the most interesting one, and seems to relate to Townsend's simplest experiment: the circa-1950s "Perspex sheet covered with tinfoil and hung from a wire".

I really need to go back and check the other post - I feel like the text of this particular patent document is different, because it starts with defining the key concept, "Electrostatic Pressure Force", which for some reason I didn't notice as easily in the previous document I read. But the timeline of (unclassified-world) post-Townsend tech seems worthwhile to post here in its own right. I feel like he's missed a fair bit of Townsend's history - no mention of Montgolfier, for instance.

[007] The notion of using electric fields as a method of propulsion was previously explored as far back as the 1920’s by, for example, Thomas Townsend Brown (“Brown”). Brown discovered that a force was developed on a Coolidge tube when the tube was subjected to a high voltage. His electric field force effect is an electrical phenomenon, which employs an electric field for generating applied forces, which could be used, for example, to motivate a spacecraft without exhausting propellant. As disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,949,550 [Brown 1957] and 3,187,206 [Brown 1958], as an“electrokinetic” phenomenon, electrical energy can be converted to mechanical energy which is then used to provide a force for providing movement to a structure. There were several patents describing propellentless propulsion devices based on this effect coined the“Biefeld-Brown Effect” named after Brown and his graduate school advisor, Dr. Paul Alfred Biefeld. Brown and Biefeld were U.S. Pat. No. 2,949,550 [Brown 1957], U.S. Pat. No. 3,018,394 [Brown 1957a], and U.S. Pat. No. 3,187,206 [Brown 1958] for devices based on utilization of the effect. Brown’s colleague A. H. Bahnson was similarly issued U.S. Pat. No. 2,958,790 [Bahnson 1958], U.S. Pat. No. 3,223,038 [Bahnson 1965], and U.S. Pat. No. 3,227,901 [Bahnson 1966] utilizing the effect.

[008] There has been recurring interest in these devices since the work of Brown. In one configuration, two asymmetrical capacitors are arranged to rotate about a vertical axis, termed Asymmetrical Capacitor Thruster (ACT). Another common configuration involves one capacitor plate of a capacitor plate pair being disposed above its mate, arranged so the device can lift off of the ground. This device is called a lifter. Alexander de Seversky investigated lifters during the 1960’s with his “Ionocraft” and received a U.S. patent [Seversky, 1964] De Seversky’s craft combined a series of wires perpendicular to a mesh plate to lift the device. J.L. Naudin and others have constructed devices similar to the original Brown patent, and then assembled multiple devices into larger designs to create“lifters” that perform similarly to de Seversky’s craft. These designs vary greatly in size and shape; some are comprised of multiple cells, or comprise stacked layers of cells, to create more efficient and more powerful devices. Other such devices are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,492,784 to Hector Serrano [Serrano 2002], which generates the Biefeld-Brown Effect using stacked-disc asymmetrical capacitors.

[009] NASA also has investigated the use of Brown's discovery. Jonathan Campbell of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center has designed and tested ACTs that use dielectrics to increase their thrust, receiving U.S. patents for this work in 2001 and 2002 as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,317,310, No. 6,411,493, and No. 6,775,123 [Campbell 2001, 2002, and 2003]

[0010] Thomas Bahder and Chris Fazi [Bahder and Faze 2002] of the Army Research Lab (ARL) in Adelphi, MD have also reported work on the subject. They constructed multiple devices, both original and reproductions of designs found on the internet and made qualitative observations. Bahder and Fazi’s paper includes a brief history and an attempt at an explanation of the cause of the force observed. However, they conclude that “At present, the physical basis for the Biefeld-Brown effect is not understood.”

[0011] An early test of this effect in vacuum was performed by Robert Talley [Talley et al., 1991] of Veritay Technology performed in the late 1980’s under an Air Force contract. Talley suspended a sphere-disk ACT from a suspension wire and measured torsion forces on it. This gave him the sensitivity to be able to measure small forces. This lengthy report is one of only two written on this effect describing a measurement of a force while in a vacuum chamber. Talley ultimately attributed the force that he observed to the electrostatic interaction between the chamber and the device. Talley wrote,“Direct experimental results show that under high vacuum conditions... no detectable propulsive force was electrostatically induced by applying a static potential difference... between test device electrodes...” Talley concluded (page 91 of his report),“If such a force still exists and lies below the threshold of measurements in this program, then the force may be too small to be attractive for many, if not most, space propulsion applications.” While this work makes a strong case against the ability of these devices to produce a force in a vacuum, it did not address the use of asymmetrical capacitors in the atmosphere.

[0012] Follow-on work was performed by NASA to evaluate the technology. A comprehensive review of the current state of the art can be obtained from Canning, Francis X., Melcher, Cory, and Winet, Edwin, Asymmetrical Capacitors for Propulsion, Glenn Research Center of NASA (NASA/CR-2004-213312), Institute for Scientific Research, October, 2004. Canning [2004] showed that a majority of asymmetrical capacitors (ACTs) exhibit a null thrust unless there is an accompanying ion wind. They performed tests on cylindrical-disk geometries under applied voltage in a vacuum bell jar and concluded that there were no forces produced in a vacuum. They find that their operation is“fully explained by a very simple theory that uses only electrostatic forces and the transfer of momentum by multiple collisions”.

[0013] Nearly all patents described above include an electrode at a high voltage in air, the consequence of which is that the air is ionized as electrons are stripped from its gas molecules. Once the gas ions are charged, they will traverse toward the electrode of the opposite polarity as directed by the field. This current is known as corona current. These gas ions bombard other neutral gas ions which in turns produces a net movement on the gas which is normally ~1 m/s. Since these thrusters are comprised of an asymmetry of the electrical field there is only one direction of gas movement emanating from the sharp electrode to the dull electrode. The sharp electrode creates a higher electric field locally which ionizes the gas whereas the dull electrode does ionize the gas. This asymmetry gives rise to the direction of the wind regardless of the polarity of the electrodes. In all cases, momentum is conserved by having a net ion wind in one direction, and the momentum on the asymmetrical capacitor in the opposite direction. There are applications that take advantage of this effect, such, for example, devices such as lifters. In 2018, Professor Steven Barrett of MIT made headlines by building a horizontal aircraft fly across a gym with no moving parts using ion wind thrust [Xu et al, 2018] and spoke at a recent Electrostatics Society of America conference on the subject. [0014] Many of the above patents make no reference to ion-wind effects; and, experimenters, including Brown, do not mention methods to mitigate this well-known ion- wind effect. As a result, many authors who test asymmetrical capacitors believe the force they observe will have some use either in space or for large aircraft, both of which are impossible for ion-wind versions. Therefore, the current state of the art of the use of electrical energy for the direct production of linear force and motion is through ion wind propulsion or one of the two technologies mentioned below.

[0015] The most current example of a propellantless field propulsion system is an electromagnetic drive system as disclosed in British Patents GB2229865, GB2334761, GB2399601 and UK Patent Application GB2537119 to Shawyer, as well as U.S. Pat. Appl. No. 20140013724 to Fetta. This system includes an axially-asymmetric resonant cavity with a conductive inner surface adapted to support a standing electromagnetic (EM) wave. The resonating cavity lacks second-axis axial symmetry, thereby causing the standing EM wave to induce a net unidirectional force on the resonant cavity, thus generating thrust without reaction mass. Experimental versions of these EM devices have reportedly produced thrust levels of micro-newtons up to milli-newtons from several kilowatts of input power (AIAA Journal of Propulsion and Power, op.cit).

[0016] Field modification approaches to propellantless propulsion include apparent reductions in gravitational mass or inertial mass. U.S. Pat. No. 3,626,605 to Wallace discloses a method and apparatus for generating a time-variant non-electromagnetic force field due to the relative motion of moving bodies constituted of elements whose nuclei have half integral “spin” values, with said force field exhibiting itself in the form of an induced secondary gravitational force. U.S. Pat. No. 5,280,864 to Woodward in 1994 discloses a method for producing transient fluctuations in the inertial masses of material objects by employing an effect that is a consequence of relativistic theories of gravitation. This patent is a continuation in part of application Ser. No. 07/521,992 filed in 1990 as CIP of U.S. Application Ser. No. 07/031,157 filed in 1987 as CIP of application 6/919,647 filed in 1986, now all abandoned. The patent basically uses high frequency vibrating piezoelectric force transducers to accelerate a capacitor array while applying high frequency AC to electrically oscillate ions in the dielectrics. The relativistic Mach Effect was predicted to produce unidirectional forces.

[0017] In subsequent U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,098,924, No. 6,347,766 and No. 9,287,840, Woodward disclosed various improvements to the device of U.S. Pat. No. 5,280,864 for producing propellantless thrust by using piezoelectric force transducers attached to resonant mechanical structures, in accordance with Mach's principle and local Lorentz-invariance predictions of transient rest mass fluctuations in accelerated objects. The device was designated the “Mach Effect Thruster”. The latest U.S. Pat. No. 9,287,840 in 2016 incorporates acceleration and temperature feedback sensors in the electronics control system, uses a DC bias voltage superimposed on the high frequency the AC voltages to activate transducers, and applies pulsed AC waveforms. With these improvements, the device produced 6-7 micro-newtons of thrust with a 100 W power input, which is approximately 14 megawatts/Nt. The disclosure admits that the device is not scalable and that arrays of multiple small devices would be necessary to generate larger thrusts.

[0018] In U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2006/0065789, Woodward introduced his“flux capacitor” which proposed modifications to the devices of U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,280,864, 6,098,924, and 6,347,766 to overcome a serious internal propagation speed problem. The force transducers were eliminated, and the capacitor arrays were either enclosed within induction coils or external induction coils were aligned with axes perpendicular to the displacement fields in the capacitor. The objective was to replace transducer accelerations by using induction coils to generate perpendicular magnetic field oscillations of the dielectric ions.

[0019] None of the above described systems or methods satisfy the stated need in the art.

This is the key paragraph I was missing before:

[0021] Generally, the system and method of the invention satisfies the stated need in the art by generating a force usable for any purpose, such as, by way of example and not by limitation, thrust, motivating force or actuation, without the use of any expelled propellant, or any propellant at all. The system and method of the invention takes advantage of an aspect of the conservation of momentum for electromagnetic systems in a novel way, in which a net force is generated on a system or object by imbalances of electrostatic pressure. This “Electrostatic Pressure Force (EPF)” has been thoroughly tested by the inventors and has been verified repeatedly in a laboratory environment using a variety of independent configurations for the system of the invention.

Nate

[natecull]

Here's the previous mention: viewtopic.php?p=22263#p22263