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01-04-2025, 06:19 PM
An Engineer Says He’s Overcome Earth’s Gravity. He discovering a machine that could somehow produce thrust without releasing propellant would be a game-changer for human space travel. There’s just one problem—such a device would defy the laws of physics.
This limitation has not stopped people from investigating the possibility, & the latest addition to the propellant-less club is an electrostatic design developed by a former NASA engineer.
While company behind the drive, Exodus Propulsion Technologies, says that the drive can achieve a thrust to counteract Earth’s gravity, such a claim still needs independent verification and a healthy dose of skepticism.
In 2001, British Electrical Engineer Roger Shawyer first introduced the “impossible drive,” known as the EmDrive, was called “impossible” because its creator purported that drive was reactionless, meaning no propellant required—in other words, it defied known laws of physics (specifically, the conservation of momentum).
As with anything that appears to thumb its nose at Newton & Einstein, scientists raised more than a few eyebrows, and two decades of testing eventually boiled down to an inevitable (and somewhat predictable) conclusion in 2021: the EmDrive was bunk. But that’s the nature of the scientific method—take a seemingly impossible idea, put it through rigorous testing, & hopefully get to an unassailable conclusion (or new discoveries that lead in other directions).
This limitation has not stopped people from investigating the possibility, & the latest addition to the propellant-less club is an electrostatic design developed by a former NASA engineer.
While company behind the drive, Exodus Propulsion Technologies, says that the drive can achieve a thrust to counteract Earth’s gravity, such a claim still needs independent verification and a healthy dose of skepticism.
In 2001, British Electrical Engineer Roger Shawyer first introduced the “impossible drive,” known as the EmDrive, was called “impossible” because its creator purported that drive was reactionless, meaning no propellant required—in other words, it defied known laws of physics (specifically, the conservation of momentum).
As with anything that appears to thumb its nose at Newton & Einstein, scientists raised more than a few eyebrows, and two decades of testing eventually boiled down to an inevitable (and somewhat predictable) conclusion in 2021: the EmDrive was bunk. But that’s the nature of the scientific method—take a seemingly impossible idea, put it through rigorous testing, & hopefully get to an unassailable conclusion (or new discoveries that lead in other directions).
