from Hacker News

NASA Veteran's Propellantless Propulsion Drive That Physics Says Shouldn't Work

by DanielBMarkham on 4/20/24, 2:34 PM with 45 comments

  • by rapjr9 on 4/20/24, 8:19 PM

    A lot of people here seem to be missing that Buhler is a _current_ research scientist at NASA, leading the Electrostatics and Surface Physics Laboratory at Kennedy. Here's a 2022 paper he is an author on:

    https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20220007230/downloads/Fi...

    Here's an article on the NASA web site from April 10, 2024 quoting him:

    https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/kennedy/nasa-tec...

    which says he is a lead researcher on the Electrodynamic Dust Shield project at NASA. Here's a similar article quoting him:

    https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/nasa-eds-techn...

    He's playing with alternative propulsion engineering on his own as a side project. If you watch the video of his presentation at APEC he says two groups have replicated some of his work. He's tested it in a vacuum. He has not tested it in space but would like to. Maybe that will make the effect disappear. But he's a leading expert on electrostatics at NASA, currently working for NASA, and he thinks this is real and he's been playing with it for a long time. He says it is trivial to reproduce, you need like $10 worth of material (more to do it in a vacuum). It's hard to see why he would make false claims and jeopardize his day job.

  • by eig on 4/20/24, 3:27 PM

    This triggers all the sketchy science alarms:

    -New fundamental force

    -Explains warp drive (??)

    -Requires exquisite measurement methods and cancelling out all other interfering forces (which inevitably they won’t do well)

    -Ex-big institute head scientist to lend credence

    -No supporting scientific papers in a reputed journal

    -Big claim of legitimacy based on a patent being granted

    This is far sketchier than even Ranga Das’s superconductivity claims.

  • by NegativeK on 4/20/24, 2:53 PM

    I'm sorry -- it's much, much more likely that this guy is wildly wrong than him actually finding 1G reactionless engine thrust. It's bad science to outright declare his stuff to be impossible, but it's not bad science to say that I'm not going to spend time on it until he has demos that are being reproduced by others.

    Also, I hope he's wrong. Reactionless drives in space are potential civilization destroyers.

  • by bragr on 4/20/24, 3:21 PM

    I think it's pretty telling that this guy using his knowledge of electrostatics as a shield, when the experimental failure of previous reactionless drives have come down to magnetism, especially interaction with the Earth's magnetic field. NASA has a excellent mu-metal shielded vacuum chamber for debunking reactionless concepts. Stick it in there, and let's talk if it shows some results.

    https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/nasas-em-drive-is-a-...

  • by macrael on 4/20/24, 4:01 PM

    Never a good sign when you have a line in your slides that says “Alien spacecraft are made to be very light. Why?”

    He mentions aliens multiple times. Not a good sign when claiming to have discovered a new force coming out of a static electric charge.

  • by simne on 4/21/24, 6:50 PM

    What I see here.

    Crookes radiometer don't work in really high vacuum, which is not cheap, if do all things with boring rules.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crookes_radiometer

    Without rules, high vacuum is achievable on just ~150km, with amateur rocket, I hear in US somewhere about thousand dollars for sub-orbital launch (smallest orbital rocket cost about million).

    For example in electronic microscope also used high vacuum, and such microscope usually cost about million dollars and as I remember, it need about tens hours to achieve such high vacuum, so could easy calculate, about thousand experiments in 3-4 years (accounting amortization period for high cost equipment), and also each experiment will cost about thousand dollars without interest rate.

    I think, he is typical NASA scientist, bored at his work and have spare money to play game with fake patent.

    As NASA worker, he really have possibility to place his experiments in high vacuum chamber, and I'm sure he have experience and seen nothing.

    And I'm sure, he understand well, mentioned in patent configuration is very hard to research, and very easy to accidentally achieve some extraordinary results.

    But you, humble reader, don't have such opportunities, but you could donate to him for his crazy experiments.

  • by GlibMonkeyDeath on 4/20/24, 4:50 PM

    It's a slow Saturday morning, so I actually watched most of his YouTube presentation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJjPi7uZ2OI&t=3696s I stopped at the Q&A where they started going off about UFOs...) He claims that the dU/dx in an asymmetric capacitor (a spatial gradient in internal energy) leads to a net overall force on the center of mass. If that were true in this system, then two different springs under compression would also have a net force on the center of mass. Or two adjacent, differently pressured vessels. It's just wrong. There is no net change in momentum happening in this system.

    His "quantum" explanations are even worse (just some hand-wavy BS with the fine structure constant thrown in.)

    I don't doubt he has managed to generate 1 g of electrostatic force on a charged object - but that force has to be reacted against something else. Otherwise Newton would be spinning at an ever-accelerating rate in his grave.

  • by clarkmcc on 4/20/24, 3:00 PM

    For someone that is smarter than me, here’s his patent https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2020159603A2/en

  • by m0llusk on 4/20/24, 3:06 PM

    Even if this thing turns out to be slamming some kinds of particle out the back it could still be a quite useful drive system.

  • by kcartlidge on 4/20/24, 6:58 PM

    Reading the article and skimming the patent, whilst the explanation differs slightly the basic setup seems to just be the Biefield-Brown Effect. A heavily charged electrical condenser tends to exhibit motion towards it's positive pole.

    I'm not a physicist and don't know if this is ion wind, if it works in a vacuum, or if this (and the Biefield-Brown Effect) is just dodgy science. Merely saying that the claims seem similar enough that it feels like nothing new.

    There's videos of Biefield-Brown devices ("lifters") online, eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVVJwObmTAk

  • by sema4hacker on 4/20/24, 2:57 PM

    I only skimmed the story because it's so padded with fluff, but is his current device around 30 to 40 grams?

  • by pengaru on 4/20/24, 9:58 PM

    fortunately it's never been easier to put something in space and see what it does

  • by WithinReason on 4/20/24, 3:52 PM

    All of this has happened before and will happen again:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmDrive

  • by FrustratedMonky on 4/20/24, 3:09 PM

  • by neutered_knot on 4/20/24, 2:48 PM

    I want to believe.