from Hacker News

An Engineer Says He's Found a Way to Overcome Earth's Gravity

by thedigitalone on 5/1/24, 9:46 PM with 11 comments

  • by Reubend on 5/2/24, 2:48 AM

    Their slideshow contains the claim that their discovery "can explain the EM Drive". But the EM Drive has already been debunked: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a35991457/emdrive-t...

    That doesn't give me much hope for legitimate new technology to come out of this. I would love to hear about the discovery of a new force, but since I don't see any small scale tests from this company to demonstrate the viability of this concept outside of a lab, I doubt that this will turn into a real invention.

  • by fragmede on 5/1/24, 10:26 PM

    https://thedebrief.org/nasa-veterans-propellantless-propulsi... is a more substantial article, and even links to the actual presentation to the Alternative Propulsion Energy Conference (APEC) which was posted to YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJjPi7uZ2OI&t=3696s.

  • by thedigitalone on 5/1/24, 9:47 PM

    “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” applies here, sure would be cool if real though!

  • by rapjr9 on 5/2/24, 4:29 AM

    To rule out an electrostatic or electromagnetic interaction with the vacuum test chamber (some stainless steels are magnetic, some are not, but all are conductors that current can be induced in) you could put a strain gauge on the test chamber and suspend the test chamber from the ceiling. If the chamber moves in the opposite direction of the test article then it's an interaction with the chamber and not true propellentless thrust. If the chamber doesn't react then it's another piece of evidence that something unknown is going on.

  • by isthatafact on 5/1/24, 11:30 PM

    > "Buhler told the website The Debrief that they’ve created a drive powered by a 'New Force' outside our current known laws of physics"

    > "space startup Exodus Propulsion Technologies says it has achieved a major breakthrough by stumbling upon a new force of nature"

    > "He says his team...investigated propellant-less drives for decades before arriving at electrostatics."

    I am already lost. Electrostatic forces can be found in an introductory physics textbook.

    I am curious whether this is simply a big scam, or maybe just the delusions of an engineer who got hyped over some experimental errors. There are of course other possibilities of something interesting happening with the experiments, but the claims of a new fundamental force of nature are not exactly believable without more evidence than mentioned in the article (which is zero).

  • by greenbit on 5/2/24, 12:19 AM

    I'll believe it when I start seeing cars that were built in the 90s floating around like toy balloons.