In 2001, British Electrical Engineer Roger Shawyer first introduced the “impossible drive,” known as the EmDrive. It earned that nickname because Shawyer claimed it could produce thrust without propellant. If true, that would make it a reactionless drive—a machine that appears to shove itself forward without throwing anything backward.

That’s direct problem for the conservation of momentum, which just so happens to be one of the load-bearing rules of physics.

As with anything that appears to thumb its nose at Newton and Einstein, scientists raised more than a few eyebrows. The EmDrive spent years producing tantalizing little signals, including a reported thrust measurement from NASA’s Eagleworks team in 2016. Then better tests caught up. By 2021, work at the Dresden University of Technology found no thrust from the device, turning one of the most famous propellantless-drive claims into a cautionary tale about tiny forces, experimental noise, and wishful machinery.

But the dream of a propellantless machine didn’t die with the EmDrive. It resurfaced again around Exodus Propulsion Technologies, a private company tied to Charles Buhler, an electrostatics specialist whose NASA/Kennedy Space Center work gives the claim a more interesting pedigree than the usual fringe-propulsion pitch.

While at NASA, Charles Buhler helped establish the Electrostatics and Surface Physics Laboratory at Kennedy Space Center in Florida—a very important lab that basically ensures rockets don’t explode. Through Exodus, Buhler has argued that his team has found a propellantless effect driven by electric fields—a “New Force,” as he described it to The Debrief—that can generate enough thrust to counter gravity. (To be clear, that claim is Exodus’s claim. Public NASA and electrostatics materials support Buhler’s Kennedy Space Center electrostatics background, but the propulsion work is a private, non-NASA effort.)

“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.”

Buhler stressed that this work is unaffiliated with NASA. Much of the public discussion has moved through the Alternative Propulsion Energy Conference, or APEC, a community built around advanced-propulsion ideas that range from serious engineering questions to claims that still need far more careful testing.

In an interview with APEC’s co-founder Tim Ventura, Buhler explained how his background in electrostatics led to the discovery. He says his team—made up of people from NASA, Blue Origin, and the Air Force—investigated propellant-less drives for decades before arriving at electrostatics. For years, their devices produced negligible thrust, but saw increases with each new iteration. This culminated in 2023, when this “New Force”-powered drive generated enough thrust to overcome Earth’s gravity.

APEC event listings in January, March, and May 2026 described continued “testing and refinement” by Exodus co-founder Andrew Aurigema. In a March 2026 interview, Buhler said he had run roughly 2,000 vacuum-chamber experiments and was emphasizing effects such as thrust that allegedly persisted after power was turned off.

Exodus has also moved into a more openly investor-facing phase. An official Deep Tech Week NYC 2026 listing advertised an “Exodus Propulsion Technologies - Meet and Greet” on April 4, inviting physicists and investors to discuss the technology and meet Buhler as CEO/founder.

As of May 2026, there isn’t a published independent replication using an outside lab’s own apparatus, instrumentation, and uncertainty budget.

“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 told The Debrief. “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.”

Obviously Buhler’s claims are pretty “woah, if true,” but the history of propellant-less drives is filled with seemingly positive results that are eventually dashed upon the rocks of scientific reality.

Even APEC is treating independent replication as the largest open issue. It also notes that patents are not validation. The professional standard isn’t a compelling video or an exciting conference description, but a documented protocol, an uncertainty budget, and outside labs reproducing the force under controlled conditions.

Before any alternative propulsion enthusiasts should start popping corks, rigorous, third-party research will have to verify the results again and again. While it’s not impossible that Buhler and his team stumbled across some unknown quirk of physics, it’s an extremely unlikely outcome.

For now, let’s call it an “improbable engine.”