A former NASA specialist claims to have found a way to overcome Earth’s gravity in a “major discovery”

A former NASA engineer claims he has found a way to overcome Earth’s gravity and all ears have perked up. Exodus Propulsion Technologies, a private company co-founded by Charles Buhler, an electrostatics specialist, made the claim, according to a report by Popular Mechanics. Buhler having worked for POT and the Kennedy Space Center, his words have created an extremely interesting pedigree.Previously, Buhler helped establish the Electrostatics and Surface Physics Laboratory at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, a very important laboratory that ensures rockets do not explode. He is a veteran of historic programs such as NASA’s space shuttle, the International Space Station (ISS), the Hubble Telescope, and NASA’s current Dust Program. Now, with his own company, he has argued that his team has found a propellantless effect powered by electric fields, a “New Force” that can generate enough thrust to counteract gravity, as he described in The Debrief.“The most important message to convey to the public is that an important discovery occurred,” Buhler told The Debrief. “This discovery of a New Force is fundamental because electric fields alone can generate a sustainable force on an object and allow the translation of the center of mass of said object without expelling mass.”In an interview with APEC 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, researched propellantless thrusters for two decades before getting to electrostatics. “Nature has its own way of doing things,” Buhler explained, “and our job is to find out what nature does. It just fell into my lap in what I’m an expert at.“For years, their devices produced negligible thrust, but experienced increases with each new iteration. For example, from 2016 to the end of 2020, its best devices produced just over one hundred thousandth of gravity. In the coming years, that number would increase exponentially. To clarify, Buhler said that measuring thrust in terms of percent gravity reflects the force generated divided by the test article.“The goal is to approach and exceed the unit,” he explained, “which means that the item would generate enough thrust to lift itself in Earth’s gravity, and that is defined as 1 gravity thrust.”Buhler says they typically measured forces in milliNewtons, but prefer to describe thrust in terms of gravity, since that is the ultimate goal of propulsion physics. “The highest we’ve generated in a stacked system is about 10 mN,” he said. “The magnitude is not really important, since anything above zero would work in space.”In the years and months leading up to the groundbreaking thrust measurement, Buhler and his team took great care to methodically eliminate anything else that could explain the small but measurable force they were seeing. This detailed and painstaking work resulted in the equipment’s primary patent, which was granted in 2020.With new impetus, Buhler says they also began construction of a custom-made vacuum chamber that would allow them to simulate the deep space environment. If something else was causing the force, this camera was built to identify it.According to the APEC presentation, that chamber was completed at the end of 2020. Between January and September 2021, 146 different items were tested, each apparently confirming the presence of measurable thrust. The team also tested different configurations that eliminated older designs that used asymmetrical capacitors and instead employed models with opposing asymmetrical plates.Then, in 2022, something surprising happened. According to Buhler, his team began to see significant jumps in the force generated. A quick look at a graph he presented to APEC shows that tests conducted between early 2022 and November 2023 resulted in a rapid ascent, going from one-thousandth, one-hundredth, and even one-tenth of gravity to full Earth gravity. This means that their current devices, which Buhler says “weigh between 30 and 40 grams on their own” without attached test equipment, were producing enough thrust to counteract the full force of Earth’s gravity. This culminated in 2023, when this “New Force”-powered thruster generated enough thrust to overcome Earth’s gravity.After decades of research, Buhler says he and his team had demonstrated unequivocally that a fundamental new force was at work, and that their devices were harnessing that force to produce thrust without emitting any mass or propellant.“Essentially, what we have discovered is that systems that contain an asymmetry in electrostatic pressure or some type of divergent electrostatic field can give a system with a center of mass a non-zero force component,” Buhler explained. “So what that basically means is that there is some underlying physics that can essentially exert force on an object if those two constraints are met.”Listings of APEC events in January, March and May 2026 described continued “testing and refinements” by Exodus co-founder Andrew Aurigema. In a March 2026 interview, Buhler said he had performed approximately 2,000 experiments with vacuum chambers and emphasized effects such as thrust that supposedly persisted after the power was turned off.Buhler emphasized that this work is not affiliated with NASA. Much of the public debate has unfolded through the Alternative Propulsion Energy Conference, or APEC, a community built around advanced propulsion ideas ranging from serious engineering questions to claims that still need much more careful testing.Exodus has also entered a more overtly investor-oriented phase. An official Deep Tech Week NYC 2026 lineup announced 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 is no published independent replication that uses the apparatus, instrumentation, and uncertainty budget of an external laboratory.Previously, in 2001, British electrical engineer Roger Shawyer first introduced “impossible driving,” known as EmDrive. It earned that nickname because Shawyer claimed it could produce thrust without propellant. The EmDrive spent years producing tantalizing little signals, including a thrust measurement reported by NASA’s Eagleworks team in 2016. Then better tests were updated. In 2021, a paper at the Dresden University of Technology found no drive from the device, turning one of the most famous claims of propellantless propulsion into a warning about tiny forces, experimental noise, and illusory machinery.Next, Buhler says his team is seeking funding to test their devices in space and better understand the force at work.“We’re hoping to do some demonstrations,” Buhler said. “Some space demonstrations. That’s what we’re trying to get funding for. I think it would be a great way to show off the technology.”