Former NASA specialist claims major breakthrough in overcoming Earth’s gravity

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 has made the claim, according to a report by Popular Mechanics.

With Buhler having worked for NASA and Kennedy Space Centre, his words have made for an extremely interesting pedigree.Previously, Buhler has helped establish the Electrostatics and Surface Physics Laboratory at Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, a very important lab that ensures rockets don't explode. He is a veteran of storied programs such as NASA’s Space Shuttle, the International Space Station (ISS), The Hubble Telescope, and the current NASA Dust Program.

Now, with his own company, he has argued that his team has found a propellantless effect driven by electric fields, a 'New Force' that can generate enough thrust to counter gravity, as he described it to The Debrief.“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 centre-of-mass translation of said object without expelling mass.”

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 two decades before arriving at electrostatics. “Nature has its own way of doing things,” Buhler explained, “and it is our job to uncover what nature does. It just happened to fall into my lap in what I’m the expert in.

”For years, their devices produced negligible thrust, but saw increases with each new iteration. For example, from 2016 to the end of 2020, their best devices were producing a little more than one hundred thousandth of a gravity. In the coming years, that would go up exponentially. For clarification, Buhler said that measuring thrust in terms of a percentage of gravity reflects the force generated divided by the test article.“The aim is to approach and exceed unity,” he explained, “which means the article would generate enough thrust to lift itself in Earth’s gravity, and that’s defined as 1 gravity of thrust.”Buhler says they commonly measured the forces in milliNewtons, but they prefer to describe the thrust in terms of gravity since that is the ultimate goal of propulsion physics. “The highest we have generated on a stacked system is about 10 mN,” he said. “The magnitude is not important, really, since anything above zero would work in space!”In the years and months leading up to the breakthrough thrust measurement, Buhler and his team took great care to methodically eliminate anything else that could account for the tiny yet measurable force they were seeing.

This detailed and painstaking work resulted in the team’s overriding patent, which was granted in 2020.With fresh momentum, Buhler says they also began construction of a custom-made vacuum chamber that would allow them to simulate the environment of deep space. If something else was causing the force, this chamber 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 separate articles were tested, each seemingly confirming the presence of measurable thrust. The team also tested different configurations that eliminated the old designs using asymmetrical capacitors and instead employed models with opposing asymmetrical plates.Then, in 2022, something astounding happened. According to Buhler, his team began to see significant jumps in the force being generated.

A quick look at a chart he presented to APEC shows that tests performed between early 2022 and November 2023 resulted in a rapid climb, moving from one thousandth, one hundredth, and even one-tenth of gravity all the way up to one full Earth gravity. This means that their current devices, which Buhler told “weigh somewhere between 30-40 grams on their own” without the attached test equipment, were producing enough thrust to counteract the full force of one Earth gravity.

This culminated in 2023, when this “New Force”-powered drive generated enough thrust to overcome Earth’s gravity.After decades of research, Buhler says he and his team had shown unequivocally that a new, fundamental force was at work and that his devices were tapping into that force to produce thrust without emitting any mass or propellant.“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 centre of mass a non-zero force component,” Buhler explained.

“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.”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 emphasising effects such as thrust that allegedly persisted after power was turned off.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.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.Previously, 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. The EmDrive spent years producing tantalising 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.Up next, Buhler says his team is seeking funding to test their devices in space to better understand the force at work.“We’re hoping to do some demos,” said Buhler. “Some space demos. That’s what we’re trying to get some funding to do. I think that would be a great way to show off the technology.”