Here we go again: an "electrostatic" successor to the EMdrive.

[techrat]

Take with a grain of salt, but the engineer in question seems real.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a60608517/overcome-earth-gravity/

 

[NTP2]

I’ll bet 100 dollars he’s just out to make some money. It’s definitely impossible to push without losing energy, I suppose you could just expend energy not mass but mass is just super dense energy so it would be less effective than a normal rocket.

 

[mh9162013]

The fact that it's published in Popular Mechanics tells me all I need to know about its real-world viability.

 

[NTP2]

The fact that it's published in Popular Mechanics tells me all I need to know about its real-world viability.

+1

 

[techrat]

I'm wondering if this isn't a scaled-up "Ionic wind" lifter. If you've ever seen those little floaters that are propelled up using a Neon Transformer to create some megavolts that were originally thought to be "anti-gravity" by people that didn't know any better. And yes, it'll turn out that whatever he's created works, but the cheat is that you still need wires to the ground because they are needing 75,000 volts to make it work. Hardly usable to propel anything anywhere without a 10-ton generator to make the needed voltage.

 

[SDramstad]

https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=60131.0