How a Car Battery Can Get You to Mars in 3.5 Days | Charles Buhler & Andrew Aurigema

Link to full episode:    • "We Cracked Antigravity" NASA Physicist Sh...   Charles Buhler and Andrew Aurigema have built a thruster that makes force without burning anything, and the number they give for it sounds almost insulting. About 50 millinewtons, roughly the weight of two sheets of paper. Then Aurigema does the arithmetic out loud. Stack a thousand of those cells and you have a five newton thruster that never has to be switched off, which is enough to hold 38 g of continuous acceleration and set a 45 ton spacecraft down on Mars three and a half days after it leaves Earth orbit, with your coffee still sitting in the mug the whole way. The power to run it for the entire trip is about what is already in your car battery, because the system is electrostatic. It needs charge, not current. 00:00 50 millinewtons of thrust and Mars in three and a half days at 38 g 05:44 The foam thruster on the table and the ship they'd build around it 13:44 The patent that vanished for three and a half years, and a second one called impossible 19:46 The two-man core team, the homemade vacuum chamber, and why it still can't float 26:44 Cubesats first, and what a ride to orbit actually costs 36:50 Tic Tac videos, 10,000 g, and the man trying to cancel inertia 45:40 Bob Lazar's element 115 and the gravity wave amplifiers 50:21 Lab security, missing scientists, and the men-in-black question 55:39 The static fire that shook his house, Apollo 1, and why science isn't done Buhler is an electrostatics engineer at NASA Kennedy Space Center and the sitting president of the Electrostatics Society of America. Aurigema spent 25 years on the shuttle program and builds the hardware, including the home made vacuum chamber that pumps their test articles down to the pressure of deep space, where the thrust gets stronger instead of vanishing. Their cells are now over unity, meaning a cell weighing one pound produces about 1.8 pounds of thrust. And still, they say, people hold the hardware, watch it spin inside a vacuum, and walk out shaking their heads. Most of this hour is about that wall. Their first patent disappeared inside the patent office for three and a half years, hung up, they were told, in a Defense Department review and then a NASA review. The second came back rejected because the examiner said it violates conservation of momentum. They explain why they refuse to wait on peer review, why hobbyists rebuilding a 150 dollar foam thruster from a free video probably matter more to them than any journal, what it really costs to fly a cubesat propulsion module, and why everything hinges on finding one launch partner willing to risk an engine that never turns off. They also get into Bob Lazar's element 115 and gravity wave amplifiers, a colleague who says he is stripping inertia out of a test article, and why both of them keep their distance from the alien crowd. Buhler's closing point is the simplest thing in the hour. Science is not finished. Subscribe to this channel:    / @jonesdanny