Satellites once used propellant for attitude control. When the propellant was used up, the satellite lost the ability to maintain or change orientation. Very much as this article describes, control moment gyroscopes took over because they didn't require propellant. They operate on the same principles that let a cat land on it's feet by twisting about as it falls.
However, there's a key difference between attitude control and movement. Changing your orientation doesn't involve changes in net kinetic energy, momentum, etc.. Changing speed (i.e. What a propulsion system does) does involve changes in these quantities, so Newtonian conservation laws come into play.
>"Genergo’s system generates thrust without using any propellant and without expelling reaction mass, by directly converting electrical energy into thrust through controlled electromagnetic impulses."
If this isn't hogwash, it might be something similar to an ion engine. i.e. It does operate by expelling propellant, but what it uses as propellant is background dust and ions, accelerated to a high velocity by electric fields and expelled.
If, as the site claims, this technology is currently working and produces non-negligible thrust, it could be very useful. They need to be very clear about what this is though, since vague and unscientific sounding claims will not attract clients.
Article is light on details but there’s a few options such as using sunlight or earths magnetic field to move around without propellent tanks near earth.
It’s surely hogwash. I like how it’s “validated” but does not mention power consumption or measured thrust.
For what it’s worth, one can very straightforwardly produce thrust using electromagnetism: just shine any sort of light out the back of your spaceship. This is called a photon rocket, and it works because light has momentum. Very little momentum: thrust = power / c. It’s only worth doing if energy is free in the way that light hitting a solar sail is free or if you power it with something absurdly energy-dense like antimatter.
Propellant is still used for rotation control. Reaction wheels can "saturate" if they compensate for rotation more in one direction than the other on net, so propellant is needed to get them back down.
Ion engines, generally speaking, do not use background dust. They still carry propellant, they just eject it electromagnetically.
An photon engine, basically just a laser pointed backwards, uses pure electricity to produce thrust. But of course the numbers all work out, since photons have momentum. They're extremely weak though, even lasers of staggering power produce very little force. There's no way you could put one on a satellite
> Reaction wheels can "saturate" if they compensate for rotation more in one direction than the other on net, so propellant is needed to get them back down.
Torque Rods can be used to desaturate wheels without needing any propellant
Am I correct in thinking that in some cases gyroscopic orientation results in turning 270° the “wrong way” to cancel out net gyroscope speed due to friction losses?
This article is quite frustrating, since all that it really tells me is that their system "generates thrust without using any propellant and without expelling reaction mass, by directly converting electrical energy into thrust through controlled electromagnetic impulses".
That's rather non-specific. My first thought was that they're using photon momentum, but thinking about that a little harder rules it out. The ratio of energy to momentum doesn't change with any properties of the photon (they're both proportional to frequency) so there's nothing to really develop there: so long as you waste very little power as heat, you might as well be shining a well-collimated flashlight.
Options 3 and 4 from [this paper](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21743), _magnetic sails_ and _solar sails_, seem more promising. Is that what Genergo are doing? I have no idea. The article doesn't tell me.
"Scientifically tested!" is the marketing term for "The tests showed it didn't work, but we won't mention that second part!"
E.g.:
"successfully flight-tested" -- didn't break or leak anything when launched into space. A brick also has these properties.
"validated across three space missions" -- a brick could be flown multiple times too, this proves nothing except that this thing is space-rated.
"protected by a portfolio of granted international patents" -- we've got more lawyers than engineers!
"accumulated more than 700 hours of on-orbit operation" -- I could say the same thing about a brick left in orbit for a month.
"multiple on-orbit activation cycles have continued alongside data analysis and characterization activities" -- we kept turning it on and off in a futile attempt to work out why nothing was happening.
"confirmed system functionality in real space conditions" -- It definitely was "on", drawing power and everything!
"several long-duration tests were conducted in which it was observed, objectively and repeatedly, that motor activation produced a measurable acceleration or deceleration of the host spacecraft." -- we got confused by atmospheric drag, IMU drift, vibrations, and other confounding factors and called the experiment a success despite a string of failures for short-duration tests.
I remember in the 80s, after mostly having given up on perpetuuum mobile, bunch of people were trying to invent something like this, using vibration etc which worked on Earth but would not in a vacuum... Looks like a new generation took the baton. Like this guy:
An Engineer Says He’s Found a Way to Overcome Earth’s Gravity
This new propulsion system could rewrite the rules of spaceflight—not to mention completely defy conventional physics.
"In 2001, British Electrical Engineer Roger Shawyer first introduced the “impossible drive,” known as the EmDrive. It was called “impossible” because its creator purported that the drive was reactionless, meaning no propellant required—in other words, it defied the known laws of physics (specifically, the conservation of momentum)."
It's easy to validate this claim, just link to its orbital tracking data.
I keep looking at the data for OPT-2[1] which is supposed to be a "quantum drive" from a IVO Ltd.[2] but haven't seen any significant orbital changes yet.
Not possible according to the laws of physics. The closest you can get is a solar sail, but that's not "propellant-less" - photons are the propellant.
If a company thinks they've broken one of the most fundamental laws of physics (momentum transfer), they need to provide some serious evidence, and publish in full so their results can be replicated. A press release on an obscure website isn't how you do it.
Anyone publishing a repeatable experiment demonstrating this would be more or less instantly handed a nobel prize, since it would have to unlock new fundamental physics.
It would also totally rock cosmology since you’d have to rework the whole age and evolution of the universe in light of those new physics, whatever they were.
This is almost definitely bunk. Either that or something mundane explained in a ridiculous hypey way.
It certainly sounds like "We managed to run our EM drive hardware in space, and our instruments say it did something" (as did EM drive proponent's, in error). Because if it really was even something like "we successfully produced thrust from ambient ions/earth's magnetic field/etc" then it would be much bigger news.
Seems like the focus is on orbital dynamics, so I’m guessing it is reacting against the magnetic field of the planet or the particulates in the solosphere.
It would be cool, though, if it were actually interacting with the zero point field or some similar bunky stuff. We can already extract minute amounts of matter from the field, ostensibly experimentally proven, so I suppose it’s not impossible to imagine that you might somehow be able to push on Casimir forces, perhaps.
Readit News
However, there's a key difference between attitude control and movement. Changing your orientation doesn't involve changes in net kinetic energy, momentum, etc.. Changing speed (i.e. What a propulsion system does) does involve changes in these quantities, so Newtonian conservation laws come into play.
>"Genergo’s system generates thrust without using any propellant and without expelling reaction mass, by directly converting electrical energy into thrust through controlled electromagnetic impulses."
If this isn't hogwash, it might be something similar to an ion engine. i.e. It does operate by expelling propellant, but what it uses as propellant is background dust and ions, accelerated to a high velocity by electric fields and expelled.
If, as the site claims, this technology is currently working and produces non-negligible thrust, it could be very useful. They need to be very clear about what this is though, since vague and unscientific sounding claims will not attract clients.
For what it’s worth, one can very straightforwardly produce thrust using electromagnetism: just shine any sort of light out the back of your spaceship. This is called a photon rocket, and it works because light has momentum. Very little momentum: thrust = power / c. It’s only worth doing if energy is free in the way that light hitting a solar sail is free or if you power it with something absurdly energy-dense like antimatter.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45932763
Torque Rods can be used to desaturate wheels without needing any propellant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetorquer
This is widely used in smaller satellites operating in Earth orbit.
However, this doesn't mean that TFA isn't BS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrodynamic_tether
But the 'pulses' make it sound like EmDrive hogwash.
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That's rather non-specific. My first thought was that they're using photon momentum, but thinking about that a little harder rules it out. The ratio of energy to momentum doesn't change with any properties of the photon (they're both proportional to frequency) so there's nothing to really develop there: so long as you waste very little power as heat, you might as well be shining a well-collimated flashlight.
Options 3 and 4 from [this paper](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21743), _magnetic sails_ and _solar sails_, seem more promising. Is that what Genergo are doing? I have no idea. The article doesn't tell me.
E.g.:
"successfully flight-tested" -- didn't break or leak anything when launched into space. A brick also has these properties.
"validated across three space missions" -- a brick could be flown multiple times too, this proves nothing except that this thing is space-rated.
"protected by a portfolio of granted international patents" -- we've got more lawyers than engineers!
"accumulated more than 700 hours of on-orbit operation" -- I could say the same thing about a brick left in orbit for a month.
"multiple on-orbit activation cycles have continued alongside data analysis and characterization activities" -- we kept turning it on and off in a futile attempt to work out why nothing was happening.
"confirmed system functionality in real space conditions" -- It definitely was "on", drawing power and everything!
"several long-duration tests were conducted in which it was observed, objectively and repeatedly, that motor activation produced a measurable acceleration or deceleration of the host spacecraft." -- we got confused by atmospheric drag, IMU drift, vibrations, and other confounding factors and called the experiment a success despite a string of failures for short-duration tests.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a65924333/eng...
An Engineer Says He’s Found a Way to Overcome Earth’s Gravity
This new propulsion system could rewrite the rules of spaceflight—not to mention completely defy conventional physics.
"In 2001, British Electrical Engineer Roger Shawyer first introduced the “impossible drive,” known as the EmDrive. It was called “impossible” because its creator purported that the drive was reactionless, meaning no propellant required—in other words, it defied the known laws of physics (specifically, the conservation of momentum)."
I keep looking at the data for OPT-2[1] which is supposed to be a "quantum drive" from a IVO Ltd.[2] but haven't seen any significant orbital changes yet.
[1] https://celestrak.org/NORAD/elements/graph-orbit-data.php?CA...
[2] https://ivolimited.us/
If a company thinks they've broken one of the most fundamental laws of physics (momentum transfer), they need to provide some serious evidence, and publish in full so their results can be replicated. A press release on an obscure website isn't how you do it.
It would also totally rock cosmology since you’d have to rework the whole age and evolution of the universe in light of those new physics, whatever they were.
This is almost definitely bunk. Either that or something mundane explained in a ridiculous hypey way.
It would be cool, though, if it were actually interacting with the zero point field or some similar bunky stuff. We can already extract minute amounts of matter from the field, ostensibly experimentally proven, so I suppose it’s not impossible to imagine that you might somehow be able to push on Casimir forces, perhaps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmDrive
Who's gullible? Pretty much all of the comments show skepticism, but some are curious what is this about.