Propellantless Drive Satellite Slight Orbital Anomoly

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The IVO Propulsion drive that is in a satellite is appeared to be slowing its decline but this was not significant.

CORRECTION: It is IVO Propulsion that launched this drive according to Mike McCullough. Mike seems to indicate the slight upward curve in descent is not yet significant.

It is expected to remain active and to raise the orbit. This propulsion if it scales up and is confirmed could mean the equivalent of Star Trek Impulse drive.

The device was launched via SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare. The should be no other propulsive device and the actual device in enclosed.

This will likely mean about $30 million or more of funding from DARPA and the Air Force Research lab will perform follow up work to confirm and to make it fully reliable and to understand the science and mechanism.

The satellite is being tracked by NORAD with readout from Celestrak.

Almost everyone thinks this is impossible. This can also mean that if this proves out space propulsion is revolutionized. IF it works as expected than the drive will give propulsion so long as it has electrical power. A nuclear reactor could power the system for decades and enable speeds approaching light speed. However, this is no evidence in orbit has been produced.

The experiment could also disprove certain aspects of physics like dark matter.

It will be very exciting to see the verification and scaling and any evidence that this works.

Late 2023 to January 2024 – Previous Barry 1 Test

The Barry-1 is orbit now and has 2 Quantum Drives: QD1 (Blue Arrow, internal) & QD1-TC (Green Arrow). Both are designed to produce thrust in the same direction (Red Arrow). QD1-TC is expected to produce about 2x the thrust of QD-1. CEO Richard Mansell said it has two drives a 0.25mN and a 0.65mN drive. There is evidence that the drives are working, changing the orbit and raising the overall altitude. The goal is to increase the orbit by 100 kilometers. The goal would be to reach 410 kilometers of altitude or more. The tiny thrust will take weeks to a couple of months. The orbit changes indicate that the drives were turned on the latter half of January to late January, 2024.

The Quantum drives according to traditional physics should not work at all. No thrust should be generated and the orbits should only change based on newtonian physics and minor amounts of orbital drag.

The Apogee (highest part of the orbit) is 535.87 kilometers. The overall orbit altitude seems to be increasing and the apogee has definitely increased from yesterday. The apogee was at about 5:35 PM PST. It has a 95 minute orbit. The only thrust for the Barry-1 satellite is the propellantless quantum drives.

Norad was giving a 10 day forecast of 525 kilometer altitude at apogee (highest altitude). The actual apogee is about 11 kilometers higher.

Barry-1 has 2 Quantum Drives: QD1 (Blue Arrow, internal) & QD1-TC (Green Arrow). Both are designed to produce thrust in the same direction (Red Arrow). QD1-TC is expected to produce about 2x the thrust of QD-1. CEO Richard Mansell said it has two drives a 0.25mN and a 0.65mN drive.

The DARPA funding (2018-2022 Quantized Inertia investigation) $1.3 million was for the researcher Mike McCulloch. But none of the DARPA funding has been or is yet for IVO. IVO is all privately funded. No VC or DARPA funds. The $17 Million DARPA Otter which appears intended for this type of work, but nothing has been allocated to my knowledge and definitely no DARPA funds have gone to IVO.

If they are fully successful, they will see both at once and see 3x thrust of QD-1. This would prove scaling via multiple devices. The devices are lightweight. If they have additive thrust, it will barely matter that the thrust is tiny. It means that arrays of thousands or millions of devices can be created. The devices might be one millinewton or less but then a million devices achieves constant one thousand newton thrust. The operation for a decade of multiple drives mean this would scale to full up interstellar drives. The best lab result is one watt for 52 millinewtons. The devices flown to orbit have far less thrust and each has different thrust so that it is clear whether zero, one or two devices are working.

If successful, they will probably reveal the basic design. Like most technology companies, it is important to protect the proprietary designs.

Orbit.ing-now has longer tracing of the Barry-1 satellite. It was showing a steady drop in altitude and then stabilization and now an increase. The average altitude may be slightly increasing but the apogee and perigee have more changes as the orbit has gotten much more elliptical.

14 thoughts on “Propellantless Drive Satellite Slight Orbital Anomoly”

  1. I’m a bit confused here. Is this a second satellite with this same experiment? Didn’t they do this a couple of years ago now but lost communication with the satellite before the experiment could happen? Is this the same satellite and they fixed the coms problem … or is this a new satellite with the same or similar experimental drive?

  2. As much as I hope, pray, and dream, something like this is possible. My conservative nature ( and energy conservation ) prevents me.

    Even if we see a positive result, it will be the duration and magnitude of the acceleration that will rule out unseen and unexpected propellant.

    Grok helped me make the following pithy statement of a related bias of mine.

    The silence of the cosmos, per the Fermi Paradox, hints that interstellar travel may remain a distant dream, as the absence of alien visitors underscores the unlikelihood of technological breakthroughs for humanity to cross the stars.

    For UFO/Alien-vistor believers, you can easily invert that statement!
    Which might explain, at some deep level, why this type of research will never end. :->

  3. Yeah goatguy, but still magical orbs get spotted by military fleets… our math isnt complete so is our knowledge…

  4. Maybe the next experiment will involve 2 identical satellites. One with the new drive, and another with a piece of inert metal which has the same dimensions and weight as the experimental device.
    Launch them on the same rocket.

    …Then we’ll see. And maybe have an independent investigator carry out the test.

    • The ‘in space’ angle is fun, because it nearly (but not completely) eliminates terrestrial influences on a more ordinary physics test-bed device. You know, static electricity, magnetic fields, wires of some length carrying power, having magnetic fields. All that.

      But at the same time, since the goal (at least at this point, given the claims) isn’t viability, but rather scaling, it would seem prudent for the physics-lab to be getting all the investor money, not to fly space birds, but to scale thrusters to the 1+ (or really 100+) newton level. A level of indisputably ‘real’ thrust to mask any miniscule bits of spurious physics interference. Thus getting maybe even billions of bucks to do a real, big, forehead-smacking space experiment, which’d leave Physicists scratching their heads trying to explain it all away, or not.

  5. Science progresses in a circular way:
    A) You have clear observations that you cannot understand with the current science, and these observations promote the formulation of new models.
    B) You have a clear new model that makes predictions not yet observed that would validate or falsify such a model.
    Usually, when an experiment is based on a poorly characterized theory and yields observations within the margin of error, it is not considered new science.
    But even assuming that IT IS new science, the proof that the authors do not claim/believe/understand their own discovery is that they speak of external sources of energy to fuel space travel: A PROPELLENTLESS DEVICE THAT PROVIDES ACCELERATION HIGHER THAT A PHOTON SOURCE IS A PERPETUAL MOTION MACHINE: you strap two of them on counter rotating arms connected by a sheft and they will persistently accelerate the rotation along the axis. Make the rods long enough, and even a minimal acceleration will be enough to provide more than enough energy to sustain the process even at t0. If you cannot achieve instant acceleration at this high level, you can have a setup with shorter rods and a small external source that provides constant acceleration until you reach breakeven, after which you will extract more and more energy from the system.

    We know that locally energy is conserved; this would break energy conservation.

    • Yep. I’m far from my regular computer, so can’t properly annotate the physics equations here, but basically when the invested power (P, watts) in the propellantless thruster (delivering some force F (newtons)), in a spacecraft (or any test device) having a reference-frame velocity of V (meters per second : m/s), we can pretty easily find that the break-even (perpetual motion machine criteria) delta energy of the set up exceeds the invested energy at V = 2P/F meters per second.

      Example… magic thruster delivers 1 newton with an investment of 10 kilowatts. V = 2 * 10,000 / 1 = 20,000 meters per second.

      At 20 km/s, a spacecraft (or moving edge of a big spinning disk) has its speed, and thus kinetic energy increased MORE than the energy invested to do so. Perpetual motion. Free energy. Violation of conservation laws.

      Do try the algebra if you have the time. Its kind of fun.

    • “…A PROPELLENTLESS DEVICE THAT PROVIDES ACCELERATION HIGHER THAT A PHOTON SOURCE IS A PERPETUAL MOTION MACHINE…We know that locally energy is conserved; this would break energy conservation…”

      This is not even remotely true. I don’t how people come up with this stuff. It’s pushing against the “inertia” of the Universe. There is no magic energy or perpetual anything. They even call it an “inertia” something. There are several devices that show this effect. I talked about it here,

      https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2025/04/trillions-of-rogue-planets.html#comment-217718

      where I speculate that it’s what scientist are seeing that they call “dark matter” is just such an effect. And yes you can all laugh but I’m right about this because there are so many things that show this effect.

      • I forgot to add that this is different from a surge type operation that causes inertia waves I described, so I don’t how it works or fits in but maybe it has to do with stress in the aether???? Vacuum???

      • You cannot push against the “inertia” of the universe because inertia is not an entity you can push against; it is a property of something.
        It is like saying, “This drive is not reactionless because the authors stated that it pushes against the volume of the universe or the color of the universe.” Using “inertia” makes it sound more plausible because people are familiar with concepts like color and volume, and they would understand that it does not make sense.

      • Look, if there’s some background to the universe you can push on, distinct from identifiable nearby matter, then the universe must have a preferred frame of reference, and the drive will exhibit two critical traits:

        1. It will have different performance in different directions, depending on our local speed relative to that frame of reference.
        2. The faster you’re going relative to it in a given direction, the more power will be consumed to accelerate in that direction.

        Now, such a drive would certainly have potential uses, even if the directionality didn’t let you use it for all mission. But it wouldn’t be a perpetual motion machine, anymore than a windmill is.

  6. If it goes down slower than anticipated, maybe they just anticipated wrong. If it goes up, they actually have something.

    • This ol’ goat expects ambivalence. Seems to be natures answer to perpetual motion experiments of any-including-exquisite qualities.

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