David Pares’ Variable Electromagnetic Drive (VEM Drive)
What if a warp bubble didn’t require the energy of a planet, but something closer to a rack of RF amplifiers and a clever way to fold their fields together? In a program that grew as much from storm physics as from relativity, David Pares and a small Omaha team argue that their Variable Electromagnetic Drive compresses space just ahead of the device and then “falls” into that dent—and reported test results suggest his team is on the right track.
The Variable Electromagnetic Drive (VEM Drive) is a propulsion concept built around a simple proposition: if energy curves spacetime, and if electromagnetic (EM) energy is a form of energy, then perhaps a suitably engineered EM field can bias local curvature enough to matter. Instead of pushing against exhaust or air, the device would shape a forward-biased gradient—a tiny “dip” in the fabric ahead of itself—and the apparatus would be pulled into its own geometry. In Pares’s telling, this isn’t reactionless magic; it’s general relativity with a practical field geometry.
The lab evidence he presents arrives in three forms. On an optics bench, laser fringes tighten when the drive is energized, implying a shorter optical path consistent with local compression. Across the room, a torsion balance drifts toward the device—even when the masses and the apparatus are separated by a glass-and-wood enclosure—suggesting a pull that penetrates barriers. On a hanging thrust rig, the scale reading drops during 20–30 second pulses, with the whole suspension lifting by a few millimeters. Each result is individually modest. Taken together, the team argues, they’re signatures of the same underlying mechanism.
“The only difference between a garage and NASA’s lab is that I’ve got lower overhead…If NASA did what we did and had the measurements we have today, they’d be parading them around and getting the Nobel Prize in Physics.” —David Pares
Skeptics raise fair points: air effects, electrohydrodynamic thrust, buoyancy from heating, instrument drift, and wishful interpretation. The only cure is rigor: vacuum measurements, blind protocols, and independent replication. Pares acknowledges this and calls their program a “probe” into the regime where electromagnetism and curvature might cohabit at benchtop scale.
VEM Drive Theory: Warping Space with Electromagnetism
At the heart of the VEM idea is a fact accepted since Einstein: the stress–energy tensor—mass, momentum, fields, and even pressure—sources curvature. Everyday EM fields do curve spacetime, but the effect is so weak that in ordinary circumstances it’s swallowed by noise. The VEM bet is that geometry matters: that by structuring near-field energy into a compact, overlapping pattern, you can produce a directional curvature bias large enough to generate a measurable force on nearby matter and, ultimately, on the device itself.
Conceptually, it’s kin to Alcubierre’s “warp bubble”: contraction ahead and expansion behind. Alcubierre’s original construction demanded astronomical energy densities and exotic negative energy. Later refinements argued that clever geometries could shave the energy down by many orders of magnitude, though still far from “plug it into an outlet.” Pares’s group sidesteps the formal warp-metric literature and focuses on one pragmatic piece: can you demonstrate the sign of the effect—contraction where you intend it—using overlapping near fields at modest power?
“The current approach used for shuttles, space-based telescopes, the International Space Station, satellites, and launches use chemical propellants. Nearly 90 percent of the weight of the rocket is propellant — the rest is payload.” —David Pares
There’s also an origin story here. Pares comes from meteorology as much as physics. Thunderstorms are staggering electrical machines: layered charge structures, strong DC fields, and bursts across bands from MHz to GHz. In some environments, two storms pass close enough that their fields overlap near the freezing layer, carving corridors pilots sometimes call “sucker holes.” Pares treats those anecdotal corridors as hints of natural field geometries that might bias local space. The lab program is an attempt to miniaturize and control that geometry on a table.
Hardware Engineering: Tripole Field Geometry and Near-Field Resonance
Instead of coils and caps in a conventional resonator, the VEM Drive centers on fractal, V-shaped conductive pads arranged as multiple tripole elements pointing into a common throat. The term “tripole” here mirrors the charged layering in storm anatomy: a positive region, a negative mid-level, and another positive layer below. Using two or more of these elements at adjustable angles—typically on the order of fifty to seventy-five degrees—the team tunes the overlap of near fields to position the energy density in front of the device.
Operating in the near field is key. In this regime, energy sloshes between electric and magnetic storage rather than racing off as radiation. The team sweeps and holds radio-frequency (RF) drive in bands they associate with mid-level storm behavior, biasing their sweeps to VHF while acknowledging that storms feature a frequency stack spanning from low MHz at the base to GHz aloft. The stated goal: build a compact, synthetic version of a storm-field overlap and park it where you want a contraction.
On paper, the logic is linear: concentrate field energy → induce local curvature → bias curvature forward → feel a pull. The hard part is proving that the observed pull isn’t the result of everything else an RF device does in air.
“By compressing the fabric of space in front of the craft you create a warp bubble … which allows the bubble to move through spacetime.” —David Pares
Experimental Demonstrations and Evidence
1) Interferometer and redshift measurements
The optical experiment is intuitive: if the device compresses the local metric, a laser beam crossing that region should experience a shorter effective path. The team runs a Michelson-style interferometer with the beam passing through the throat. With the drive off, fringe spacing and position hold steady within the instrument’s drift. With the drive on, the team reports the fringes “closing”, consistent with path-length reduction. In at least one talk, they scale the change on the order of micrometers along the beam—small, but of the correct sign for local compression at the measured location.
As a second optical signature, they report a local redshift in the throat region during operation. Because gravitational potentials can shift clock rates and frequencies, a downward tick in measured frequency is, again, the correct sign for a compression claim. It’s not a smoking gun—interferometers are notorious for picking up vibration, thermal gradients, and delightfully subtle lab shenanigans—but it is the right kind of signal to test and retest under stricter controls.
2) Modified Cavendish (torsion-balance) experiments
The torsion experiment speaks to force on matter. A lightweight bar with end masses hangs from a fine fiber inside a glass/wood enclosure. A small mirror on the bar reflects a laser onto a distant scale so that tiny angular deflections show up as centimeters of motion on the wall. The VEM array sits outside the box at a fixed distance. When energized—sometimes at low powers like 25 W, 100 W, 200 W—the bar deflects toward the device. The team alternates ferrous and non-ferrous masses and reports pull over distances reaching roughly a meter-plus in later configurations.
Why is this interesting? If the cause were ordinary magnetic attraction or electrostatic coupling, you’d expect a dependence on the composition of the mass, a strong sensitivity to barrier materials, or obvious coupling paths through wiring. The enclosure, the material swaps, and the stand-off distance are meant to stress-test that interpretation. They don’t eliminate all conventional effects, but they raise the bar for air-coupled explanations.
3) Direct thrust / lift tests
The hanging thrust rig is the most visceral. The array, RF amplifiers, and a heavy cable harness are suspended from a digital scale on a spring mount. The apparatus points in a known direction. The operators pulse for 20–30 seconds. In the runs the team highlights, the numbers are eye-catching: an early configuration (“Model 16”) reported ~6.3 N at ~1.65 kW; a later configuration (“Model 17”) reported ~15 N at ~1.5 kW, accompanied by several millimeters of lift and a matching reduction on the scale. The group emphasizes a nonlinear force–power trend as geometry and phasing improved, claiming that force per kilowatt rose sharply once pad angles, spacing, and frequency hold were tuned.
It’s crucial to keep these in context. The tests are short pulses in air on a hanging scale—not continuous duty on a calibrated vacuum thrust stand. Even so, if any appreciable fraction of those forces survive a rigorous vacuum campaign, the near-term utility for station-keeping and attitude control becomes compelling.
Controls, Confounds, and the Vacuum Question
Any high-field device in air lives on a minefield of false positives:
-
Electrohydrodynamic (EHD) thrust / ion wind. High fields ionize air, moving it and pushing back on the apparatus. Even symmetrical ion wind can lower density in front of the device, creating buoyant lift that looks like thrust.
-
Buoyancy and thermal gradients. Heating (or localized cooling that induces flow) can change air density around a scale or a pendulum.
-
Instrumentation hygiene. Interferometers feel footsteps and HVAC changes. Torsion balances see elevator starts and passing trucks. Bad grounds and stray capacitance can nudge readouts in ways that look intentional.
Pares’s team works to bound these effects: barrier enclosures, non-ferrous and ferrous mass swaps, fixed-length pulses, repeatable geometry, cameras on clocks and scales, and an emphasis on near-field reactive energy rather than radiative coupling. That’s necessary but not sufficient. The real arbiter is the vacuum chamber. A clean thrust measurement in hard vacuum, with charge management and RF traps, would knock out ion wind and most buoyancy arguments in one stroke. If the forces collapse to zero in vacuum, the story leans toward air artifacts. If they persist, the story gets interesting fast.
Steering, Navigation, and the “Mass Follows Mass” Intuition
The group makes a subtle but important claim about navigation: a warp-like throat will tend to bias toward nearby mass. On a rubber-sheet analogy, a shallow moving bowl skews toward the nearest heavy bowling ball. For a field generator operating near Earth, that means the natural bias is toward the planet unless a control law actively pre-compensates. This isn’t science fiction flavor; it’s a reminder that if the effect exists, guidance and control are part of propulsion from the start. Even in laboratory demos, nearby metal racks, concrete walls, and the body of the apparatus may tilt the “downhill” direction of the throat.
From Benchtop to Bench Power: Hardware and Tuning
One striking aspect of the VEM program is how deliberately prosaic the powertrain is. The system runs from 48 V DC battery packs on the order of ~160 Ah, a small exciter of a few watts feeding linear RF amplifiers, and a roadmap toward ~2.8 kW of amplifier headroom. The pads themselves are fractal V-geometries on adjustable carriers so that pad angle and spacing can be changed quickly between runs. The operators talk about “holding” an operating point once a favorable overlap pattern appears, and about a future quad-throttle arrangement to coordinate four arrays for vectoring and stability.
Making the VEM Drive work requires creating enough energy density in the right place at the right time. A plain rack with careful geometry is easier to control and simpler to scrutinize. The team’s philosophy favors solid-state everything—no turbomachinery if they can help it—sometimes sketched as a companion fusion concept designed to feed multi-kilowatt arrays continuously. Even without committing to a reactor, the principle stands: if the drive is going to bias geometry in a meaningful way, it needs clean, controllable DC upstream of the RF chain and enough thermal overhead to sustain duty cycles longer than flashy 30-second pulses. That’s where laboratory propulsion becomes engineering: power budgets, heat rejection, and reliability curves.
What the Numbers Suggest—and What They Don’t
On a raw force-per-kilowatt basis, the highlight numbers—~6 N at ~1.65 kW, ~15 N at ~1.5 kW—look outsized compared with the tens of millinewtons per kilowatt of many flight-proven electric thrusters. Apples to oranges, though: ion engines deliver those tiny thrusts for thousands of hours in vacuum with exquisite stability; the VEM numbers come from half-minute pulses in air on a bench. It isn’t a fair head-to-head, but it does set a target: if a vacuum campaign returns even single-digit newtons per kilowatt in sustained runs, the technology would find immediate use in satellite station-keeping, momentum dumping, and fine attitude control—especially if mass and volume compare favorably with propellant tanks plus plumbing.
“The potential economic gains for a space-faring nation are staggering. You need efficient means to get from point A to point B. Right now, it takes 10.5 months to get to Mars. A VEM Drive could get us to Mars in 18 days.” —David Pares
For crewed vehicles, the conversation changes from Δv to habitat physics. The ability to generate a controlled gravity gradient—even locally—could mitigate bone and muscle loss on long missions without spinning habitats. The same gradient, if actively manipulated, might offer partial inertial relief on acceleration spikes. Those are enticing visions, but they hinge on fields that are stable, well-mapped, and safe for avionics and humans.
Conclusion
The VEM Drive is a tidy, audacious proposition: use overlapping, near-field RF energy to bias local curvature just enough to matter. The lab story Pares presents—fringe contraction and redshift on an interferometer; barrier-penetrating pulls on a torsion balance; short-pulse lift on a hanging rig—is internally consistent and experimentally specific. It is also perched on ground that demands unforgiving tests. The good news is that those tests are straightforward: take it into vacuum, measure cleanly, invite replication, and publish the whole thing—wins, losses, and edge cases.
If even a fraction of the claimed performance translates to vacuum, the payoff is immediate: propellant-free station-keeping, attitude control, and a new tool for habitat gravity. If the effect doesn’t survive, the field still advances—leaner on illusions, richer in technique. That’s how frontier engineering works: bold claims, clear experiments, and the humility to let the data decide.