Dogfighting In Space: Can Exodus Electrify Delta-V for the Space Force?

December 28, 2025

In a contested orbital environment, survivability is starting to look less like armor and more like agility. Debris clouds can be manufactured with a missile test, “inspector” satellites can drift close enough to make intentions ambiguous, and the old comfort of predictable ephemerides is quietly becoming a liability. In that world, delta-v isn’t just a propulsion spec — it’s a warfighting currency, the difference between staying in the fight and being trapped on rails. John Cserep’s provocation is that the Space Force’s most urgent vulnerability may be fuel itself — and that Exodus Propulsion’s claimed propellantless electric thrust could, if real and scalable, deliver the one thing every deterrence concept keeps circling back to: the ability to maneuver on demand.

The problem arrives at 28,000 km/h

Imagine a cloud of razor-sharp metal shards—some no bigger than a bolt, others the size of a laptop—spreading across thousands of miles of orbit at tens of thousands of kilometers per hour. In low Earth orbit, that’s roughly 28,000 km/h, fast enough that even a paint fleck can hit like shrapnel, and a larger fragment can gut a satellite in an instant. Several years ago, when Russia destroyed one of its own defunct satellites in a direct-ascent anti-satellite test, it created exactly that kind of hazard: more than 1,500 trackable pieces of debris, plus many more too small to routinely track.

The strategic point isn’t just that debris is dangerous—it’s that debris can be made. Direct-ascent ASAT missiles have already been demonstrated, and they’re the blunt instrument of counterspace: a capability that can create long-lived risk to satellites, crewed missions, and routine operations, while forcing more collision-avoidance maneuvers across the entire environment. In other words, even if nobody “shoots at you” directly, the battlespace can still be shaped into something harder to survive inside.

But the timeliness problem doesn’t come only from below. It’s also increasingly on orbit—where “inspector” and proximity-operations satellites blur the line between benign servicing and coercive interference. We now live in an era where a satellite’s slow drift toward another spacecraft can read like maintenance…or like a threat. Add robotic arms and grappling capabilities to the mix, and “inspection” becomes something far more ambiguous.

“U.S. Space Command has evidence that Russia conducted a non-destructive test of a space-based anti-satellite weapon.”
—U.S. Space Command Public Affairs statement (July 2020)

Put those together—debris as a manufactured hazard, improved ground-based ASAT options, and on-orbit proximity threats—and you get a single, brutal conclusion: survivability is becoming inseparable from mobility. That’s why, in John Cserep’s “Electrifying delta-v for the Space Force”, the Space Force’s on-orbit problem collapses to a simple requirement: acceleration on demand—delta-v—because the only reliable defense against many of these risks is still the oldest one in spaceflight: get out of the way.

Delta-v is the hidden governor of “space power”

Every satellite mission is, in part, a budget. Some budgets are obvious—mass, power, bandwidth. Delta-v is the one that hides in the background until the day you need it, because delta-v is the budget that buys you choices. When you have it, you can dodge, retask, re-angle, re-phase, and relocate. When you don’t, you’re a beautifully engineered object trapped on rails.

That’s why Cserep insists the Space Force’s vulnerability isn’t merely that satellites can be attacked—it’s that most satellites are predictable. Orbital mechanics is a gift to the attacker: the target’s future location can be forecast, the engagement can be timed, and the geometry can be prepared. Your satellite may be modern; the equation that describes its path is ancient.

This emphasis also echoes the Space Force’s own warfighting vocabulary. Space superiority isn’t described as a vibe—it’s measured in “freedoms,” and one of the key ones is freedom to maneuver, alongside freedom to attack and freedom from attack. In that framing, maneuver isn’t a secondary activity; it’s part of what it means to control the domain.

So the core problem becomes almost embarrassingly simple. If an adversary can threaten you with debris, stalk you with a proximity satellite, or time effects from the ground, then the satellite that survives is the one that can keep changing the game board. Delta-v isn’t just propulsion. It’s agency.

The fuel trap: why today’s “electric propulsion” still runs out of options

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: even “electric propulsion” is still a fuel story. Hall thrusters and ion engines are marvels—efficient, long-lived, and proven—but they still spend propellant. When the xenon is gone, you’re back to your original orbit and your original predictability. You’re not dead, but you’re easier to plan against.

That’s why refueling became the obvious answer. If propellant is what limits survivability, then build a logistics chain to replenish it—tankers, depots, fill ports, the orbital version of midair refueling. It’s a sensible vision, and for certain exquisite, expensive systems it may still be inevitable.

But Cserep highlights the tension inside that logic as Space Force architectures tilt toward proliferated constellations and rapid refresh. If many satellites are designed to be replaced every few years, then designing them like 15-year platforms—complex ports, transfer plumbing, depot compatibility—can feel like solving yesterday’s problem with tomorrow’s bill.

And in wartime, there’s a sharper edge: logistics isn’t just cost—it’s a target. A refueling architecture is something you have to defend, something you have to keep supplied, and something an adversary can plan around. Which brings Cserep back to his heresy: if the real need is maneuver, maybe the answer isn’t “more fuel.” Maybe the answer is “no fuel.”

The shadow war that makes maneuver urgent

The reason this delta-v conversation suddenly feels less academic is that the competitive behavior is already visible. Satellites are maneuvering close enough to raise eyebrows, nations are practicing rendezvous and proximity operations, and officials are describing coordinated movements in language that belongs to fighter aviation, not celestial mechanics.

In 2025, public reporting cited a senior Space Force official describing Chinese satellites executing coordinated proximity maneuvers—“dogfighting” in space—an attention-grabbing phrase for a simple idea: multiple objects moving in a controlled way relative to one another, practicing the choreography you would want for inspection, escort, interference, or defense.

“That’s what we call dogfighting in space… They are practicing tactics, techniques, and procedures to do on-orbit space operations from one satellite to another.”
—Gen. Michael A. Guetlein, Vice Chief of Space Operations (remarks at the 2025 McAleese Defense Programs Conference)

Allies are sounding alarms in plain language, too. In late 2025, Germany’s defense minister warned about Russian satellites “shadowing” commercial satellites used by Germany and allies, explicitly treating it as part of a growing threat environment. Meanwhile, U.S. officials have publicly framed certain Russian on-orbit actions as weapons-adjacent behavior—reminders that orbit isn’t just a parking lot anymore; it’s a place where intent can be expressed through motion.

Then there’s the pressure that doesn’t need an enemy at all: congestion. With more satellites launched every year, collision-avoidance has become a constant activity, not a rare contingency. Even in peacetime, the ability to maneuver is now part of basic survival—because the orbit you’re trying to hold is no longer empty. And that’s why the identity—and credibility—of the people promising a propulsion step-change suddenly matters.

Cserep’s bet: a patented “propellantless” drive built by people who’ve shipped real space hardware

Cserep anchors his case to a specific artifact: U.S. Patent 11,511,891, which he describes as a method for producing force from intense, diverging electric fields—without throwing reaction mass overboard. It’s not the kind of thing you stumble across in a normal aerospace roadmap; it reads more like a cheat code.

The patent is owned by Exodus Propulsion Technologies, co-founded by aerospace engineer Andrew Aurigema and physicist Dr. Charles Buhler—a detail Cserep leans on for a reason. The pitch here isn’t “two guys in a garage”; it’s “people who speak the language of flight hardware,” arguing they’ve found an overlooked way to generate thrust in vacuum.

Buhler’s résumé does heavy lifting in the narrative. He’s long associated with NASA’s electrostatics work at Kennedy Space Center—exactly the domain where charging, arcing, dust adhesion, and surface physics stop being theory and start being mission risk. This isn’t credibility built on opinions; it’s credibility built on field problems that can kill spacecraft, including electrostatics challenges that matter for lunar operations.

Cserep also emphasizes the claims that make the story so combustible: Exodus’s approach is framed as electrostatic, relying on high electric field intensities at high voltage but extremely low current, implying surprisingly low power draw for the force produced. He describes millinewton-class thrust in lab prototypes and argues the effect is scalable—and if no propellant is being expelled, the usual rocket bookkeeping breaks, with specific impulse “technically…infinity.” Those are extraordinary assertions, and they’re precisely why the work demands extraordinary verification.

“Maneuver without regret” breaks the attacker’s planning cycle

Cserep’s best phrase is also his operational thesis: “maneuver without regret.” The idea isn’t that a satellite suddenly sprints like a fighter jet; it’s that even modest thrust, if it can be applied continuously without propellant depletion, changes the psychology and geometry of defense. When every burn costs you life expectancy, you hesitate and conserve. When thrust is treated like a power draw instead of a consumable, you can maneuver frequently enough to turn predictability—an attacker’s favorite assumption—into a liability.

“Propellantless propulsion enables ‘maneuver without regret,’… making literally every overhead pass different from the one before.”
—John Cserep, Electrifying delta-v for the Space Force

Remove the cost, and you remove the hesitation. Now every overhead pass can be different from the one before. Now you can force uncertainty into the enemy’s models. Now the targeting problem isn’t “where will it be?” but “where could it decide to be?” Cserep argues this creates intractable problems for an attacker, because it attacks the root assumption of orbital predictability.

This also re-frames proximity threats. A stalking satellite can’t tail you forever if you can keep changing relative geometry without spending down a limited chase budget. A ground-based attack that relies on timing and alignment becomes harder to schedule. Even passive tracking becomes more complex if the target refuses to behave like a clockwork object.

In that sense, delta-v becomes more than a maneuver tool—it becomes a kind of defensive countermeasure. Not a shield, not a jammer, but something more fundamental: the ability to deny the enemy a stable solution.

The weird payoff: non-Keplerian positions and deception geometry

Once you accept continuous thrust, Cserep takes the reader to the edge of what “orbit” even means. He claims a propulsion method like this could allow positions that don’t even qualify as orbits, because you can constantly correct gravity’s demands rather than passively obey them. It’s a subtle shift: from flying a path to holding a place.

He lists examples that feel like military wish lists. A “geostationary” position much lower than GEO, where sensors are closer and links are stronger. Hovering above a pole for persistent coverage. Crossing the sky in nonstandard ways by applying inward acceleration to change apparent speed at altitude.

Then he offers the two that read like magician’s tricks. One is to match the sidereal background so the satellite “disappears” against the starfield. Another is “impersonation”: appearing, from the ground, to orbit directly beneath another object while actually maintaining safe separation at a different altitude.

Whether these are practical at scale, the strategic point is sharp: in a shadow-war era built on inspection, proximity, and targeting chains, geometry is power—and strange geometry can become a weapon.

The logistics twist: skipping the orbital gas station

Cserep doesn’t just say propellantless thrust makes satellites harder to kill. He says it makes a whole acquisition direction less necessary. If satellites don’t need propellant replenishment, he argues there’s no need to invest in on-orbit refueling—no tankers, depots, or fill ports.

That’s not just savings; it’s strategic simplification. Refueling creates new nodes of vulnerability, new supply chains, and new predictable patterns. In a contested domain, anything you must routinely visit becomes something an adversary can watch, plan around, or threaten.

He also points to how the future might look if servicing becomes routine, not rare. Instead of sending fuel, you send upgrades: attachable packages, robotic servicing vehicles, bolt-on capability. In that world, a propulsion breakthrough doesn’t require redesigning every satellite; it can be added like an aftermarket kit.

It’s a tidy vision: maneuver authority without fuel logistics. Survivability without an orbital supply train. And it’s exactly why his article keeps circling back to that single question—because if the premise holds, it doesn’t just improve delta-v. It removes delta-v as a limiting factor.

The hard ending: extraordinary capability still needs extraordinary proof

The problem, of course, is history. Space is littered with promising lab effects that evaporated under disciplined testing. Cserep nods to the EmDrive cautionary tale—high-precision testing by TU Dresden of an EmDrive-style resonant microwave cavity thruster—where apparent thrust signals were traced to experimental artifacts rather than new physics. That’s a different claimed mechanism than Exodus—but it’s the same genre of extraordinary promise, and it’s why the verification bar has to be brutal.

That’s why the responsible posture isn’t belief or disbelief—it’s verification. If the Space Force is serious about delta-v as survivability, then any claim that promises to break the propellant constraint is worth rigorous, adversarial testing: independent labs, vacuum balances, null configurations, and deliberate artifact hunting—thermal drift, cable forces, electromagnetic coupling, charging effects—followed by an on-orbit demo that can’t hide behind chamber quirks or test-stand interactions.

But even if the device fails, Cserep’s framing still lands the punch. The shadow-war trendline—proximity ops, stalking, counterspace effects, debris risk—keeps pushing satellites toward a future where maneuver is not optional. It’s how you stay alive long enough to keep doing the mission.

So the piece ends where it began, with a question that feels less like science fiction every year: if orbit is becoming a battlefield measured in geometry and decision cycles, will the Space Force solve delta-v with better logistics and better rockets—or will something like Exodus actually change what “maneuver” means?