Pretty bloody impressive article reprinted from CNN.com
And the ship looks cool!
(CNN) -- Thanks to a NASA physicist, the notion of warp speed might just travel out of sci-fi and into the real world.
NASA's Harold White has
been working since 2010 to develop a warp drive that will allow
spacecraft to travel at speeds faster than light -- 186,000 miles per
second.
Ripples in space-time revealed
White, who heads NASA's
Advanced Propulsion Team, spoke about his conceptual starship at a
conference last fall. But interest in his project reached a new level
this week when he unveiled images of what the craft might look like.
Created by artist Mark Rademaker,
who based them on White's designs, the images show a technologically
detailed spacecraft that wouldn't look out of place in a "Star Trek"
movie. Rademaker says creating them took more than 1,600 hours.
For now, warp speed is only possible in TV and movies,
with both "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" referencing an idea that was
completely speculative at the time. White has fittingly named the
concept spacecraft IXS Enterprise, for the starship famously piloted by
Captain James T. Kirk in the "Star Trek" TV series and movies.
At the SpaceVision 2013
Space Conference last November in Phoenix, White talked about his
design, the concepts behind it and the progress that's been made in
warp-drive development over the decades. He discussed the idea of a
"space warp," a loophole in the theory of general relativity that would
allow for massive distances to be traveled very quickly, reducing travel
times from thousands of years to days.
In his speech, White
described space warps as faraway galaxies that can bend light around
them. They work on the principle of bending space both in front of and
behind a spacecraft. This would essentially allow for the empty space
behind the craft to expand, both pushing and pulling it forward at the
same time. The concept is similar to that of an escalator or moving
walkway.
"There's no speed limit on the expansion and contraction of space," White said at the conference.
"You can actually find a way to get around what I like to call the 11th
commandment: Thou shall not exceed the speed of light."
It's the idea of space
warps that inspired physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994 to first
theorize a mathematical model of a warp drive that would be able to bend
space and time. While studying Alcubierre's equations, White decided to
design his own retooled version of the Alcubierre Drive. His recently
unveiled design has much less empty space than the first concept model,
increasing its efficiency. The warp drive that White's team has been working on would literally transcend space,
shortening the distance between two points and allowing the craft to
break the speed of light. This would be a spaceship with no speed limit.
Because travel into
space has been extremely limited due to existing means of propulsion,
such a technology could blow open the possibilities of space
exploration. It could allow for study of the farthest reaches of space,
parts that scientists once considered unimaginable. Although the technology
to create the spacecraft or the warp drive doesn't yet exist, the
artistic renderings Rademaker created could potentially be a model of
what's to come -- the first spacecraft to break the speed-of-light
barrier and journey beyond our solar system.
In his design, White
says he drew from Matthew Jeffries' 1965 sketches of the Enterprise from
"Star Trek," saying parts of that ship were mathematically correct. He
worked with Rademaker and graphic designer Mike Okuda to update the math
and produce what he believes to be a viable spacecraft.
According to NASA, there
hasn't been any proof that a warp drive can exist, but the agency is
experimenting nonetheless. Although the concept doesn't violate the laws
of physics, that doesn't guarantee that it will work.
"We're starting to talk about what the next chapter for human space exploration going to be," White said at SpaceVision.
