NASA Starts Development On Real-Life Star Trek Warp Drive

"Perhaps a Star Trek experience within our lifetime is not such a remote possibility." These are the words of Dr Harold "Sonny" White, the Advanced Propulsion Theme Lead for the NASA Engineering Directorate. Dr White and his colleagues don't just believe a real-life warp drive is theoretically possible; they've already started the work to create one.

Yes. A real warp drive, Scotty.

When it comes to space exploration, we are still cavemen. We got to the moon and sent some badass robot to Mars. We also have those automatic doors that swoosh wide open when you get near them, but that's about it. It's cool, but we are far from being the space civilisation we'll need to become to survive for millennia.


So we need an alternative. One that would allow us to travel extremely fast without breaking the laws of physics. Or as Dr White puts it: "we want to go, really fast, while observing the 11th commandment: Thou shall not exceed the speed of light."

Searching for Warp Bubbles

The answer lies precisely in those laws of physics. Dr White and other physicists have found loopholes in some mathematical equations — loopholes that indicate that warping the space-time fabric is indeed possible.

Working at NASA Eagleworks — a skunkworks operation deep at NASA's Johnson Space Center — Dr White's team is trying to find proof of those loopholes. They have "initiated an interferometer test bed that will try to generate and detect a microscopic instance of a little warp bubble" using an instrument called the White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer.





The Energy Problem Solved


The Eagleworks team has discovered that the energy requirements are much lower than previously thought. If they optimise the warp bubble thickness and "oscillate its intensity to reduce the stiffness of space time", they would be able to reduce the amount of fuel to manageable amount: instead of a Jupiter-sized ball of exotic matter, you will only need 500kg to "send a 10m bubble (32.8 feet) at an effective velocity of 10c."





Trending Stories Right Now