Just a few years ago, NASA engineer and physicist Harold White revealed that he was working on an idea that could allow spaceships to travel faster than the speed of light in the same vein as "Star Trek's" Enterprise. Now, designer Mark Rademaker - who is collaborating with White on the project - has finished a design and pushed the project even farther.
"We wanted to have a decent image of a theory conforming warp ship to motivate young people to pursue a STEM career," Rademaker said. "It does have some sci-fi features that might never transfer to a possible final design, unless we really want to."
The spacecraft is called the IXS Enterprise and if it is ever realized, it will be able to travel to and from distant areas of space in the matter of weeks as opposed to centuries. The spaceship would do so by exploiting a "loophole" in Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, allowing the ship to expand space-time behind itself and contract the space-time in front of it, propelling it through space faster than the speed of light.
"Remember, nothing locally exceeds the speed of light, but space can expand and contract at any speed," White said in 2011. "However, space-time is really stiff, so to create the expansion and contraction effect in a useful manner in order for us to reach interstellar destinations in reasonable time periods would require a lot of energy."
White claims that he has calculated a way to harness this expansion and contraction in a manner that requires less energy than the original theory that was proposed by physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994.
"Based on the analysis I did the last 18 months, there may be hope," he said. "The key, may be in altering the geometry of the warp drive itself."
"The rings are most important as they will form the warp bubble," Rademaker added. "The way they are designed now will reduce the energy requirement needed to form the bubble. Also we tried to fill up as much space within the rings, it's expensive to leave that open or unused."
White is currently working with his team at NASA's Eagleworks Labs to create a "proof of concept" for the idea and bring it one step closer to reality.
