The warp drive is a staple of every Star Trek series and while it’s generally been regarded as science-fiction, new research shows that warp drive could actually become a reality to help humanity explore outer space.
At a recent 100 Year Starship Symposium at NASA, the possibility of a working warp drive was postulated.
The proposed warp drive system would manipulate space-time to move a starship by taking advantage of loophole in the laws of physics that prevents objects from moving faster than light A concept for a real-life warp drive was suggested by Mexican physicist Miguel Albubierre in a 1994 article, but recent calculations shows such a device would require huge, prohibitive amounts of energy.
Now physicists say that adjustments can be made to the proposed warp drive that would enable it to run on significantly less energy, potentially bringing the idea back from the realm of science fiction into science.
“There is hope,” Harold “Sonny” White of NASA’s Johnson Space Center said Friday (Sept. 14) at the 100 Year Starship Symposium, a meeting to discuss the challenges of interstellar spaceflight.
An Alcubierre warp drive would involve a football-shape spacecraft attached to a large ring encircling it. This ring, potentially made of exotic matter, would cause space-time to warp around the starship, creating a region of contracted space in front of it and expanded space behind…
But recently (Harold “Sonny” White of NASA’s Johnson Space Center) calculated what would happen if the shape of the ring encircling the spacecraft was adjusted into more of a rounded donut, as opposed to a flat ring. He found in that case, the warp drive could be powered by a mass about the size of a spacecraft like the Voyager 1 probe NASA launched in 1977.