REAL LIFE IMITATES STAR TREK: WARP DRIVE RESEARCH
by Hazed
“Warp Factor 10, Mr Sulu!” We all know that the spaceships in Star Trek use warp drives to move fast enough to travel between the stars. Surely this is just the stuff of fantasy. Well, maybe not, because a real life physicist is looking at whether a real life warp drive would be possible.
Harold “Sonny” White is the head of the advanced propulsion program at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, and he’s put together a tabletop experiment which is designed to create tiny distortions in spacetime. (You know, the fabric of the spacetime continuum, another common science fiction thing.) If his experiments succeed it could eventually lead to a system that would be capable of generating a spacewarp bubble around a spaceship.
That would mean the ship could travel, not by increasing its speed, but by distorting the spacetime along its path so it can swerve around the laws of physics that prevent anything from travelling faster than the speed of light. That would mean the ship could reach other stars in just a few weeks, rather than taking many, many years.
That would be amazing! However, the experiment has only been allocated a measley $50,000 from NASA’s $18 billion research budget so clearly they don’t see it as a major area to explore. But the fact that they are even entertaining the idea at all is something science fiction fans everywhere can applaud.
