Even though it may seem farfetched, but is NASA seriously testing a Star Trek style warp drive propulsion system that could someday propel a spacecraft faster than the speed of light?
By: Ringo Bones
From naming the first Space Shuttle prototype after the
starship Enterprise after a letter writing campaign from Star Trek fans to the
increase in astronaut applicants after Apollo 11 successfully landed on the
moon, it seems that NASA’s post Apollo projects have been largely shaped by the
fans of the original Star Trek TV series. But did you also know that they are
currently working on a Star Trek style warp drive that could someday propel a
spacecraft faster than the speed of light that could make interstellar travel a
practical reality?
Unlike Star Trek’s Zefram Cochrane who built his warp
capable ship under post World War III shortages, NASA physicist Harold “Sonny”
White and team had been for a number of years been working on a propulsion
system based on the Star Trek warp drive based on the groundbreaking equations
formulated by Prof. Miguel Alcubierre showing the feasibility of
faster-than-light travel that doesn’t violate Einstein’s Special Relativity.
Only this time, they are actually receiving federal government funding.
The White-Juday warp-field interferometer is a space warping
experiment to detect a microscopic instance of a warping of spacetime with the
intent of creating an Alcubierre warp bubble, if possible. A research team led
by Harold “Sonny” White in collaboration with Dr. Richard Juday at the NASA Johnson
Space Center and Dakota State University are conducting experiments but results
so far have been inconclusive. An additional experiment with an EmDrive is
showing interesting results.
The NASA research team led by Harold White and their
university partners currently aim to experimentally evaluate several concepts,
especially a redesigned energy-density topology as well as an implication of
brane cosmology theory. If space actually were to be embedded in higher
dimensions, the energy requirements could be decreased dramatically and a
comparatively small energy density could already lead to measurable – i.e.
using an interferometer – curvature of spacetime. The theoretical framework for
the experiment dates back to work by Harold White from 2003 as well as work by
White and Eric W. Davis from 2006 that was published in the American Institute
of Physics, where they also consider how baryonic matter could, at least
mathematically, adopt characteristics of dark energy. In the process, they
described how a toroidal positive energy density may result in a spherical
negative-pressure region, possibly eliminating the need for actual exotic
matter.
The NASA research team has postulated that their findings
could reduce the energy requirements for a spaceship moving at ten times faster
than the speed of light from the mass-energy equivalent of the planet Jupiter
to that of the Voyager 1 spacecraft or less. By harnessing the physics of
cosmic inflation, future spaceships crafted to satisfy the laws of these
mathematical equations may actually be able to get somewhere unthinkably fast –
and without adverse effects. Also, physicist and Earth Tech CEO Harold E.
Puthoff explained that contrary to widespread belief that even the highly
blue-shifted light seen on board such a spaceship would not fry its crew, being
bathed in strong ultraviolet light and X-rays. It would however be dangerous to
anyone seeing it fly closely.
