White justified the design, saying that "if you're going to go to all the trouble of making it that big, you might as well fit all you can in there." Speaking at the SpaceVision conference last year, Dr. The spacecraft is fatter than most of Jefferies' sci-fi ships, too, capable of bearing four cylindrical pods on its flanks, and sporting a wide, flat, duck's bill of a command module.
But where famed aviation artist Jeffries, who helped create the spaceships of the Star Trek universe, imagined spindly craft with thin rings, the IXS Enterprise sits inside two circles chubby enough to power its Alcubierre drive. Rademaker says he was influenced in the design for his Enterprise by Matt Jefferies' sci-fi artworks from the 1960s. By expanding the space behind a ship and contracting the space in front of it, the IXS Enterprise could drastically speed up our space travel potential, making the 4.3 light-year journey to Alpha Centauri in around two weeks. The drives, named for physicist Miguel Alcubierre, theoretically work by distorting space-time. White and his team at NASA are hoping to make "faster-than-light" travel possible with Alcubierre drives. Harold White to produce visual concepts for the craft. Rademaker worked together with NASA's Dr. The result is the IXS Enterprise, a ship that shares similarities with both its science fiction Star Trek namesake, and NASA's real-world space shuttle. Two years later and the space agency hasn't built a spaceship capable of such speeds yet - but thanks to artist Mark Rademaker, we now know what one could look like. I did some work in 20 as part of the 100 Year Starship symposium and discovered ways to reduce the energy requirements by many orders of magnitude, so for a 10-metre diameter spacecraft with a velocity of 10 times light speed, I can reduce the negative energy needed.NASA announced in 2012 that it was working to build a "warp drive" that could enable "faster-than-light" travel. When the idea was first proposed mathematically in 1994 it required a vast amount of negative vacuum energy which made the idea seem impossible. It would be like watching a film in fast forward.Įven if travelling at warp speed is theoretically possible, don’t the huge energy requirements make it unlikely?
Space would contract in front of the spacecraft and expand behind it, sending you sliding through warped space-time and covering the distance at a much quicker rate. You would have an initial velocity as you set off, and then when you turn on the ring of negative vacuum energy it augments your velocity. What would it be like to travel at warp speed? The presence of this toroidal ring of negative vacuum energy is what’s required from the math and physics to be able to use the warp trick. The football is where the crew and robotic systems would be, while the ring would contain exotic matter called negative vacuum energy, a consequence of quantum mechanics. Imagine an American football, for simplicity, that has a toroidal ring around it attached with pylons. What would a starship with warp drive be like? You are still walking at 3 miles an hour, but you are covering the distance much more quickly relative to somebody who isn’t on the belt. You are walking along at 3 miles an hour, and then you step onto the walkway. In airports we have moving walkways that help you cover distance quicker than you would otherwise. What is a space warp and how can it help?Ī space warp works on the principle that you can expand and contract space at any speed. One is a wormhole and the other is a space warp. Within general relativity, there are two loopholes that allow you to go somewhere very quickly, overcoming the restriction of the speed of light. The idea that nothing can exceed the speed of light limits our interstellar ambitions. To pave the way for rapid interstellar travel, NASA propulsion researcher Harold “Sonny” White plans to manipulate space-time in the lab “I discovered ways to reduce the energy requirements by many orders of magnitude”
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