Late last year, it emerged that a small team of NASA researchers were working on warp drive technology in the lab. Led by Harold “Sonny” White, the team devised a variation of the Alcubierre warp drive that could almost be feasibly produced — if we can work out how to produce and store antimatter. Now, White is ready to discuss some other facets of his warp drive, such as the energy requirements, what a spacecraft with a warp drive would look like, and what it would be like to travel at warp speed.

When it comes to interstellar travel, due to the massive distances involved, the only feasible solution for reaching other planets and stars is a method of transport that travels at close to or faster than the speed of light. The nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, is just over four light years away — at a speed of 62,136 kmh (the speed at which Voyager-1 is flying through space), it would take roughly 67,000 years for a spacecraft to reach it. There are a variety of proposed propulsion systems, such as ion drives, but none of them really get close to the speeds necessary to enable the exploration of other planets in under a few thousand years. Warp drives, while years away from even small-scale testing — if they’re even possible at all — are one of the few exceptions that would allow same-lifetime space travel.

As the name suggests, a warp drive enables faster-than-light travel by warping space-time around it. In essence, Miguel Alcubierre proposed a device that causes the space in front of the spacecraft to contract, while the space behind it expands. This creates a warp bubble that carries the spacecraft through space-time at 10 times the speed of light. We know from our observations of the universe that such deformation of space-time is probably possible, but in this case there’s a huge step between theoretical and experimental possibility. There are numerous problems with an Alcubierre drive — such as whether you’d be able to survive inside the bubble, or my personal favorite: annihilating the entire star system when you arrive at your destination — but the sheer amount of energy required to reach the speed of light, let alone surpass it, is probably the main drawback.

Last year, Sonny White revealed a new design (pictured top) for the Alcubierre drive that reduces the energy requirement from the total mass-energy of a planet the size of Jupiter, down to the mass-energy of Voyager-1 (700 kilograms). We say “mass-energy,” because no one quite knows how to fuel an Alcubierre drive, with some research suggesting that it might require more energy than the mass of the observable universe, or possibly negative amounts of energy. Basically, though, according to NASA’s preliminary research, the energy requirements appear to be somewhat feasible if the drive is donut shaped (like the image at the top of the story) rather than a flat disc.

Speaking to New Scientist, Sonny White (pictured right) has filled in a few of the questions posed by his team’s original 2012 study. He begins with a warp bubble analogy, to help explain how superluminal (faster-than-light) travel is even possible in the first place: “You are walking along at 3 miles an hour, and then you step onto [a moving airport walkway]. 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.” Speaking about what it would actually feel like to travel at warp speed, White says “you would have an initial velocity as you set off… It would be like watching a film in fast forward.”

What would a warp drive-equipped spacecraft look like? “Imagine an American football, for simplicity, that has a toroidal ring around it attached with pylons. The football is where the crew and robotic systems would be, while the ring would contain exotic matter.” Here the “exotic matter” is an energy source that we don’t know a whole lot about (thus why we use phrases such as “the mass-energy of Jupiter.”)

Finally, White warns us that the first real-world warp drives are a long way away. The NASA research team have some “very specific and controlled steps to take to create a proof of concept,” to see if the physics of the Alcubierre warp drive actually play out in practice, but we’re talking about a microscopic warp bubble that will have very little relation to a real-world prototype. We are probably looking at a decade or more before we can create a car-sized warp drive — and even then, that’s only if we can find some of that elusive “exotic matter,” which we probably won’t.

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