Related video: Intern Hammond Pearce talks about what it's like to work at Nasa.

Related video: Intern Hammond Pearce talks about what it's like to work at Nasa. Credit: Stock photo - Getty; Video - The AM Show.

Star Trek's Montgomery Scott famously said "ye cannot change the laws of physics", but a real-life space engineer says he might have just done that.

David Burns of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama has unveiled what he's calling the 'helical engine', which could potentially power flights across space without using any fuel at all.

There's just one small problem - it breaks the laws of physics as we know them.

"I'm comfortable with throwing it out there," Burns told magazine New Scientist. "If someone says it doesn't work, I'll be the first to say it was worth a shot."

The simple version of how the helical engine works - or doesn't work - is like this: a ring inside a box is sprung in one direction, the box recoiling in the other, just as Isaac Newton's laws of motion say they should.

"When the ring reaches the end of the box, it will bounce backwards, and the box's recoil direction will switch too," New Scientist explains.