NASA engineer and physicist Harold White announced a few years ago that he was working on a potentially groundbreaking idea that could allow space travel faster than the speed of light. Yes, like in “Star Trek.”
And now, to boldly go where no designer has gone before, Mark Rademaker — who is collaborating with White — has created a CGI design concept for the “warp ship.” They’re calling it the IXS Enterprise.
“We wanted to have a decent image of a theory conforming Warp ship to motivate young people to pursue a STEM career,” Rademaker said in an e-mail interview. “It does have some Sci-Fi features that might never transfer to a possible final design, unless we really want to.”
A warp ship such as the IXS Enterprise could allow travel to interstellar space in a matter of weeks rather than, say, centuries. And the science behind why it might be possible is truly mind-boggling.
An over-simplified explanation is that the concept seeks to exploit a “loophole” in Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity that allows travel faster than the speed of light by expanding space-time behind the object and contracting space-time front of it. Io9 explains more:
"Essentially, the empty space behind a starship would be made to expand rapidly, pushing the craft in a forward direction — passengers would perceive it as movement despite the complete lack of acceleration.
White speculates that such a drive could result in “speeds” that could take a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri in a mere two weeks — even though the system is 4.3 light-years away."
White, whose title is “Advanced Propulsion Theme Lead for the NASA Engineering Directorate,” has mathematically calculated a plausible way to accomplish this using far less energy than required by the original theory, which was proposed in 1994 by physicist Miguel Alcubierre.
His concept requires using large rings that surround the spacecraft to greatly reduce the amount of energy needed to warp space-time in front of and behind the spacecraft.
A few months ago, physicist Harold White stunned the aeronautics world when he announced that he and his team at NASA had begun work on the development of a faster-than-light warp drive. His proposed design, an ingenious re-imagining of an Alcubierre Drive, may eventually result in an engine that can transport a spacecraft to the nearest star in a matter of weeks — and all without violating Einstein's law of relativity. We contacted White at NASA and asked him to explain how this real life warp drive could actually work.
The Alcubierre Drive
The idea came to White while he was considering a rather remarkable equation formulated by physicist Miguel Alcubierre. In his 1994 paper titled, "The Warp Drive: Hyper-Fast Travel Within General Relativity," Alcubierre suggested a mechanism by which space-time could be "warped" both in front of and behind a spacecraft.
How NASA might build its very first warp driveExpand
Michio Kaku dubbed Alcubierre's notion a "passport to the universe." It takes advantage of a quirk in the cosmological code that allows for the expansion and contraction of space-time, and could allow for hyper-fast travel between interstellar destinations. Essentially, the empty space behind a starship would be made to expand rapidly, pushing the craft in a forward direction — passengers would perceive it as movement despite the complete lack of acceleration.
White speculates that such a drive could result in "speeds" that could take a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri in a mere two weeks — even though the system is 4.3 light-years away.
How NASA might build its very first warp driveExpand
In terms of the engine's mechanics, a spheroid object would be placed between two regions of space-time (one expanding and one contracting). A "warp bubble" would then be generated that moves space-time around the object, effectively repositioning it — the end result being faster-than-light travel without the spheroid (or spacecraft) having to move with respect to its local frame of reference.
"Remember, nothing locally exceeds the speed of light, but space can expand and contract at any speed," White told io9. "However, space-time is really stiff, so to create the expansion and contraction effect in a useful manner in order for us to reach interstellar destinations in reasonable time periods would require a lot of energy."
And indeed, early assessments published in the ensuing scientific literature suggested horrific amounts of energy — basically equal to the mass-energy of the planet Jupiter (what is 1.9 × 1027 kilograms or 317 Earth masses). As a result, the idea was brushed aside as being far too impractical. Even though nature allowed for a warp drive, it looked like we would never be able to build one ourselves.
"However," said White, "based on the analysis I did the last 18 months, there may be hope." The key, says White, may be in altering the geometry of the warp drive itself.
A new design
In October of last year, White was preparing for a talk he was to give for the kickoff to the 100 Year Starship project in Orlando, Florida. As he was pulling together his overview on space warp, he performed a sensitivity analysis for the field equations, more out of curiosity than anything else.
How NASA might build its very first warp driveExpand
"My early results suggested I had discovered something that was in the math all along," he recalled. "I suddenly realized that if you made the thickness of the negative vacuum energy ring larger — like shifting from a belt shape to a donut shape — and oscillate the warp bubble, you can greatly reduce the energy required — perhaps making the idea plausible." White had adjusted the shape of Alcubierre's ring which surrounded the spheroid from something that was a flat halo to something that was thicker and curvier.
He presented the results of his Alcubierre Drive rethink a year later at the 100 Year Starship conference in Atlanta where he highlighted his new optimization approaches — a new design that could significantly reduce the amount of exotic matter required. And in fact, White says that the warp drive could be powered by a mass that's even less than that of the Voyager 1 spacecraft.
That's a significant change in calculations to say the least. The reduction in mass from a Jupiter-sized planet to an object that weighs a mere 1,600 pounds has completely reset White's sense of plausibility — and NASA's.
Hitting the lab
Theoretical plausibility is all fine and well, of course. What White needs now is a real-world proof-of-concept. So he's hit the lab and begun work on actual experiments.
"We're utilizing a modified Michelson-Morley interferometer — that allows us to measure microscopic perturbations in space time," he said. "In our case, we're attempting to make one of the legs of the interferometer appear to be a different length when we energize our test devices." White and his colleagues are trying to simulate the tweaked Alcubierre drive in miniature by using lasers to perturb space-time by one part in 10 million.
Of course, the interferometer isn't something that NASA would bolt onto a spaceship. Rather, it's part of a larger scientific pursuit.
"Our initial test device is implementing a ring of large potential energy — what we observe as blue shifted relative to the lab frame — by utilizing a ring of ceramic capacitors that are charged to tens of thousands of volts," he told us. "We will increase the fidelity of our test devices and continue to enhance the sensitivity of the warp field interferometer — eventually using devices to directly generate negative vacuum energy."
He points out that Casimir cavities, physical forces that arise from a quantized field, may represent a viable approach.
And it's through these experiments, hopes White, that NASA can go from the theoretical to the practical.
Waiting for that "Chicago Pile" moment
Given just how fantastic this all appears, we asked White if he truly thinks a warp-generating spacecraft might someday be constructed.
"Mathematically, the field equations predict that this is possible, but it remains to be seen if we could ever reduce this to practice."
How NASA might build its very first warp driveExpand
What White is waiting for is existence of proof — what he's calling a "Chicago Pile" moment — a reference to a great practical example.
"In late 1942, humanity activated the first nuclear reactor in Chicago generating a whopping half Watt — not enough to power a light bulb," he said. "However, just under one year later, we activated a ~4MW reactor which is enough to power a small town. Existence proof is important."
His cautious approach notwithstanding, White did admit that a real-world warp drive could create some fascinating possibilities for space travel — and would certainly reset our sense of the vastness of the cosmos.
"This loophole in general relativity would allow us to go places really fast as measured by both Earth observers, and observers on the ship — trips measured in weeks or months as opposed to decades and centuries," he said.
But for now, pursuit of this idea is very much in science mode. "I'm not ready to discuss much beyond the math and very controlled modest approaches in the lab," he said.
Which makes complete sense to us, as well. But thanks to these preliminary efforts, White has already done much to instill a renewed sense of hope and excitement over the possibilities. Faster-than-light travel may await us yet.
Warp engines -- technology that would allow space travel faster than the speed of light -- are still very much the stuff of science fiction. Science fiction, however, enters the realm of science fact through careful research, development and experimentation. This is where Dr Harold White comes in. For a few years now, he has been working on the idea of a warp drive for NASA -- based on the Alcubierre drive which manipulates time and space to create propulsion.
Dutch Mark Rademaker is not an engineer. Nor is he a physicist. He is a digital artist -- one who has worked within the Star Trek canon, and therefore was perfectly placed to be recruited by Dr White and Star Trek graphic designer Michael Okuda after they saw his rendition of the XCV-330 designed by Matt Jefferies -- the original designer of the Starship Enterprise. Rademaker's brief? To design the concept for a ship that could conceivably be powered by the Alcubierre drive -- a ship called the IXS Enterprise.
"Trek ships can be very particular, they have a set of design rules created by Gene Roddenberry. Deviation is possible, but it's best to follow them unless you have a very good 'Treknological' reason to do things differently," Rademaker explained to CNET.
"My own designs for the most part followed these guidelines. I do put research in things like era, events in the Trek timeline, plausible registry numbers and specifications of a ship. I put about three months of research in the XCV-330 Ringship that Matt Jefferies sketched in the 1960s. I was asked to convert that sketch/blueprint as a 3D CGI model, I wanted it to look spot on."
Dr Harold White explains the warp drive at SpaceVision 2013.
It was Jefferies' Ringship that was to form the basis of the concept for NASA, with the idea being that the rings produce the space/time bubble that allows the ship to move forward through the warp. Although the ship was just a concept, there were some challenges not present in designing purely for the fictional realm.
"Maths and physics are totally not my cup of tea, the math involved here is way, way over my head. Dr White was very good at explaining what I needed to know and what I would understand," Rademaker said. "Mike Okuda gave a lot of feedback at the start of the project and he designed the IXS Enterprise insignia. White gave pointers about ring thickness, outer curvature and how we could fill the inside of the rings, without wasting too much valuable space. When we had the basic shape pinned, I could freely add details and features, with communication about my progress each couple of days."
The ship looks as complex as anything seen in science fiction, and this in itself posed its own set of challenges. Everything on the ship, Rademaker said, had to have a function -- he couldn't just add details that he thought looked cool and add an explanation later. And there were a lot of parts.
"To keep track of 2500+ parts in the assembly," Rademaker said, when asked what the biggest challenge actually was. "No matter how well I planned this, it's a lot of parts to handle. My workstation had trouble with the rather heavy model, at a certain point I needed to upgrade to a faster/more capable PC."
It certainly looks the part -- although the project is still in very, very early days -- still in its speculative stage, according to the official NASA website. But the idea at this point is not to design a fully functional ship.
"We designed this mainly to interest people in space travel; the research might or might not lead to a breakthrough in FTL propulsion, but always will return valuable data. I think it's decades and many many evolutions away from a working prototype. To see it fly in this exact form is highly unlikely," Rademaker said.
That's a shame, for sure, but if the job of the IXS Enterprise is to spark imaginations, well, it's certainly doing that in spades
Many months have passed since I last posted an update. While my intention was to share anything the project I was working on was too important/too demanding to write an article during the "construction".
The IXS Enterprise, a very early concept of the first real warpship. When I got invited by Dr. Harold "Sonny" White and Mike Okuda, I was absolutely stunned. Did that just really happen? A person from NASA contacted me to do artwork for them? Yes it did! After seeing my rendition of Matt Jefferies "Ring Ship", Dr. White thought that this would be a good starting point for a near future "Ring Ship". At least from a STEM perspective. Because that is the main goal: to get a warpship concept out there that would inspire young people to choose a career in STEM.
However the XCV-330 needed some adaptions to fit to the latest warp theory. After making some adjustments, we quickly realized it would be better to start from scratch. I started to draw some logical (in my mind) shapes, Mike Okuda joined in to give some extremely helpful technical advice. He also concepted a 2D version that made excellent use of the space within the 2 rings. I tried to put as much of it into the IXS without loosing the motivational perspective. This perspective is also the reason why I made some (in reality) rather unpractical design choices. For example the windows in the cockpit, (a small homage to the spaceshuttle) the ship would be fully flown by wire/computer, but to have an outlook into space and to give the ship a face was very important to me. This was the main priority on my wishlist.
For a few weeks we kept tweaking and modifying the rough layouts, and when we finally concluded what direction to go, I secluded myself and started to work out the shapes and think over the details. Meanwhile Doug Drexler joined in to get this ship on the SOTL 2014 calendar. That was even better, I never walked the line between science and SCI-FI this close. (Or reality/fantasy.)
Time passed and I kept on modeling. Because the ship is even smaller than the XCV-330 I wanted to give it a very physical appeance. Very little textures and a lot of real surface detail. This did not really speed up the modeling, but in the end did work out quite well. The smallest edge blend on this ship is 2mm, the paneling and even the slots to keep the paneling in place are all modeled. If a tube flows into something, there is a slot where this tube will go into. No "hull stucking" so to speak. Hardly visible, but in my mind very satisfying.
Deadline for SOTL approached and I had to move on to make this happen. Because of the rather fat rings and the short/stubby length, it was very difficult to get a wide shot that would show it all. After a lot of consideration with Doug we finally got a decent angle. When I finished the SOTL entry (this March) I decided to take a quick brake. After a week I got back into it, and started to convert the entire ship to mesh and to name all the parts. (Over 2000 of them) Also I added more details to the underside of the ship, that was not visible on the calendar shot. I'm currently working on the last phase: texturing the nomenclature/signs/arrows/labels. This will take some time to complete. The result will be the best model I have done so far, the most manageable despite it's 80 million+ polygons and most importaly one that might inspire the next generation to choose for space and science. Lets face it, there is an entire endless Universe waiting out there to be explored. Why are we still here?
- Mark
Avimimus said:First half science.
Second half fiction.
There is a long way to go between 'we aren't sure it isn't impossible' to hardware ...and certainly to finding a place that is halfway acceptable to be worth the trip. If there was ever a competition between artist conceptions' that are simply PR gestures...
Ummm... a hydrogen atom has a mass of 1.6735 x 10^-27 kilograms. At 1/10 light speed, 299,792 meters/sec, kinetic energy = 1/2 * M*V^2 = 1/2 * 1.6735 x 10^-27 * 299,792 * 299,792 = 7.52x10^-17 Joules. One Hiroshima = ~20 kilotons = 20*4.184e+12 = 8.368x10^13 J. You'd need 1.1x10^30 hydrogen atoms at 1/10 c for a single Hiroshima... about 1.86 metric tons.The situation worsens exponentially at higher speeds. Traveling at 1/10 the speed of light the impact of a simple hydrogen atom equals a one Hiroshima.
Yet sir, not yet.Consider that proton accelerators routinely get bunches of protons moving at nearly arbitrarily close to c speeds, and they don't produce anything like an atom bomb worth of bang.
OK, 1/10 HiroshimaUmmm... a hydrogen atom has a mass of 1.6735 x 10^-27 kilograms. At 1/10 light speed, 299,792 meters/sec, kinetic energy = 1/2 * M*V^2 = 1/2 * 1.6735 x 10^-27 * 299,792 * 299,792 = 7.52x10^-17 Joules. One Hiroshima = ~20 kilotons = 20*4.184e+12 = 8.368x10^13 J. You'd need 1.1x10^30 hydrogen atoms at 1/10 c for a single Hiroshima... about 1.86 metric tons.The situation worsens exponentially at higher speeds. Traveling at 1/10 the speed of light the impact of a simple hydrogen atom equals a one Hiroshima.
To get one Hiroshima out of a single Hydrogen atom, you need to be going at *high* relativistic speeds... 99.9999+% light speed. Consider that proton accelerators routinely get bunches of protons moving at nearly arbitrarily close to c speeds, and they don't produce anything like an atom bomb worth of bang.
Yet sir, not yet.Consider that proton accelerators routinely get bunches of protons moving at nearly arbitrarily close to c speeds, and they don't produce anything like an atom bomb worth of bang.
Miracles do still happen...{ Off-topic, but one of our tabby cats has just strolled across keyboard without deranging my text: Is this a first ?? }
Macbeth, "What, sir, not yet at rest?"Yet sir, not yet.Consider that proton accelerators routinely get bunches of protons moving at nearly arbitrarily close to c speeds, and they don't produce anything like an atom bomb worth of bang.
Here’s the latest paper on the Alcubierre drive showing it is an allowable proposal theoretically.
IIRC, it was to deploy a dust cloud ahead, maintained by a robot. Perhaps held together by electrostatic charge?I'm reminded of the AC Clarke tale where, due to a minor math error, fast (subluminal) interstellar travel was nearly missed. The ship did require a thick frontal shield of ice, literally a DIY comet. So, when that ate something at far end of distribution curve, they had to stop off at a slow-boat settled planet and do some ice sculpting. Seemed a bit contrived...
IIRC, the 'Daedalus Final Report' fretted about inter-stellar and in-system mascons but, without digging it out of storage, I can't remember if they planned to use 'chaff' and 'talc' as 'path-sweepers' for the cruise phase. Certainly for the fly-through probes...
{ Off-topic, but one of our tabby cats has just strolled across keyboard without deranging my text: Is this a first ?? }
IIRC, it was to deploy a dust cloud ahead, maintained by a robot. Perhaps held together by electrostatic charge?I'm reminded of the AC Clarke tale where, due to a minor math error, fast (subluminal) interstellar travel was nearly missed. The ship did require a thick frontal shield of ice, literally a DIY comet. So, when that ate something at far end of distribution curve, they had to stop off at a slow-boat settled planet and do some ice sculpting. Seemed a bit contrived...
IIRC, the 'Daedalus Final Report' fretted about inter-stellar and in-system mascons but, without digging it out of storage, I can't remember if they planned to use 'chaff' and 'talc' as 'path-sweepers' for the cruise phase. Certainly for the fly-through probes...
{ Off-topic, but one of our tabby cats has just strolled across keyboard without deranging my text: Is this a first ?? }
TARDIS?Alcubierre like space-time metric that I have around here (somewhere) that talked about creating a warp bubble that was smaller on the outside than the inside
Is the Warp Drive Possible? With Alexey Bobrick and Gianni Martire:
View: https://youtu.be/vclfqT5oOyY
I have been following the Alcubierre warp drive theory since the beginning and find the whole process fascinating, given the fact that there seems to be nothing in the current laws of physics that says that such a drive is impossible.
While conducting analysis related to a DARPA-funded project to evaluate possible structure of the energy density present in a Casimir cavity as predicted by the dynamic vacuum model, a micro/nano-scale structure has been discovered that predicts negative energy density distribution that closely matches requirements for the Alcubierre metric. The simplest notional geometry being analyzed as part of the DARPA-funded work consists of a standard parallel plate Casimir cavity equipped with pillars arrayed along the cavity mid-plane with the purpose of detecting a transient electric field arising from vacuum polarization conjectured to occur along the midplane of the cavity. An analytic technique called worldline numerics was adapted to numerically assess vacuum response to the custom Casimir cavity, and these numerical analysis results were observed to be qualitatively quite similar to a two-dimensional representation of energy density requirements for the Alcubierre warp metric. Subsequently, a toy model consisting of a 1 m diameter sphere centrally located in a 4 m diameter cylinder was analyzed to show a three-dimensional Casimir energy density that correlates well with the Alcubierre warp metric requirements. This qualitative correlation would suggest that chip-scale experiments might be explored to attempt to measure tiny signatures illustrative of the presence of the conjectured phenomenon: a real, albeit humble, warp bubble.