So O'Donoghue took the Federation starship USS Enterprise, commanded by Captain Jean-Luc Picard (played by Patrick Stewart) in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and sent it flying from the sun to Pluto at varying warp-speed velocities. After receiving widespread attention for those animations, he began wondering what going faster might look like in reality.

O'Donoghue previously animated the speed of light within the solar system, and the results were depressing. He says the work gives him 'a sense of despair' about travelling through space, even at superluminal speeds.

Harold G “Sonny” White, together with the Limitless Space Institute (LSI), has reported the successful manifestation of an actual, real-world “ Warp Bubble.” This is a world's first breakthrough by his LSI team.This trouncing of theoretical physics makes reaching alien-rich planets across the galaxy seem like just a convenient TV-commercial-break-length trip away.īut a new animation by the planetary and space scientist James O'Donoghue, who used to work at NASA and is now employed by JAXA (Japan's national space agency), grounds the warp drives of those fictional spaceships in reality. Warp drive pioneer and former NASA warp drive specialist Dr. Spaceships at warp velocity would continue to interact with objects in 'normal space'.ĭec 2021. Warp involves a measurable passage of time using an exponential scale called 'warp factor' where a factor of 10 is infinite speed. This is in contrast to other faster-than-light technologies such as a jump drive where travel is in hyperspace lanes and are much faster than warp drives as you could jump from point to point down these lanes almost instantly, taking multiple jumps to get to a destination. In this way, dilithium could regulate the antimatter density, and thus the matter-antimatter reaction rate. Antihydrogen atoms are threaded through the lattices of the dilithium crystals and therefore remain a fixed distance both from atoms of normal matter and one another. The displacement 'ride' had the effect of reducing the inertial mass of the spaceship, which required inertial dampers to control.ĭilithium crystals regulate the matter-antimatter annihilation rate, because they are the only form of matter known to be “porous” to antimatter. This is a subspace displacement field which warps spacetime around the vessel, encompassing it in a subspace bubble, allowing it to 'ride' in this distortion and effectively travel faster than the speed of light. In Star Trek: Federation warp drives were fueled by the reaction of matter (deuterium) and antimatter (antideuterium), which produced a highly energetic plasma, which was channeled through conduits and field-generation warp coils to create a warp field. The space inside the rings is optimized to fit more space for cargo, crew and equipment. The ship has two thick outer rings that generate the warp field-a contraction of space ahead, and expansion of space behind it.

The energy required to power the warp drive approximately the negative mass–energy equivalence of Voyager 1 which is 700 kg or 63 exajoules of energy. Harold White, using the Alcubierre drive and exotic matter. The IXS Enterprise is a conceptual interstellar spaceship designed by NASA scientist Dr. This Alcubierre warp drive theory was first suggested by Miguel Alcubierre, stating that to build one would require negative energy and exotic matter, the same stuff needed to maintain stable wormholes. This solves the special relativity dilemmas and ensures that there are ordinary velocities, there is no time dilation, and no prohibitive fuel cost. The spaceship does not actually travel faster than light but rather a high-energy warp core reactor is used to compress 4d spacetime in front of the ship (so it contracts), and decompress spacetime behind the ship (so it expands), creating a warp of spacetime and displacing the ship forward, propelling it along like a surfboard on an expanding wave of spacetime. A warp drive is a spaceship propulsion system allowing it to travel at speeds faster than light by many orders of magnitude.

Nasa warp drive