NASA Tests Potential Warp Drive for Engines
Star Trek fans may be getting excited at NASA’s latest announcement of a potential warp drive engine that, like the starship Enterprise on the popular TV show, could travel to places in space in a few hours instead of years. The new type of space travel being tested would be able to go at speeds near the speed of light.
NASA is making the potential warp drive through the building of an electromagnetic (EM) drive via technology that some wouldn’t have thought to be possible in this day and age. This new space flight drive is designed to work through moving items through space via magnets which would create microwaves. These microwaves would travel through some kind of device and that would create the thrust needed to help them travel through space.
Potential Warp Drive Would Save Fuel
If NASA can get a working model of this potential warp drive, then it would solve a very big issue, which is how to carry enough fuel to allow man to travel to Mars and beyond, since the weight of the fuel currently used causes limitations in the speed and how far a spacecraft can travel.
The scientists at the Johnson Space Center of NASA have seemingly tested this potential warp drive via the EM drive. Reportedly, if it actually could be used in space travel it would cut a trip to the Moon down to just a few hours, and cut a trip to Mars down from a two or three year mission to just 70 days.
According to the reports, the potential warp drive is so far able to reach about nine and a half percent of the speed of light, which while far from the ability to send off astronauts to Mars at a faster than light speed, it still shows potential if they can get the EM drive working more efficiently.
Potential Warp Drive Very Controversial
The technology that would run the potential warp drive is quite controversial, as it appears that it would violate the way that science currently interprets the laws of physics. However, the report put out says that it has been officially presented by NASA, as well as the Chinese space agency, which says that NASA has successfully been able to test the EM drive in a hard vacuum, as previously they did tests on it in the regular atmosphere, making a hard vacuum more important since there is no atmosphere out in space.
All in all the potential warp drive is considered to be a major breakthrough in the efforts of the international team of scientists working on what could someday propel astronauts and allow them to travel in space in vastly faster ships that will help man explore the universe perhaps more like the crew of the USS Enterprise.
