Thanks to a NASA physicist, the notion of warp speed might just travel out of sci-fi and into the real world. NASA's Harold White has been working since 2010 to develop a warp drive that will allow spacecraft to travel at speeds faster than light -- 186,000 miles per second.White, who heads NASA's Advanced Propulsion Team, spoke about his conceptual starship at a conference last fall. But interest in his project reached a new level this week when he unveiled images of what the craft might look like.Created by artist Mark Rademaker, who based them on White's designs, the images show a technologically detailed spacecraft that wouldn't look out of place in a "Star Trek" movie. Rademaker says creating them took more than 1,600 hours.At the SpaceVision 2013 Space Conference last November in Phoenix, White talked about his design, the concepts behind it and the progress that's been made in warp-drive development over the decades. He discussed the idea of a "space warp," a loophole in the theory of general relativity that would allow for massive distances to be traveled very quickly, reducing travel times from thousands of years to days.
This is actually really cool. It means that we are close to being able to travel to far away places, that might contain life, in the future. It was previously thought that we would never have the capabilities of traveling fast enough to reach any of these distant places. It is kinda funny that they based the designs off of fictional movies. But ultimately this is huge in the realm of science.
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