Space
| NASA physicist Harold White and a team have been working on a theoretical design for a faster-than-light ship for a few years. They have now collaborated with an artist to create an updated, more realistic design of what such a spaceship might actually look like. |
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NASA physicist has unveiled a more realistic concept of his warp drive spacecraft, and the not-so-subtle influence of Star Trek is front and center. While it's clearly just a concept at this stage, it's hard not to be inspired.
The space agency's Harold White worked with the artist Mark Rademaker to realize in images his long-standing idea for a ship capable of travelling at virtually unbelievable speeds and distances.
The concept, based on the Alcubierre warp drive would involve a spacecraft attached to a large ring encircling it. This ring, potentially made of exotic matter, would cause space-time to warp around the spaceship, creating a region of contracted space in front of it and expanded space behind.
White has been working on a functional warp drive concept at NASA's Johnson Space Center since 2010. The idea is to try and warp space time, literally shortening the distance between two points around the ship and allowing it to travel faster than light.
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The renderings show what a craft fitted with the drive (named the IXS Enterprise) could really look like. Annalee Newitz at iO9 also unearthed the video below, in which White describes his idea at the SpaceVision 2013 conference (skip ahead to about the 42 minute mark).
Check out the full gallery of images on his Flickr. Rademaker said the images took more than 1,600 hours to make.
SOURCE iO9
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