ISX Enterprise – what a real warp-drive spacecraft might look like

Even if you hate Star Trek, you still know the flagship spacecraft of the Federation is the Enterprise, you also probably know it can travel at warp-speed. That’s faster than light in case you’re wondering. What you might not know, is that despite its sci-fi storyline, much of the technology used in the show was based, albeit very loosely, on scientific hypothesis, theory and fact.

Using the best available information from NASA, and adding a healthy dose of artistic license, designer Mark Rademaker has created a series of images showing what the very first warp-capable spacecraft built by humans might look like. He’s called it the ISX Enterprise.

Believe it or not there are in fact some very clever people working at NASA right now on trying to figure out, in theory, how you could build a warp drive. Just to be clear, we’re a long, long way away from something actually being built. But Dr Harold White of NASA’s Johnson Space Center has been working hard to prove that it could one day be possible. His research is based on an earlier theory put forward by Miguel Alcubierre in 1994.

Alcubierre theorised that although it is impossible to travel faster than light (186,000 miles per second) in conventional space. A drive which allowed spacetime to be manipulated may allow for a vehicle to exeed the speed of light by several factors. His ideas are supported by the fact many physicists believe that in the first moments after the Big Bang the universe expanded at a speed 30 billion times faster than the speed of light.

The hypothetical Alcubierre drive works by recreating a miniature version of the big bang in a localized bubble around the spacecraft. A negative energy torus would expand space behind the spacecraft and compress space in front of it allowing the craft in effect to travel many times the speed of light. The spacecraft itself would sit in a zero-gravity zone and the occupants would therefore be unaware of the acceleration or deceleration. Think of it this way. If you take a regular bath sponge and put a small toy car at one end, to get it to the other end you have to push it several inches. But if you compress the sponge lengthways, the car can be at the other end almost instantly. Well in this setup, the car is the spaceship and the sponge is space.

Of course it’s never that simple, and when Alcubierre crunched the numbers it was calculated that the torus around the spacecraft would need to be the size of Jupiter, and you’d also need to turn something the size of Jupiter into pure energy to power it. Just to complicate things, negative energy density is still hypothetical.

On the upside however, the latest research by Dr. White has suggested that the size of the torus could be massively reduced. Down to a feasible 30 feet (10 metres). He has also suggested that by oscillating the bubble around the spacecraft the amount of energy required could be brought down by an equally significant amount. This means that in terms of size, a warp-speed capable spacecraft could be constructed and fueled.

There is however the one fairly major sticking point. It might be smaller, but the drive itself is still only hypothetical. Oh yeah, and the fact several other researchers have theorised that control of the spacecraft by the crew would be impossible, others which have said the extreme temperatures generated would fry every thing inside the torus. And to top it all off there’s a possibility that the shockwave in front of the spacecraft would destroy everything in front of it, including its destination.