NASA's design for a warp ship

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Here's NASA's New Design for a Warp Drive Ship
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AnnaleeNewitz
Annalee Newitz
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Annalee Newitz
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mark rademaker
space
harold white
warp drive
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Here's NASA's New Design for a Warp Drive Ship12345...8

In 2012, NASA physicist Harold White revealed that he and a team were working on a design for a faster-than-light ship. Now he's collaborated with an artist to create a new, more realistic design of what such a ship might actually look like.
How NASA might build its very first warp drive

A few months ago, physicist Harold White stunned the aeronautics world when he announced that he… Read more

Artist Mark Rademaker told io9 that he worked with White to create the updated model, which includes a sleek ship nestled at the center of two enormous rings, which create the warp bubble.

In this video, below, you can see White talking about the new design (starting at 41:54), and explaining how it fits his mathematical analysis.

I rather like the design. Too bad it'll never be built.

[Borgholio]

Design is great, it actually looks plausible. As far as never being built...well let's wait and see.

[Iroscato]

Would there be a way to internalise the warp bubble generator? Speaking purely from an aesthetic viewpoint, seems a shame to have a cool-looking ship surrounded by huge, ungainly rings.

[Borgholio]

I think the rings add to the coolness factor. It screams "This ship has a motherfucking warp drive"

[Iroscato]

I think the rings add to the coolness factor. It screams "This ship has a motherfucking warp drive"

I suppose you have a point there

[General Zod]

Someone else pointed it out in the comments section, but I just want to repost it here:

Second from the right.

[Eternal_Freedom]

That's what I thought as well.

I like the design. Not sold on the name Enterprise though.

[Simon_Jester]

The thing still requires negative energy density in order to work.

Wake me when we find a rock of negative mass.

[Eleas]

I like the complete absence of cosmic radiation shielding.

[dragon]

I like the complete absence of cosmic radiation shielding.

Well if they have a nuclear reactor for power thats more than enough oomph to provide for a electromagnetic shielding

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Design is great, it actually looks plausible. As far as never being built...well let's wait and see. :)

It's not. As Simon says, until we find rocks of negative mass to power the damned thing with, it's still elf magic.

Aside from that, it's clearly a ship designed by an artist paying homage to Star Trek, and not an engineer. An Albicuerre-drive equipped ship still needs to be a huge rocket, since you go into and come out of "warp" with whatever velocity you had before you turned on the drive ... so you'll need to very quickly match velocities with wherever you've ended up.

Also, the inside of an Albicuerre warp bubble is apparently expected to bathe everything inside it in hard gamma rays produced by Hawking radiation (as more than a few models suggest a warp bubble travelling faster than light will have visible event horizons.) If that weren't bad enough, the bubble will sweep up anything in its way, and unleash it as a bright flash of hard radiation when turned off. (Initial estimates suggested the flash would fry an entire star system, though they've walked that back quite a ways.) tl;dr - The big windows ... bad idea.

So an "actual" warp drive (again, assuming you could find the ton of negative space rocks required to make it go,) would be a couple of rings wrapped around a featureless football with a great big rocket nozzle at one end. (The crew compartment would be tiny and buried in the center of the ship, which would probably be filled with water.)

[Channel72]

It's hilarious how much of an influence Star Trek has on the aesthetic sensibilities of engineers.

[Iroscato]

I like the complete absence of cosmic radiation shielding.

Could the rings themselves double up as a shielding system?

[Ziggy Stardust]

It's not. As Simon says, until we find rocks of negative mass to power the damned thing with, it's still elf magic.

Out of curiosity, why would we need rocks of negative mass? I don't know much about the theory behind the Alcubierre.

[Zixinus]

Are there technical blueprints or is this just something vaguely based on not-confirmed-in-practice math?

Because I think it's the latter and io9 is being stupid for the sake of a sensationalist headline.

Someone else pointed it out in the comments section, but I just want to repost it here:

Second from the right.

That's a proposal for a space station. The wheel isn't a stardrive, it's a space station using centrifugal acceleration (if I am using the term right) to create pseudo-gravity. It's a common concept with imagining future space programs.

[Borgholio]

It's not. As Simon says, until we find rocks of negative mass to power the damned thing with, it's still elf magic.

Out of curiosity, why would we need rocks of negative mass? I don't know much about the theory behind the Alcubierre.

I'm no expert, but the idea of being able to fold space requires the ability to generate negative mass or energy. Which as far as modern science knows, is impossible. So if there's no way to generate negative mass, no warp drive.

[Magis]

I like the complete absence of cosmic radiation shielding.

Well if they have a nuclear reactor for power thats more than enough oomph to provide for a electromagnetic shielding

That is absolutely not true. Even if one had a no power constraints at all, the kind of field you would neet to deflect HZE particles would be so strong that it would cause biological problems for the human occupants.

Shielding against HZE particles on long space journeys is something that we haven't even come close to solving. In fact, there aren't even any plausible solutions being suggested except to try to make the duration of the journey as short as possible by increasing vehicle speeds.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

It's not. As Simon says, until we find rocks of negative mass to power the damned thing with, it's still elf magic.

Out of curiosity, why would we need rocks of negative mass? I don't know much about the theory behind the Alcubierre.

I'm no expert, but the idea of being able to fold space requires the ability to generate negative mass or energy. Which as far as modern science knows, is impossible. So if there's no way to generate negative mass, no warp drive.

Yes. Though, at least, you only need a ton of negative space rocks to power a small starship. Which is a dramatic improvement over the Jupiter's worth of negative space rocks they thought you needed a few years ago. Which is a mind-boggling improvement over the several billion times the observable mass of the universe worth of negative space rocks they thought you needed when they first postulated this idea.

EDIT:

Also, "negative space rocks" underlines the current absurdity of the Albicuerre warp drive's special fuel requirement better than "negative energy/negative mass" or "exotic matter."

[Imperial528]

Are there technical blueprints or is this just something vaguely based on not-confirmed-in-practice math?

Because I think it's the latter and io9 is being stupid for the sake of a sensationalist headline.

From what I gathered from the article (I saw it earlier), Harold White (he's working on warp field experiments among other methods of propulsion at NASA) basically told an artist "This is what it has to have, and this is what it can't have. See if you can make something cool that follows those requirements."

So far his experiments have potentially indicated that a warp drive is within the range of conventional energy generation*, but the experiments are not yet accurate enough to say for sure.

The name Enterprise is clearly for publicity, but frankly as far as spaceship art goes it is actually rather impressive.

*Though IIRC to get all the energy at once you'd need beamed power or a large bomb.

I like the complete absence of cosmic radiation shielding.

Honestly if we ever get a functional warp drive, it'd be extremely valuable for just travel in the solar system. Shielding would still be an issue, but not nearly as bad as interstellar space.

[Guardsman Bass]

You need Negative Space Rocks (love that term) to keep the throats open for wormholes as well, so the lack of negative mass screws most proposed methods of FTL travel.

[Borgholio]

If there ever was a way to create or harness negative mass, I can see dozens of applications here on Earth in addition to a warp drive. It would be a massive....um...NEGATIVE massive world changer.

[Simon_Jester]

Just to clear up the negative-mass thing:

It's not. As Simon says, until we find rocks of negative mass to power the damned thing with, it's still elf magic.

Out of curiosity, why would we need rocks of negative mass? I don't know much about the theory behind the Alcubierre.

You need regions of spacetime that are curved opposite the way normal matter curves them. If we translate the concept (inaccurately) into Newtonian terms, you're basically creating a gravitational field that impels you forward, falling into a potential well in front of you... and away from a potential peak behind you.

So you need a way to make gravity that can push instead of just pulling, which in turn requires "exotic matter-" matter of negative gravitational mass.

It doesn't have to be a rock, but saying "now find me a rock of negative mass" sums up the real difficulty of this project rather well. So far as we know, it's not just that it can't be built out of modern materials or built with modern technology. The problem is that it can't be made out of atoms; you need at least one type of matter that is not recognizable as 'atoms' or for that matter a part of the Standard Model of particle physics at all. And which might not, in point of fact, exist.

[Guardsman Bass]

I think "dark energy" technically has a negative value, since it's causing space-time to expand. The problem is that it's thinly and evenly permeated through the universe (hence the resemblance to the old "cosmological constant"), and we have no idea how you might change that, or even if you could.

[A-Wing_Slash]

Anti-matter wouldn't have a negative mass, right? Thats what my basic google-fu suggests, but its not something anyone's been able to really test outside of very mico/particular circumstances it seems like.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Anti-matter wouldn't have a negative mass, right? Thats what my basic google-fu suggests, but its not something anyone's been able to really test outside of very mico/particular circumstances it seems like.

Antimatter does not have negative mass, and it certainly doesn't have negative energy. We've produced enough of it to know that it behaves like ordinary matter in every way, except for its exuberant, and terminal, allergy to ordinary matter (which is why 'enough' isn't very much.)

If antimatter were what negative space rocks were made of, you wouldn't find so much FTL pessimism because we know we could make enough antimatter to make FTL happen, if we were really patient and really careful.