A Spacecraft that Twists Space

The concept of faster-than-light travel has existed and is common in the realm of science fiction for decades now. However, the idea of wrap drives interstellar journeys has captured the imagination of many, especially in the series called Star Trek. Which of these ideas and concepts were more than just fiction and imagination? It seems like the new development of science theory is slowly becoming a subject of interest.

Twisting space to travel faster than light is the idea behind the warp drive

Science fiction is often associated with warp drives, which have the potential to accelerate spacecraft faster than the speed of light. The prospect of twisting or bending space-time to enable faster-than-light travel without violating the fundamental principles of physics lies at the heart of the warp drive concept. A warp drive would presumably compress space in front of the vehicle and expand it behind, producing a kind of bubble.

This bubble would enable the ship to travel great distances swiftly rather than speeding it to the speed of light. The space surrounding the spacecraft would move, enabling it to travel farther than the speed of light, rather than the spacecraft itself moving through space at an impossibly rapid rate. Miguel Alcubierre, a physicist laid this foundation in 1994 and spoke about the mathematical model for a warp drive.     READ MORE...

An Exotic Propulsion Space Race

An international team of physicists behind several revolutionary warp drive concepts, including the first to require no exotic matter, says that recent unprecedented breakthroughs in physics and propulsion have launched the world powers into a Cold War-style, 21st-century space race to build the world’s first working warp drive.


“We have a space race brewing,” said Gianni Martie, the founder of the Applied Physics (AP) think tank and co-author on a pair of forthcoming warp drive research papers, in an email to The Debrief. “There’s still a ton to discover and invent, but we have the next steps now, which we didn’t have before.”


Comprised of over 30 physicists and scientists in related disciplines, the AP team has gained a sizeable reputation in the warp theory community due to their highly regarded, peer-reviewed papers on numerous warp drive concepts. 

One of those concepts recently reported by The Debrief has gained significant attention, inspiring many researchers and scientists to declare the team’s “constant velocity warp drive model” as the first practical, viable warp drive concept ever proposed.


The AP team has also created the Warp Factory, a set of development and simulation tools that allow fellow researchers in this nascent field to evaluate the physics of their own models, which can greatly improve the model’s quality and viability.       READ MORE...

A Real Life Warp Drive

A team of physicists has reported the accidental discovery of a real-world "warp bubble" whilst observing the structure of Casimir cavities – a small step towards building a potential warp drive.

The Debrief reports that Dr. Harold G. "Sonny" White and his team stumbled upon the existence of a warp bubble whilst conducting DARPA-funded research into Casimir cavities and the energy density present in those structures. White acknowledged the significance of the fluke findings but asserted that it was only a small step forward in regards to actually building a warp drive.

"Our detailed numerical analysis of our custom Casimir cavities helped us identify a real and manufacturable nano/microstructure that is predicted to generate a negative vacuum energy density such that it would manifest a real nanoscale warp bubble, not an analog, but the real thing," White explained in a statement to the publication.

He emphasized that the findings recorded by his Limitless Space Institute (LSI) team centered around "a real, albeit humble and tiny, warp bubble" as opposed to a warp bubble analog, and confirmed that the structure "predicts negative energy density distribution that closely matches requirements for the Alcubierre metric," hence the significance of the observation.

IGN previously referred to the Alcubierre metric and the possibility of warp drives becoming a reality, as Space.com noted that "a concept for a real-life warp drive was suggested in 1994 by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre; however, subsequent calculations found that such a device would require prohibitive amounts of energy."  READ MORE...

Leaving NASA

Warp Drive Inc
Traveling at faster than the speed of light has been the subject of countless works of science fiction. Most notably, the “warp drive” in “Star Trek” allowed cosmic travelers to break the lightspeed barrier to traverse vast galactic distances.

In the real world, research into potential warp drive technologies has been slow, but significant enough to attract the interest of NASA and even a handful of independent ventures.


Take Harold “Sonny” White, a big name in warp drive research who left NASA in 2019 to work at a Houston-based nonprofit called the Limitless Space Institute — where, he says, he was allowed by NASA to continue his work and even take his lab equipment with him.

“Yeah, I have a lab here full of all my goodies from NASA,” White told The Debrief in a fascinating new interview. But the engineer didn’t burn any bridges in the process, adding that “we have a Space Act agreement with the agency.”


Leaving NASA
It sounds like NASA is pretty chill with White continuing his work elsewhere.

Sonny said that “when I was working in NASA, we really didn’t try to go through and patent anything.”

“Probably a little too early to try and really work towards patenting anything,” he told The Debrief. “I mean, there may be a time it’s right to do that, but there wasn’t at NASA.”

Where the transition leaves White’s progress on realizing a new form of propulsion that could allow humans to travel past the speed of light remains somewhat murky (although The Debrief says it’s going to publish two more installments of its interview with White, so stay tuned.)  READ MORE