NASA's Advanced Propulsion Team - IXS Enterprise

A spaceship set inside two dumbbells fore/aft.  This is the shorthand description of Harold White's starship vision.

Artist Mark Rademaker has created some stunning computer generated images of what NASA physicist Harold White has in mind for a real warp drive vessel.

Harold White is the head of NASA's Advanced Propulsion Team and he recently spoke about his conceptual starship design at a conference last year.  But new interest in the project reached new heights with Mark Rademaker's images of what White's starship will look like.

Rademaker said that creating the images took over 1,600 hours to create.

As a tip of the hat to Star Trek fans, Harold White has named his starship fittingly enough "the Enterprise" - although in this case, its the IXS Enterprise.

The SpaceVision 2013 Space Conference took place last November in Phoenix, Arizona.  And it was here that White talked about his design.  The concepts that went into it.  The theory of a special loophole in general relativity that will allow for the idea of generating a "space wrap."

Quoting the CNN edition article:  ...White described space warps as faraway galaxies that can bend light around them. They work on the principle of bending space both in front of and behind a spacecraft. This would essentially allow for the empty space behind the craft to expand, both pushing and pulling it forward at the same time. The concept is similar to that of an escalator or moving walkway.

"There's no speed limit on the expansion and contraction of space," White said at the conference. "You can actually find a way to get around what I like to call the 11th commandment: Thou shall not exceed the speed of light."  end quote.

This an outgrowth of physicist Miguel Alcubierre who in 1994 was first to theorize a mathematical model of a wrap drive that would allow for the bending of space and time.

The wrap drive that White and his team are working on "would literally transcend space," thus shortening the distance between two points and allowing the craft to break the speed of light barrier.  Thus, there will be no speed limits for spaceships.

While existing technology will not allow for the construction of the IXS class of starship - yet, Harold White based his design on EARLY concept drawings by Matthew Jeffries 1965 designs of the Enterprise from the future "Star Trek" tv series.  Quote:  In his design, White says he drew from Matthew Jeffries' 1965 sketches of the Enterprise from "Star Trek," saying parts of that ship were mathematically correct. He worked with Rademaker and graphic designer Mike Okuda to update the math and produce what he believes to be a viable spacecraft. end quote.



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Ref.
1. CNN.com.  "What an Enterprise! NASA physicist, artist unveil warp-speed craft design" by Caitlin Schmidt. June 12, 2014.  (http://edition.cnn.com/2014/06/12/tech/innovation/warp-speed-spaceship/).
2. Mark Rademaker images that went with the article.

A recent article posted to the Discovery.com website tells of a recent shake up in the work being done to make faster-than-light travel possible in reality than stay in science fiction.

Click on the link below to go to the actual article. I will quote a few statements from that article below as well.

Quote:  "There is hope," Harold "Sonny" White of NASA's Johnson Space Center said Friday (Sept. 14) at the 100 Year Starship Symposium, a meeting to discuss the challenges of interstellar spaceflight.

Miguel Alcubierre proposed a football shape spacecraft with a flat ring of exotic matter that can create a space-time bubble aorund it.  And that bubble would contract space-time ahead of the ship and expand it behind the vessel causing it to travel faster-than-light without breaking the laws of physics to do so.  But the energy needed to create that space-time bubble was to great - until now.  Such FTL travel would give the vessel the "effective speed of about 10 times the speed of light.

But Harold White calculated that if the flat ring was instead more of a donut shape ring around said spacecraft, the energy requirements drop.  Plus, the intensity of the space warps could be oscillated over time - and that reduces the energy requirements even more.

Quote: "The findings I presented today change it from impractical to plausible and worth further investigation," White told SPACE.com. "The additional energy reduction realized by oscillating the bubble intensity is an interesting conjecture that we will enjoy looking at in the lab."

White and his team have begun experimenting with a mini version of their warp drive system theory.

Calling it the "White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer", the lab is located at the Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas.

And the final quote from this article:  "We're trying to see if we can generate a very tiny instance of this in a tabletop experiment, to try to perturb space-time by one part in 10 million," White said.

The White-Juday Warp Field (henseforth referred to as WJWF) generator could be about the size of the old Voyager 1 space probe that was launched by NASA in 1977.


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Ref.
1. Discovery.com. "THE WARP DRIVE COULD BECOME SCIENCE FACT" by Clara Moskowitz. September 17, 2012. (http://news.discovery.com/space/warp-drive-possible-nasa-tests-100yss-120917.html).
2. Vulcan space ship images off the internet. Hallmark Christmas ornament.(http://images.replacements.com/images/images5/china/C/hallmark_star_trek_enterprise_no_box_P0000446232S0001T2.jpg). And from this website (http://star-trek.fl-ink.com/st-album1.htm).

A REAL starship USS ENTERPRISE in 20 Years?

Part spaceship, part space station, and a mobile spaceport; a engineer thinks that a version of the famous Star Trek TV and movie iconic starship can be built to fit the bill.  Going by the handle BTE Dan, he has a website that has caught the attention of thousands of fans (including this blogger).

The ship has to be functional and still looks like the famous spaceship.  And while it would not be equiped with a real Warp Drive, this mobile starbase would be powered by a 1.5 GW nuclear reactor that can supply power to the ion drive engines to give a constant acceleration to any point in our solar system.  Three additional nuclear reactors would supply all the electric needs of the ship.

The saucer section of the ship would be 536 meters (.3 mile) diameter.  Within this section would be a ratating, magnetically-suspend gravity wheel that could create 1G of gravity for a crew that could go as high as 1000 people.

The key to anything getting done in outer space is funding. And if Congress doesn't give out the bucks, then there is "No Buck Rogers!" (Sorry, could not resist that quote from the movie "The Right Stuff.")

BTE Dan has worked out a spending plan that uses tax increases and spreading out budget cuts to defense, health and human services, housing and urban development, education and energy.  These are cuts to areas of discretionary spending and are not large, and the tax increases could be small.  A personal note here. I don't see the current crop of congressmen and women having the gonads to do this.  Including the tax increase proposed here.  Even if the next administration and congress are successful in getting rid of the so-called "Obamacare" plan, this nation will still be trillons in debt for the near future.

Quoting BTE Dan, "These changes to spending and taxes will not sink the republic," says the website. "In fact, these will barely be noticed. It's amazing that a program as fantastic as the building a fleet of USS Enterprise spaceships can be done with so little impact." end quote.

BTE Dan also added this bit of news, quote:  "The only obstacles to us doing it are the limitations we place on our collective imagination," BTE Dan adds, and his proposal says that NASA will still receive funding for the science, astronomy and robotic missions it currently undertakes.


But he proposes not just one Enterprise-class ship, but multiple ships, one of which can be built every 33 years –- once per generation –- giving three new ships per century. "Each will be more advanced than the prior one. Older ships can be continually upgraded over several generations until they are eventually decommissioned." end quote.

As for who BTE Dan is, lists himself as a systems engineer and electrical engineer who has worked for a Fortune 500 company for the past 30 years.



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Ref.
1.  io9.com. "Engineer thinks we could build a real Starship Enterprise in 20 years" by Nancy Atkinson. May 12, 2012. ( http://io9.com/5909774/engineer-thinks-we-could-build-a-real-starship-enterprise-in-20-years?tag=startrek ).  images from same article.
2. Build The Enterprise.org website. ( http://www.buildtheenterprise.org/ ).