4 Insane Methods of Space Travel We Might See One Day

 

1. Warp Drive spaceengines

Made famous by Star Trek, a warp drive enables for faster than light travel. It’s generally assumed to be impossible because of the tremendous amount of energy required to operate a drive. However, researchers think that they’ve discovered a method. The original concept was to adopt a design by scientist Miguel Alcubierre, who suggested a spaceship fashioned like an American Football with a flat circular ring around it. But in order to power such design, you would require a ball of antimatter the size of Jupiter.

To make the spaceship more viable, NASA’s Dr. Harold White altered the design. In theory, the improved spacecraft would need significantly less antimatter, roughly 500 kg. The planned spaceship would bend space-time and reach speeds 10 times the speed of light. It would make journeys to the nearest star roughly four or five months lengthy.

Unfortunately, antimatter is highly volatile. Just one third of a gram might discharge the same amount of energy that was released during the bombing of Hiroshima. The quantity of antimatter that White’s design requires would be the equivalent of 1.5 million Hiroshimas, enough to destroy the Earth.

2. Wormhole spaceengines

A mainstay of science fiction, wormholes have interested people ever since they were originally postulated in 1921. While they’re thought to exist, there’s no observable proof. Wormholes are basically tubes in space, which things may hypothetically pass through. But wormholes are fragile - if someone were to go through them, the walls would definitely collapse. In order to safely go through, the vessel would have deploy an anti-gravitational force. Physicists think we most likely wouldn’t be able to capture enough energy. If there existed a wormhole people could travel through, it wouldn’t naturally occur; it would have to be manufactured by an intelligent civilisation. So until we either get to that point or someone develops a wormhole for us, it will stay in the realm of science fiction.

3. Magnetic Sail spaceengines

The sun discharges primarily protons and electrons at rates that vary from 248 to 370 miles per millisecond. A magnetic sail would utilise this energy and push against it. A loop of conducting material would generate a magnetic field that’s perpendicular to the solar wind, and this would drive the vessel to the intended spot. The difficulty is that in order to achieve this, the sail would need to be 62 miles long. The technology to create the superconducting material for a sail of that scale, and maintain it at the correct temperature, simply isn’t accessible right now. Magnetic sails are simply a notion until better technology is developed.

4. Solar Sail spaceengines

While sails are low-tech by today’s standards, they’re receiving a contemporary upgrade in space flight. Instead of employing wind, these sails would utilise the power of the sun. Solar sails would only offer a spaceship a little push, but because there’s no friction in space the sails would gradually build up speed. For example, a solar sail that’s 1,300 feet broad might traverse 1.3 billion miles every year. That’s quicker than a vessel employing chemical propulsion. That would also be reasonably inexpensive compared to gasoline usage.

There are presently a number of initiatives employing solar sails. One comes from NASA and is dubbed the Sunjammer, after a short tale by Arthur C. Clarke. The Sunjammer sail would be created out of a material called Kapton and be only five microns (approximately 0.0002 inches) thick, weigh less than 70 pounds and be about the size of a dishwasher when packed up.

It’s believed that, although it could take a few decades to create, a solar sail could be utilised to transport a spaceship into another solar system. This sail would need to be the size of Texas, and a powerful laser would need to beam on it as it went farther away from the sun.