JSC's Warp Drive: Fact or Fluff?
NASA’s real life Enterprise may take us to other star systems one day, Gizmodo
“Dr. Harold “Sonny” White is still working on a warp drive at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Their work is still in the experimental stages but that doesn’t mean they can’t imagine already what the real life Enterprise ship should look like according to their math. You’re looking at it right now.”
What an Enterprise! NASA physicist, artist unveil warp-speed craft design
“According to NASA, there hasn’t been any proof that a warp drive can exist, but the agency is experimenting nonetheless. Although the concept doesn’t violate the laws of physics, that doesn’t guarantee that it will work.”
Status of “Warp Drive”, NASA
“Warp Drives”, “Hyperspace Drives”, or any other term for Faster-than-light travel is at the level of speculation, with some facets edging into the realm of science. We are at the point where we know what we do know and know what we don’t, but do not know for sure if faster than light travel is possible.”
Clarifying NASA’s Warp Drive Program, earlier post
“How much has NASA already spent on this project? How much does it intend to spend on this project? Where do the funds for Eagleworks and White’s advanced propulsion/warp drive research come from? JSC? HQ? Answer: The scope and scale of this project is small and commensurate with a university effort. Most of the equipment was pulled from storage to minimize capital procurement. Total procurement to implement the warp field interferometer is ~$50k. The funding comes from JSC.”
Keith’s note: Given the PR that centers on Dr. White it is a little difficult to believe that all NASA spends on this effort is on the order of $50,000 a year. Is this his full time job? If not, what is it that he does to get a salary from NASA? When you ask JSC what this costs you either get no answer or non-answers liek this. If this is a real project then you’d think NASA would want to be a little more forthcoming. If it is a real project, that is.
What will be interesting to watch is what visibility NASA PAO does – or does not – give to this in-house warp drive skunk works when it starts to work with the PR people for the film< em> “Interstellar” (there has been some preliminary interaction). Will NASA want taxpayers to know that it is thinking ahead or will it avoid all mention of this effort for fear of being ridiculed in the press?
Warp Drive Research at NASA JSC, earlier post
Right forthcoming about some little part-time long shot that just maybe could yield some interesting result , in any big institution projects under 100K rarely get a notice until they get enough PR that some idiot congressman makes a waste of taxpayer money issue of it. Part of Nasa’s exploration charter is to explore new ways of getting to all these new worlds we are finding out there. So as a taxpayer I have no problem with just a small amount of funds spent on fringe research like this.
The problem isn’t so much with the funds spent on the research but rather the publicity for a project that has yet to produce any results and money spent on things like models of futuristic looking space ships, things which have zero application for the research.
White is certainly putting his cart well before his research horse. There are also sufficient reasons to question whether the research is valid.
exactly, I doubt the guy doing the rendering is doing it for free, so thats just money going down the toilet
Sure it looks cool, but all I see is a waste of space on a practical vehicle
actually the artist did it for a Star Trek Calendar.
If that was the case, then I’m fine with it being used, but I think they (Sonny and the artist) should say the models made are not part of some feasible spacecraft and were generated independently. In any case like I said they are very nice pictures
and how much money and publicity is SLS churning through with no tangible results for another 3 years? plenty of models, pins, swag have been produced for the rocket to nowhere compared to this potentially ground breaking effort being done on the cheap.
Do you remember that saying about how two wrongs don’t make a right?
there is no evidence the mockups were paid for by NASA. comments elsewhere have said the ship was for a Trek Calendar (ships of the line) and white just provided suggestions.
cool pictures, but nothing more…
yeah … that is pretty much what they said about rockets and submarines in Science Fiction books in the 1800’s.
There is math to support the possibility that a warp drive is possible. Now … it is small experiments like this that may lead to the development of a true warp drive or point the way to different approach. The budget is miniscule.
The pictures is just a way to get the public interested in all the things that NASA does.
Without experiments to prove or disprove incredible concepts like a real warp drive, we will NEVER get very far into the Solar System with manned missions. I would think that beyond Mars a manned mission to a Jupiter moon is pretty much impossible without a warp drive or fusion power. Public sentiment is certainly not going to let nuclear fission power be viable for spacecraft and/or launches besides the traditional RTG and they kick up a huge fuss over the launch of anything with a small RTG even so!!!!
Solar power for a manned mission to the outer reaches of the solar system (Saturn and beyond) is pretty much impossible and unworkable because of the huge surface area (and structures) that would be required. Solar may work on small unmanned probes but the electrical requirements for a manned mission are likely to be orders of magnitude greater. The more solar panels you add the more structure you need and that is mass and more delta V and the reason to have more power is so you can use ION propulsion (or some variant) and so you need bigger engines because of the increased mass and so you need more power … and the spiral goes on … the whole house of cards becomes pretty much unworkable beyond the Asteroid belt for manned flight!
If we are to have manned flight beyond the Moon, a few Near Earth Asteroids and Mars, we need something radical like a warp drive or fusion.
If we are to ever send a probe to another star (and perhaps back) even if unmanned, it will take a warp drive to make the trip in any meaningful timeframe. Even with a Nuclear Fission power plant and ION or VASIMIR or a variant thrusting all the way, travel times to the nearest star are on the order of, perhaps in a few ten-thousands or thousands of years. Even when the probe gets there, it will still take 4.3 years to get the signal back to Earth and just the power requirements to transmit a signal to Earth are huge compared to the power generation resources that can be launched onboard such a mission.
With current chemical or ion propulsion The travel times one way are huge. Presuming an AVERAGE speed of .01c (c=speed of light), the travel time would be at least 450 years. With fusion power, average speeds up to .1c might be possible but that is still 43 years one way!
A warp drive capable of just .5c (not even faster than light) gets you a travel time of about 9 years one way or 18 years round trip (can anyone say “sample return” mission) and we don’t have to worry about significant infrastructure just to “phone home” so to speak with data. That is well within a human lifespan.
A warp drive capable of 4c means that you can make the round trip in 2 years and sit on Earth for years waiting for your radio signals transmitted at Alpha Centauri to arrive!
Given the results of White’s work so far–nothing so far–money shouldn’t be spent on fancy mock-ups and publicity. I cannot remember a single time on any research project where it seemed like a good idea to use research money for publicity about zero results. White has nothing to show for his work so far.
As for the research itself, right now it’s only possibly mathematically feasible. White-or anyone for that matter–has yet to discover what negative energy is, what negative mass is, or where the massive amounts of energy is going to come from.
White shouldn’t be selling or paying for promotional material until his “warp field interferometer” has produced results that support the math.
What was supposed to be a contribution to the Star Trek Ships of the Line 2014 calendar has now been altered to a ring-ship design that could provide means for manned missions to Mars or other worlds.
“I could have walked away, but I wanted this to be really good, so I put in an extra three months of spare time, with the new images as the result,” Rademaker said. – nature world news
you can see it in the calendar here – http://www.amazon.com/Star-…
so did NASA pay for the promotion or was it a Trek ship for a calendar that got some tips from white on how to make it more realistic? you decide.
They said procurement costs of $50k not total costs including salary and the shared costs of the centre. Seems a fair answer to me.
Given the PR that centers on Dr. White it is a little difficult to believe that all NASA spends on this effort is on the order of $50,000 a year.
Well, it’s like this. Unless things have changed in the last year or so, civil service labor is no longer charged against projects. It comes out of a separate budget area. One of the reforms that Dan Goldin put in place, and one of the few that was a good idea, was to require that civil service labor be charged to projects, just like the support contractors are. The CS staff hated this. They had to get charge numbers,keep track of what they worked on and fill out detailed timesheets. (Just like the contractors do.) This was rolled back a few years ago, so that they charge to broad areas like “ISS” or “R&D”, etc.
So, JSC may not be able to tell how much this really costs, aside from equipment and travel.
As a contractor I am not certain how it works for CS, but it sure sounds like they charge to projects. My CS colleagues talk about which WBS they’re charging and whether they have .1 FTE for one project and .5 FTE for another, and they have biweekly timesheets to fill out just as we do.
For starters, all fall into the trap of theoretical Einstein without even asking why. I believe that people are unable to challenge theories which they do not understand. Someone actually dares to challenge Einstein? No. But history shows that from time to time, theories fall. Overall, I believe it is a waste of precious time. But seeing that and low budget, it’s worth because you can actually find that it is infeasible to create a bubble in space-time. Things are more objective, less relativistic .. it’s a fact.
Nobody says that the Theory of Relativity stands for eternity. I’m sure that it’s just the matter of time until we have a better one (although I hope it can hold longer than the intricate standard model or the uncertainty principle). The point is that great revolutions take steps to be done, it’s seem unlikely that we now should think about an actual vehicle for this space dimensions warping when needed theoretical backgrounds are still uncompleted and current technologies have not managed to transport even a molecule.
White isn’t challenging Einstein’s theories, theories which happen to be two (General Relativity and Special Relativity) of the most heavily test theories in all of physics. White is claiming that he has found a solution to Einstein’s field equations (General Relativity) that requires much less energy than Miguel Alcubierre’s solution.
Personally I think it’s valuable to see the interest that a story like this garners among the general public, even internationally. Rather than taking shots at what is clearly a speculative, low-level funded activity (compared vs far more wasteful activities across US and international space agencies), it might be more interesting to understand the interest it has piqued and factor that into our efforts to build support for the bigger, nearer term projects.
Ever trying to stay positive… 🙂
KC and others here need to step back a moment and realize that a relatively small equipment budget ($50K) and a full time civil servant’s time (and salary) doing some R&D are just what NASA needs. Lets walk down the memory hole…
Go WAY back to the late 90’s, when the first “uncovered capacity” issues started to come up (ultimately ISS related; but that’s another story). This was civil servants with no project to charge to, and facilities with no customers lined up immediately, but which needed to be maintained for contingency when one would. The facilities made the news. Uncovered civil servants not so much. The bigger attempts to grapple with this (first, greater flexibility to project managers, soon after, full cost accounting) made the situation WORSE. (Many lesson’s there).
Finally, when Griffin came in, a bit of an improvement occurred as real procurement (contractor) funds, real money, was set aside and protected to cover some facilities which might only see the occasional customer (who was then to be charged the marginal costs). The civil servant issue would go away for a while, as the new Constellation program handed out charge code like it was going out of style. BUT-as more civil-servant efficient programs came along, using MUCH less than 10% of project costs on civil servants, projects like ISS commercial cargo, the whole civil servant to procurement dollars relationship continued it’s prior trend of going south.
So today you have many thousands of NASA civil servants not covered under projects per se, or in general lacking a direct link to real procurement dollars. Any time any NASA project deviates from the 10% civil servant rule this gets worse. From my experience, R&D buckets have been one of the more effective ways to re-balance all this; that is giving small amounts of procurement dollars to civil servants to pursue innovative R&D.
Do the numbers and you’ll see the HUGE issue. If 10 civil servants had 90 procurement dollars back in the day, but now those 90 real dollars might be run by 2 civil servants, what real money is left to the other 8 civil servants? The total is still 100 dollars. That is not going to change -and don’t make me laugh talking about RIFs! The best solution to this I’ve seen in the last 15 years has been these small R&D projects. Basically this means something like 2 civil servants getting 82 of the procurement dollars in the big project (still a HUGE improvement in project management ratio) and the other 8 civil servants splitting the other 8 procurement dollars among them. (With $50K projects, the actual being more like 8 civil servants splitting 3 procurement dollars among them). These R&D projects battle it out to innovate and become bigger projects (think of it as a random walk).
So many things have been tried to address this imbalance. (The last meeting I saw with all the grand poopah’s on this was 2010, and it was only getting worse). At the end of the day though it’s these “taxes” (as one major project manager I know whined about; he would have liked to have kept all the procurement dollars from any original total!) that are keeping many hundred if not thousands of NASA civil servants relevant and busy.
I agree. Although White himself will probably not produce anything practical he’s not consuming even detectable resources compared to SLS/Orion and there are a number of other small CS-led research projects that are doing some really useful work, and simply getting physics accepted as something NASA does helps. I agree plastic models don’t make sense. We should use CGI instead.
Where we get into trouble is when HQ demands all projects support “the NASA mission” of (SFAIK) hurling a couple of professional astronauts to Mars and back at a cost of $400 billion. Tough to do useful work when you have to spend half your time showing it is critical for a nonsensical and arbitrary “mission”.
Ironically one of the CS researchers I know has developed a novel contactless displacement transducer sensitive to the femtometer level, considerably better than the one White is working on. Maybe they should exchange ideas.
They’re being relatively quiet about this precisely because of its promise – because Congressional appropriators are evil, misanthropic little vermin who deliberately target any program that’s too promising.
What promise? White’s solutions of Al’s field equations, solutions which may not even be correct? The lab results which he has yet to obtain? Or maybe the promise that a shiny science fiction-like model drums up?
Could you miss the point any more if you tried? This isn’t the design for the next iPhone we’re talking about. You’re not going to get cost/benefit analyses that a Wall Street broker would endorse. Frankly you sound exactly like the kind of people in Congress who have guaranteed zero progress in decades.
That’s one way to look at things. The other way to look at things is to acknowledge that White has zero results and that actual experts in General Relativity have real issues with White’s claims. Then there are the issues with not knowing exactly how to come with negative energy density nor what 700kg of “exotic material” is. Until White produces results, I’ll remain highly skeptical
Certainly your ad hominem makes your point stronger, though.
sorry, I didnt mean rendering, just didnt know what they call it. I meant more drawing/building the solid 3D model
It’s worth pointing out that the 3D model was not created by NASA and did not cost the government anything. It was created by Dutch artist Mark Rademaker for the Star Trek “Ships of the Line” 2014 calendar. He consulted with Dr. White on the theoretical warp drive to derive the configuration. There isn’t even a NASA logo anywhere on it.
I submitted Dr. White’s paper to an experienced high-energy physicist; he has provided an unbiased assessment, divided into two parts:
The good news:
The basic premise of the Alcubierre warp drive is founded is good physics. IF we had access to enormous amounts of negative energy then such a warp drive would be plausible. Unfortunately we do not have access to enormous amounts of negative energy. There is a seed of hope, which is that the Casimir effect shows that we can in certain situations create regions of space that effectively have small amounts of negative energy. While there is no evidence (theoretical or experimental) that this could ever be made remotely large enough to find applications for NASA, it may be worth exploring. The use of a torsion balance to detect changes in the metric near regions of small negative energy may be good science. Also, citation 7 about the dynamic Casimir effect is good science, and indeed it is theoretically possible to use such devices to create thrust from photons without having to carry along a propellant. Unfortunately the thrust is known to be extremely small, and regardless we already have the ability to create thrust without carrying a propellant: it’s called a light bulb (e.g. a laser).
The bad news:
The article is poorly written and through opaqueness makes critical evaluation difficult. It clearly isn’t written by someone with a very strong background in the relevant physics, contains some highly dubious citations and makes use of dubious non-quantum models (“stochastic electrodynamics”). I cannot make sense of Figure 3, which I think is critical to the argument and yet is not explained and has no citation for further reading. Also I think there should be some discussion of the fact that (as far as I can tell) there is nothing clearly unique about the proposed hypothetical thruster relative to a light bulb, which also creates thrust without a propellant. Based on these deficiencies I don’t think any serious physicist would take this paper (as written) seriously.