NASA, which is scheduled to plummet a flying saucer-like test vehicle towards Hawaii in a bid to assist future human expeditions to Mars, has unveiled a "faster than light," Star Trek-like spaceship that could make interstellar travel a reality.
The space agency's "warp ship" was cleverly crafted by NASA engineer and physicist Harold White, and "Star Trek" graphic artist Mark Rademaker. Images of the prototype design were revealed at a SpaceVision 2013 conference, and have been posted on Rademaker's Flickr page and Facebook account. Titled as "NASA's New Design for a Warp Drive Ship," it's no surprise that the images almost immediately went viral.
"The Flickr views went from 119 yesterday to 2 million today," Rademaker told NBC News.
Rademaker based his creation off the concept known as Alcubierre warp drive, an idea first put forth by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre, which suggests that faster-than-light travel might be achieved by manipulating spacetime both in front of and behind a spacecraft.
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.
The hypothetical design, dubbed IXS Enterprise, includes a sleek ship nestled at the center of two enormous rings, which create the warp bubble. According to White, iO9 reports, space vehicles equipped with warp drives could attain such remarkable speeds by making the empty space behind a starship expand rapidly, pushing the craft in a forward direction - passengers would perceive it as movement despite the complete lack of acceleration.
White speculates that the innovative concept could take a spacecraft to the star Alpha Centauri in a mere two weeks - even though the system is 4.3 light-years away.
These ambitions have yet to be considered realistic, as scientists still haven't found a way to warp spacetime. However, according to The Space Reporter, NASA officials at Johnson Space Center said last year that White and his team could soon create a warp-drive interferometer capable of finding tiny warp bubbles in spacetime.
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NASA will test out new space exploration technology – including some used for asteroid landings – by having its teams live on the ocean floor off Florida coast for extended periods of time in two upcoming summer missions.
The so-called ‘aquanauts’ will only get down to about 19 meters below, but that is enough to perform the crucial task of assessing new gear that will help the agency’s astronauts live in orbit more comfortably and even assist future asteroid landings and explorations.
The missions will include extra-vehicular activities (EVAs), simulated spacewalks and other activities – all performed underwater, about 10km off the coast of Key Largo, Florida.
Aside from the primary objectives, the assignments will also test for health and behavioral issues, as well as evaluate the usefulness of ‘telementoring’, in which the astronaut is given instructions by voice or video.
The Extreme Environment Mission Operations program (NEEMO) has taken charge of organizing the upcoming missions. Its project Manager at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Bill Todd, has admitted to journalists in a statement that, “It is both challenging and exciting for our astronaut crews to participate in these undersea missions in preparation for spaceflight.”
Todd explained that only the closest-matching conditions that accurately replicate the conditions astronauts are to face in space are good enough for the task, as “the extreme environment of life undersea is as close to being in space as possible.”
The EVAs, according to NASA officials commenting on the NEEMO 18 and NEEMO 19 missions, will“focus on evaluating man-machine work systems and EVA tools and techniques for exploration tasks in varying levels of gravity ranging from that of asteroids to the gravity of Martian moons and Mars itself.”
The NASA missions will actually be an international effort comprising Japanese, European and Canadian astronauts from their respective space agencies – all professionals and occupying key positions in their scientific fields.
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Google is planning to spend more than $1 billion on satellites which will reportedly be used to give internet access to parts of the planet that still have no connection to the web.
The news comes courtesy of The Wall Street Journal which claims that Google will start by building 180 small satellites in low orbit and then expanding from there because, why not.
Whilst the initial projection is $1 billion, there are some reports that the final cost of the project could be anything up to a massive $3 billion.
According to the WSJ Google has been hiring satellite engineers as well as experts in order to better fulfill their plans.
This isn't the first time Google has looked into expanding internet coverage over the globe with Project Loon proposing the idea of high-altitude balloons which would provide broadband coverage to out of reach areas.
Whilst balloons are cheap they're by no means a permanent solution, a fleet of satellites however would be able to reach much further whilst requiring very little maintenance.
Google and Facebook have both been looking at ways to bring Internet coverage to the rest of the world with Facebook's Internet.org partnership bringing together some of the tech-world's biggest players to improve web coverage globally.
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