Nasa Lightens Up Albert Einstein’s Theory Of Relativity Aside, The Space Agency Is Finally Willing To Discuss The Possibility Of Interstellar Travel.

In a development straight out of “Star Trek,” NASA is looking seriously at the feasibility of flight to the stars.

Beginning today, more than 80 employees of the space agency and space-related industries will gather at NASA’s Lewis Research Center in Cleveland to discuss ways to achieve interstellar flight.

The possibilities to be discussed this week sound like a script from the popular television and movie adventure series “Star Trek,” in which warp drive propels spaceships to regions where no one has gone before.

One theory on space travel involves the creation of so-called wormholes, something akin to rips in the fabric of space and time. Some physicists have speculated that a spaceship passing through a rip might emerge in a distant part of the universe.

“We don’t even know if these things are physically possible,” said the program’s chief and sole full-time employee, aerospace engineer Marc Millis of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Lewis facility.

But Millis added hopefully: “Progress is not made by conceding defeat.”

Why go to the stars? Among other things, to find habitable planets for humanity, Millis said.

“Imagine if we could give citizens access to a whole other planet Earth,” said Millis, 37. “Imagine if there were an uninhabited planet suitable enough to live on.”

The main barrier to interstellar flight remains Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, which says no energy or object can be transmitted faster than the speed of light - 186,000 miles per second.

The nearest stars, other than the sun, are four light-years away. A light-year is 6 trillion miles, the distance that light travels in a year. It would take years to reach the closest stars, Proxima Centauri and Alpha Centauri.

Bernhard Haisch, of Lockheed Missiles and Space Co., is expected to discuss the possibility of space propulsion using “the momentum of the quantum vacuum.”

Others plan to discuss how laboratory experiments suggest that under certain circumstances, photons - particles of light - appear to travel “at an effective speed of 1.7 times the speed of light.”

But the proposed technologies “are extremely long shots,” cautions one enthusiast, John Cole. He is manager of space transportation research at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, which funds the interstellar program at Lewis.

“Theories of this type have cropped up perpetually from time to time,” Cole said, “and usually wind up not leading anywhere. … But if we don’t look, we certainly will never find anything.”

Now may be as good a time as any to explore the possibilities of travel to the stars.

“People, particularly young people, are sort of rejecting the claustrophobic position that we are locked in this solar system without any chance at all of going to others,” said Whitt Brantley, chief of the advanced concepts office at Marshall Space Flight Center.

But not everyone at NASA is pleased by talk about star ships.

Within the space agency, “the reactions completely cover the entire spectrum,” Cole said. “There are those that believe we are about to get NASA embarrassed with some ideas that can’t possibly be achieved.

“And there are others that are just delighted that NASA is finally openminded enough, and (has) enough courage - and encouragement from the administrator - to pursue these things,” Cole added.

Brantley added, “If you look back in history before great discoveries were made, there were great minds trying to show they were impossible.”

NASA has come a long way in its thinking about interstellar travel. The agency’s administrator, Daniel Goldin, made the once-taboo topic acceptable by publicly speculating about it.

Also, recent research published “in credible, peer-reviewed (scientific) literature” has made interstellar flight seem more feasible than it did decades ago, Millis said.

For example, warp drive is based on an idea proposed by Miguel Alcubierre, an astrophysicist from the University of Wales. He published the method in 1994 in a little-known scientific journal called “Classical and Quantum Gravity.”

According to one theory of warp drive, it is possible to get around Einstein’s speed limit for matter by moving the space around the matter. The space, being non-material, could exceed the speed of light - or so the theory implies.

Larry Diehl, director of NASA-Lewis’ research and technology directorate, acknowledged with a chuckle that there has been Internet chatter about whether “we are looking to violate the laws of physics. The answer, of course, is ‘no.’

“We haven’t made any large-scale commitment to funding work in this area. … (Still) if we don’t continue to reach out and explore, I don’t feel that we make progress,” Diehl said.