New York Times publicizes NASA’s speed-of-light propulsion investigation

The front page of the New York Times‘s Science Times section on Tuesday, 23 July, featured an article about NASA’s low-budget effort to investigate a radical possibility for interstellar spaceflight: ‘whether faster-than-light travel—warp drive—might someday be possible.’ The reporter, Danny Hakim, immediately adds, ‘Warp drive. Like on ‘Star Trek.’'

At Johnson Space Center in Houston, physicist/engineer Harold White and others are seeking ‘to slightly warp the trajectory of a photon, changing the distance it travels in a certain area, and then observing the change’ with an interferometer.

The motivation comes, Hakim says, from the work two decades ago of Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre, who ‘theorized that faster-than-light speeds were possible in a way that did not contradict Einstein, though Dr. Alcubierre did not suggest anyone could actually construct the engine that could accomplish that.’ The theory ‘involved harnessing the expansion and contraction of space itself.’ Hakim stipulates that White likens the NASA work ‘to a university science project that is just trying to prove that a microscopic warp bubble can be detected in a lab.’ He quotes White: ‘We’re not bolting this to a spacecraft.’

The news is not actually new. NASA’s web page Status of ‘Warp Drive’ begins by placing faster-than-light travel ‘at the level of speculation, with some facets edging into the realm of science.’ In 2012, the Atlantic presented the article ‘What if NASA could figure out the math of a workable warp drive? ’

Also in 2012, the Daily Mail in the UK published a news article on White’s work. Then, within hours of the new Times article, the Daily Mail published online a piece based on it. As of 24 July, interest has reappeared but not proliferated planetwide, for example at TopNews Arab Emirates , in Germany at Het Nieuwsblad , and at the Times of India, which simply reprinted Hakim’s piece.

Not counting researchers’ time, White’s budget is reportedly only $50 000 in a modest project that reuses a research facility left over from Apollo Moon-mission days. The effort calls to mind a practice of NASA’s predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics—the NACA, pronounced as four separate letters. The NACA cherished a tradition of what aerospace historian James R. Hansen (Neil Armstrong’s biographer, not to be confused with climatologist James E. Hansen) has called special studies quietly and informally permissible in the NACA of the 1930s—'as long as they were not too exotic, did not require too many agency resources, and did not draw adverse public attention.’

Is White’s work ‘too exotic’? Hakim quotes Edwin F. Taylor , a former editor of the American Journal of Physics and a senior research scientist at MIT: ‘My personal opinion is that the idea is crazy for now. Check with me in a hundred years.’

But Hakim also quotes Steve Stich, deputy director of engineering at Johnson: ‘You always have to be looking towards the future.’ And he quotes astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson of the American Museum of Natural History:

Hakim of course never mentions the NACA or its quiet support of small, visionary projects. This means that Hakim also never mentions an earlier line of flight-propulsion study that the NACA forbade as too far-fetched, at a time when Nazi Germany was secretly advancing it: jet engines.

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.