Serious Star Trek fans are familiar with the term nacelles—the long, cylindrical engines that power the Starship ...

Warp drive has long been shorthand for “pure fantasy,” a narrative device that lets starships hop between stars without ...

Exploring the universe in Star Trek is as easy as firing up the warp drive and zipping off to the next adventure, but real life is much more tedious without faster ...

Warp drive has long lived in the realm of starships and scriptwriters, but the equations behind it are starting to look less like fantasy and more like a difficult engineering problem. The latest ...

Inspired by Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek, physicist Miguel Alcubierre set out to transform one of the cornerstones of science fiction iconography, the Warp Drive, into reality. But is it even possible ...

In the past, we have covered the feasibility of various forms of interstellar space exploration, along with a few of the proposed mechanisms that are based on technologies available to us today. Given ...

You know that scene in the film Contact where the “Machine” is spooling up, its three spinning rings kicking out crazy light and an electromagnetic field powerful enough to pitch nearby Navy ...

Einstein gives us a glimmer of hope that time can be warped. Einstein's "nothing travels faster than light” rule seems to ensure that exploration of even the local part of our galaxy will be ...