Space Travel? It’s Fiction, but Dreamers Are at Work

“Beam me up, Scotty.”

The modern-day science fiction cliche, used to rescue many a main character from danger on alien worlds, came about during the voyages of the starship Enterprise in the popular television and movie series “Star Trek.”

But will it ever be possible in reality to travel from place to place by having your molecules rearranged on a beam of light and reassembled on arrival?

How about starships, or jumping to what characters in “Star Wars” called hyperspace--the warp that makes it possible to travel between the neighborhoods of Alpha Centauri and Rigel in a snap?

99% Hollywood

It does not take a scientist to know that those big-screen adventures are 99% Hollywood and that the assumptions that make them work--travel to other galaxies, for one--would take centuries to achieve, if they are even possible.

But how about more basic concepts, like piloted travel beyond the solar system? The answer depends on whom you talk to. There are those who say the problems are too great, and there are optimists.

“For anybody to sit down and say they know something is impossible is probably very closed-minded,” said Robert Crippen, co-pilot of the first space shuttle flight six years ago and now deputy director of NASA’s shuttle program for operations.

“I firmly believe that mankind is going to travel beyond the solar system someday,” he said. “I know that trying to do it with chemical rockets the way we do today is going to be thought of as very primitive.”

More Pressing Matters

NASA has more pressing practical matters--the revival of the shuttle program, for one--on its agenda these days to spend much taxpayer money on such futuristic ideas.

But there exists in science a band of dreamers, some of whom are working on ideas that resemble science fiction.

Science fiction authors have always combed scientific literature, playing a “what if” game that sometimes turns out to come true. Arthur C. Clarke is credited with inventing the concept of communications satellites, and Isaac Asimov wrote decades ago about a space station and widespread use of robots.

One who crosses the boundary between science and science fiction is Robert L. Forward, a physicist and senior scientist at Hughes Research Labs in Malibu. Forward is paid to investigate outlandish ideas.

“I try to find things that other people think are impossible and see if there isn’t some way I can find to make them come true,” he said.

Forward is a developer of the first antenna for detection of gravitational radiation. Believed to be produced by all cosmic bodies, this radiation is what we know as gravity; researchers believe that it actually takes the form of waves that distort the space around an object.

The ideas Forward investigates that don’t work out sometimes find their way into his science fiction. He is the author of “Dragon’s Egg” and “Starquake,” both about life on a neutron star.

“Twenty years ago I set myself to find, one, a way to go to the stars; two, a way to control gravity, specifically to make an anti-gravity machine; and three, find a time warp or time machine,” Forward said.

In the first case, Forward was able to come up with some new ways of going to the stars that would involve inventing no new physics. One of these is a souped-up version of solar sailing, a concept space researchers have been playing around with for a while.

Sailing in Space

Solar sailing involves transporting a small payload, and eventually piloted spacecraft, through space with a sail made of thin film miles across. This would work provided the craft stayed close to the sun for its photons to provide the “wind.” In Forward’s version, the light energy is produced by a laser for a faster and farther-ranging craft.

By studying Albert Einstein’s theories, Forward said he came up with a way to build a machine that would use gravity to push instead of attract. “If you sat in such a machine, it would fire you like a bullet,” he said.

For now, however, “that’s science fiction,” he said. Even though the project is feasible in theory, the technology is not available to do it, he said.

“Right now, I’m working on antimatter propulsion,” Forward said. “In fact, we have shown it is not only probably physically feasible, but it is something we can do in the next 30 years.”

Forward wrote a detailed proposal on antimatter drive, and as a result the Air Force is investigating the concept for possible use.

“It’s a huge engineering challenge,” said Capt. William Sowell, chief of energetic physics technology in the Air Force Astronautics Lab at Edwards Air Force Base. “But it doesn’t look like it violates any basic laws.”

Antimatter exists. But it is not the stuff of science fiction stories, which have postulated an entire universe existing in another plane and containing antimatter reverse-images of ourselves and the planets.

Antimatter is simply matter made of subatomic particles carrying a different electrical charge. Atoms of ordinary matter have a nucleus containing protons of positive charge, surrounded electrons carrying a negative charge. Antimatter atoms contain anti-protons of negative charge with anti-electrons of positive charge.

When matter meets antimatter, the two materials annihilate each other and produce radiation, or charged particles.

Antimatter is not a naturally occurring substance. It is created when regular protons collide with regular matter in particle accelerators, such as the one at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. and at the European Center for Nuclear Research straddling the French-Swiss border.

In an antimatter rocket, antimatter interacting with normal matter would produce a huge amount of heat that would cause hydrogen to expand with tremendous force. That expanding hydrogen would be pushed out to provide thrust.

The advantage would come in the form of propellant savings because there would be no need for oxygen to enable hydrogen to burn as in today’s rockets. The most pressing problem is how to store the tiny amount of required antimatter.

Puttkamer said anything is possible, given time. But one thing that is impossible right now is traveling at the speed of light--both because of the state of technology and because natural law may simply not permit it.

“Even half the speed of light or 10% of the speed of light is a great challenge,” he said.

The speed that came closest was that reached by the Voyager and Pioneer satellites. In slingshot maneuvers, the craft came close to Jupiter and got a gravity boost to about 30 kilometers per second, or close to one-one-tenth of 1% of the speed of light.

Laser-powered solar sailing may allow craft built in orbit to reach 10% to 50% of the speed of light, Forward said.

But neither solar sailing nor electric rockets, another advanced propulsion technology, are high on the Air Force agenda right now, except in the sense that the concepts involve basic research that could provide small improvements in current propulsion techniques as well as more understanding of fundamental science.

However, Sowell said, “If we can find a way of getting from Point A to Point B without pushing something out the back, that’s great.”

The ideal way to do that would be to use a space warp, another concept Forward and others have been working on.

“You go in one hole and come out another hole somewhere else and you don’t travel through all that dull, dreary distance in between. Hopefully, it’s faster than traveling through three-dimensional space,” Forward said.

“Unfortunately, the more I look at it, the more I feel it’s going to be like antimatter: It will be physically allowable, but we will not have the technology to carry it out.”

Cause and Effect

The problem here is that once space and time are controlled to this degree, violations of the laws of cause and effect occur. Whereas in this world A can cause B, when time shrinks in a warp it may appear that the cause, B, occurs before its effect, A.

“People say, ‘It creates a problem in logic, so therefore I’m not going to think about it anymore,’ ” Forward said. “My answer is that the equations seem to say it is allowed. I’m still going to look at it and I’m not going to reject it just because it violates the laws of causality.”

Travel faster than the speed of light has always presented a problem that the search for warps has been intended to alleviate: the fact that for the travelers, time slows down dramatically. When they return to where they started, decades and even centuries may have passed.

“It doesn’t mean you can’t go,” said Eric Feigelson, associate professor of astronomy at Penn State University. “It means going is a little more like an invasion and more of a permanent migration.”

That leads to another problem sometimes overlooked in science fiction and gee-whiz technological forecasts: What will the people be like? Will they be like us, as movies and some novels would have us believe? Perhaps not.

“We always forget it will not be (us) who are doing it, but humans with different priorities, different mind set, different philosophy, probably so different from us today that they would seem very strange to us,” Puttkamer said.