Scientists Engineering MEGA Drive for Manned Interstellar Travel

Accelerate to near the speed of light, no propellant required

In the deep space adventure world of Star Trek, high-tech ships are propelled forward with incredible efficiency by utilizing something known as an “impulse drive”. This drive allows them to travel at speeds approaching — but never quite reaching — the speed of light. Intrepid crew members travel between planets in minutes. Sometimes they even go back and forth between different worlds in the span of a single day.

This is unimaginable for us. Getting to our neighboring world of Mars will take at least 7 months with our best technology. A mission to the red planet and back would span over a year at minimum. A far more ambitious visit to our nearest star system, needless to say, is out of the question for humanity today. At 4.37 lightyears away the neighboring Alpha Centauri system would take 16,000 years to reach with conventional rockets.

Star Trek’s impulse drive is a fusion rocket that works alongside a driver assembly and a special thrust nozzle. As the fusion reaction generates high-energy plasma, it is directed out of the thrust nozzle as exhaust. The plasma may be passed through driver coils which make it even more efficient and provide greater propulsion. There are, of course, many details about the impulse drive that remain highly fictional and cannot translate into real world engineering. The single most important characteristic of the impulse drive is that it can move a spaceship forward at sub-luminal speeds, allowing crew members to travel between planets and star systems well within their lifetimes.

Their version of the impulse drive is called the MEGA drive — or the Mach Effect Gravity Assist drive. The most surprising feature of the drive is that its goal is to move at about 40% the speed of light or higher, all without using propellant. Propellants are mixtures of fuel and oxidizers. Every spacecraft we have ever engineered relies on…

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