Breakthrough Propulsion

The beauty of magnetic sail concepts — magsails — is that they let us leave heavy tanks of propellants behind and use naturally occurring phenomena like the solar wind to push us where we’re going. Solar sails, of course, do the same thing, though they use the momentum imparted by photons rather than the energetic [...]

Are we ever going to understand what makes matter resist acceleration? If we can get a handle on inertia, we’ll have a better idea what’s possible when it comes to exotic propulsion. 19th Century physicist Ernst Mach believed that inertia was the result of matter being acted upon by all other objects in the universe, [...]

Can traversable wormholes be created, allowing us to achieve our wildest dreams of traveling between the stars? Mohammad Mansouryar says yes, and in a paper titled “On a macroscopic traversable spacewarp in practice,” the young Iranian theorist lays out his argument. Mansouryar bases his thinking on a needed prerequisite: the violation of the Averaged Null [...]