We have talked before about increasing the speed that spaceships can travel. The improved Ion engine, an engine that wouldn't have the power to push a toy on Earth, can now power spaceships fast enough to make travel to other planets practical. In this case, practical means in a reasonable amount of time. The Europeans have improved the Ion engine that NASA is using so that they can get three times the speed out of it. It was a matter of rearranging a plate that was near the bottom of the engine. Sometimes it doesn't take much more than an innovative mind to improve something. They claim that this will make travel to planets and close star systems practical . I don't know if I would go that far, it will still take a long time to reach the nearest star system, it just won't take your whole life span. This type of engine achieves speed by constant acceleration until it reaches top speed, it continues to burn for year after year.

The Europeans have launched this Ion engine and it seems to work even better in space than it did in the lab. It is powered by solar electric technology. Because of this new engine, the Europeans were able to cut the cost of its launch down to only 110 million Euros. This cost includes everything. NASA could learn a lesson here. Solar panels provide the energy for the engine. It only takes 1/10 of the fuel to power this type of engine leaving a lot more room for experiments or even personnel, some day. Did you ever see a rocket at blast off? The engine burns for a few minutes then shuts off when all the fuel is used up. The ion engine just keeps accelerating. As long as there is sunlight for the solar panels it will keep burning. This is assuming that solar panels are used to gather electricity and not a reactor. If you are going to fly to the moon, the speed advantages of an Ion engine are non existent since the distance is too short for the engine to build up enough speed to be faster than a rocket. The longer the distance the more the advantage in speed on an Ion engine.

It doesn't seem that we will be able to break the light speed barrier with this type of engine however. As a matter of fact, Einstein said we could never go faster than the speed of light. New experiments with light are showing strange things that no one suspected. There are scientists experimenting with light and getting results that no one ever thought possible. One scientists has sent light through an optical cable and just BEFORE it entirely enters, it exits out the other end. The scientists conducting this experiment explains that the light wave is shaped like a hump with a peak and the peak doesn't enter the fibre optics before the entire wave comes out the other end. Light has also been slowed down to about 600 mph from 186,000 miles per second. Another thing the scientist noticed in his experiments was that he could make light travel backwards and as it was doing this, a pulse of light going forward seemed to travel faster than the speed of light. The scientist answers question on how the light can travel this fast by saying that the light carries no information and Einstein's theory only pertains to light carrying information. In layman's terms, the light breaking the speed of light is only the tip of the wave and not the center with the peak. How can any of this effect space travel? It certainly isn't clear yet, but maybe, just maybe, there may be a way around the speed of light limit that Einstein spoke of.

Other scientists are working on the problem of breaking the speed of light barrier. As a matter of fact, a German physicist named Burkhard Heim began to work on a method for doing this in 1957. Guess what he called his idea for a new propulsion system? Why hyper drive of course. Haw, got you, you thought I was going to say warp drive, didn't you? So who was this guy Heim? He was a disabled explosives developer. An explosive device went off in front of him blowing off his hands and part of his arms and almost blinding him. He registered in college later and decided to study Einstein's theory of relativity and that is when he began work on his theory for a new propulsion system. He was able to calculate masses of fundamental particles very accurately and this drew attention to him by the scientific community. Helm joined forces with Walter Droscher and they developed the theory of Heim-Droscher space which allows the hyper drive to function. Will this system ever become a reality? If it does, we will be zipping around the universe far faster than light ever could. This would be the key to the stars.

It is said that a shadow can move faster than light, but it can not carry any information. A spot from a laser on Earth that is directed onto the moon is said to move faster than light. As you move the laser you can see the spot move pretty quickly. All scientists agree that right now, it is not possible to send information faster than the speed of light. Some scientists thought that they found light that was traveling faster than the speed of light, but it turned out to be coming from galaxies that were rushing toward us and this speed had been added to the speed of the light leaving the galaxies and was just a mathematical error in calculating the speed of the galaxies light.

Will we ever travel faster than light? That is a matter of opinion. Some scientists say that we won't have too. We will merely fold space or travel through worm holes to reach our destinations faster, but is this really an answer? If we fold space and time to get to a destination, how will this effect our universe? Might it cause some results that would be unwanted? If we use wormholes, they would all have to be conveniently located and I think that this is too much to ask. No, I would say that they best solution would be to break the light speed barrier and I believe that we will do it someday. With so many people working on this problem, I think that it is only a matter of time before the mission gets accomplished and from that point on, the stars will become our home.