National Geographic has combined mankind's nearly 200 manned and unmanned exploratory space missions into one infographic. It's not nearly to scale, and it doesn't even try to follow the actual paths of the various chunks of metal we've tossed into the ether.

But the broad strokes are all here, and they're fascinating: Of the dozens and dozens of probes launched in the last 50 years, precious few have made it past the asteroid belt; a handful have been tossed into the face of the sun; and just the luckiest, boldest pieces of hardware have been jettisoned into the outer reaches of our solar system.

NatGeo's got an interactive scrollable map here, but honestly, I'd skip straight to the poster-sized version on Flickr. [NatGeo via i09]

Except, obviously, in the case of the LHC this is real hyperdrive technology and testing we're talking about, whereas, sadly, Han's bucket of bolts will remain firmly in the realm of sci-fi.

But no matter. If physicist Franklin Felber gets his way then an ancient, unknown German research paper from the 1920s could get dusted off and have its thesis tested in the LHC. Called the "Foundations of Physics," the paper proposed that under certain circumstances a stationary mass can, on occasion, repel a "relativistic particle." Ferber's theory proposes that the opposite must also be true, and that this can be tested at the LHC.

In the experiment, Felber would monitor a test mass inside the ring as particles shoot past it. The work would not interfere with other already scheduled projects, and if it works we'd be one small step closer to unlocking that coveted near light speed achievement. That is, if the LHC ever starts up again. Where's R2? [Technology Review via Engadget]

The idea is that traveling by way of these gravitational currents would save drastically on fuel, as it would only be needed to correct course or move between currents. Sadly, it's not exactly a fast way to travel and "attempting to get a free tube ride from Earth to Mars would take thousands of years." Ah, well. At least it proves that some sci-fi writers weren't complete nutters. [Telegraph]

Way up. The answer? They were all the direct result of NASA products and research initially conducted for space travel.

The drill, for instance, was created in 1971, when NASA tapped Black & Decker to build a cordless, battery-power tool for lunar voyages and space walks. The smoker detector, on the other hand, was installed on Skylab in the 1970s to warn astronauts of mission- and life-ending fire. Finally, the LZR, long an antagonist to anyone racing against Michael Phelps in an Olympic pool, was created using materials developed by NASA to fight chafing on space walks and certain high g-force situations.

Radar magazine has a cool list of eleven more where that came from, including braces, swipe cards and even a rose-scented perfume. When you wear underwear in space for a month straight, things get stinky. [Radar via Neatorama]

You see, while warp drives are all sorts of fun within the confines of Star Trek, when they're applied to the real world—which must live under the iron fist of physics—things get expensive, exponentially difficult to power, or just plain deadly.

Warp drives, for example, are now theorized to be black hole-creating monstrosities that, if activated in the distant future, would incinerate their passengers and suck Earth into a black hole.

This according to Stefano Finazzi, of Italy's International School for Advanced Studies, who said in a scientific paper published this past week that warp drives, powered by dark energy bubbles, are completely possible—it's just that they're unsustainable and would kill us all if one should collapse.

According to their calculations [...] it would take a huge amount of energy to create the bubble, and then increasing amounts of energy to contain the highly repulsive dark energy. Eventually the energy would run out. The bubble would rupture, with catastrophic effects. Inside the bubble the temperature would rise to about 10^32 degrees Kelvin, destroying almost anything on the bubble.

Anyone watching the ship nearby wouldn't be much better off. "We know that the warp drive will be destabilized," said Finazzi. "But we do not know if it will in the end explode or collapse to a black hole."

Of course, speaking of Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry and crew already had this all figured out by the time The Next Generation came around. As any Trekkie knows, for safety reasons Federation ships are discouraged or even forbidden from making warp jumps in-system. Time to get back to the lab, Finazzi. [Discovery Channel - Thanks, Chase]

Yes, I know what you are thinking: "It's impossible."

And right now, you are right. Our current propulsion engines are, simply put, pathetic. We are still in the Stone Age of space travel. As cool as they are, rocket engines—which eject gas at high speeds through a nozzle on the back of a spacecraft—are extremely inefficient, requiring huge volumes of fuel runs out faster than you can say "Beam me up, Scotty."

We have cleared the tower

Solid boosters, hybrid, monopropellant, bipropellant rockets... all these would be impossible to use in interstellar travel, with maximum speeds going up to a maximum of 9 kilometers per second. Rockets won't work even using the effect of planetary gravity to gain impulse. Voyager—the fastest man-made spacecraft out there racing at 17 kilometers per second—would need 74,000 years in deep space to reach Proxima Centauri, the red dwarf star located at 4.22 light-years in the Alpha Centauri system, the closest to our Sun.

But even if we were able to build a massive spacecraft with today's experimental—but feasible—propulsion technology, it will still take thousand of years to reach Alpha Centauri. Using nuclear explosions—like the ones proposed in the Orion project—would be more efficient than rockets, achieving a maximum of 60 kilometers per second. That's still a whopping 21,849 years and a couple months.

Using ion thrusters—which use electrostatic or electromagnetic force to accelerate ions that in turn push the spacecraft forward—would only reduce that amount marginally. Even theoretical technology—like nuclear pulse propulsion, with speeds up to 15,000 kilometers per second—won't cut it. And that's assuming we can find a way for these engines to last all that time. And let's not even get into the resources and engineering needed to create a vessel capable of sustaining life for such a long period of time.

All to reach a stupid red dwarf with no planets to explore. We may as well not go, really. You know, let's just save Earth from our own destruction and colonize Mars or Titan or Europa (if the aliens let us do that.)

Our ignorance is our only hope

It gets even worse. Our current understanding of physics—which says that nothing can travel faster than light—basically establishes that we will never be able to achieve space travel in a way that is meaningful to Humanity. In other words, even if we are able to discover a propulsion method that could get a spacecraft close to the speed of light, it will still take hundred of years to reach an star system with planets similar to Earth. By the time the news get back to us, we all will be dead.

And that's precisely the key to our only hope to reach the stars: Our ignorance. As much as we have advanced, we are still clueless about many things. Physicists are still struggling to understand the Universe, discovering new stellar events that we can't explain, and trying to make sense of it all, looking for that perfect theory that will make everything fit together.

That fact is that, since we don't know how everything works, there still may be something that opens the way to faster-than-light space travel. Discovering the unknown—like physicists have been doing since the Greeks—and harnessing new math and theories into new technology is our only way to spread through the Universe in a way that makes sense to Humanity as a whole. You know, like Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica or Star Wars: Travel across the Universe in hours or days, not in centuries or millennia.

I'm giving her all she's got!

One of those yet-to-be-unraveled things is the Big Bang, the origin of the Universe itself. Our origin, the final question that we have been trying to answer since we came out of the cave and looked up the night sky. We still don't know exactly what happened, but the observation of the Universe from Earth and space probes have caused some physicists to propose many different models. One of these models says that, during the initial inflation period of the Universe, space-time expanded faster than light. If this turns out to be the case, it would make possible the creation of warp drives.

Yes, the warp drives.

Warp drives were first proposed in a logical way by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre. He theorized that, instead of moving something faster than the speed of light—which is not possible under Einstein's relativity theory—we could move the space-time around it faster than the speed of light itself. The spacecraft will be inside a warp bubble, a flat space that will be moved by the expansion of the space behind it and the contraction of space in front of it. The spacecraft won't move faster than light, but the bubble will. Inside the bubble, everything would be normal.

A way to understand the effect, as Marc Millis—former head of the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project at NASA's Glenn Research Center—explains, is to look at the way a toy boat reacts in the tub when you put some detergent behind it. The bubbles will expand the space behind the boat, impulsing it forward. In the same way, a spaceship with a warp drive would be able to do the same thing.

But while there have been already experiments in the laboratory that suggest that this may indeed be possible, we are still far, far away from developing the technology that would make warp drives a reality. To start with, the amount of energy necessary to bend space like this is way beyond anything we can produce today. Some scientists, however, suggest that antimatter may be the fuel that will make this possible.

Again, there are a lot of question marks surrounding antimatter, but this is precisely part of our only hope: Somewhere, still hiding, is the breakthrough that will make interstellar travel possible. The possibility is still there.

Why should we go to the stars?

So call me an optimist if you have to. It may be all this sun shining in New York right now. Or maybe it is because I saw Star Trek yesterday (and it was as good as I hoped it to be and then some more.) The fact is that I'm convinced that interstellar travel will happen. You and I will probably not see it, but if Humanity can survive self-annihilation, I'm sure we will achieve it.

No, "will we reach the stars?" is not the question to answer. We will. The more important question is why do we need to go?

The answer to this is the reason why we have celebrated humans in space all this week, now coming to its end. As I said when we started Get Me Off This Rock, space exploration is the most epic and most important adventure Humanity has ever embarked upon. When we travel to space we are opening the way to the preservation of Humanity. We are trying to contact other civilizations. We are trying to answer the biggest questions of them all: Who are we? Why are we here? How did we get here? Are we alone in this rock we call Earth?

But there is more. A lot more. Ultimately, the most important thing will not be getting the answers to these eternal questions. The most important thing will be the process of reaching for the stars. Because if we manage to get there, it would mean that we managed to survive as a species. That is the only way we can develop the engineering and the resources needed to build something like the Enterprise. Survive self-destruction, solve the problems we have here, collaborate, work as species, not as countries or corporations.

That's what space exploration and interstellar travel is all about. Only if we manage to go beyond our petty fights and stupid wars, only if we work together towards a better future, we will be able to go where no one has gone before. And be back to tell about it before dinner gets cold.

Recommended reading: Wikipedia, The Warpdrive: Hyper-fast travel
within general relativity by Miguel Alcubierre (PDF), Assessing Potential Propulsion Methods (PDF)

This video is from an April 20 test flight over the Mojave desert. According to Wired, the plane suffered a tail strike and some rudder control issues, but other than that, it was smooth sailing. Unsurprisingly, the pilots didn't really push the plane as far as spacefaring activity goes, but that will come on another day.

For now, we can continue to talk about how Branson is a) brilliant b) God c) badass d) the real life Dos Equis Guy. Because I'm pretty convinced he designed and built WhiteKnightTwo on his own. Possibly using only his mouth. [Wired]

Motivated by a $4 million funding prize from NASA, the team at Cambridge University developed a light, flexible ribbon that is believed to be the world's strongest. Currently, the team is producing 1 gram of the material per day, enough to stretch to 18 miles in length. According to Alan Windle, professor of materials science at Cambridge, NASA wants 144,000 miles of the stuff—but he notes that it would take an industrial level of production to make that happen.

Still, this once preposterous idea is actually gaining some traction. The Japanese have already seriously considered making one out of carbon nanotubes and some believe that this new project could get the job done in as little as a decade. I'm not buying that—but I'm still keeping an open mind. [Times Online via io9]

These teams weren't sanctioned by NASA top brass, so in a way they are effectively going rogue, not unlike an Alaskan governor in a Saks Fifth Avenue. They were also not towing the company line about the future of the space program. In fact, they argued that NASA should scrap the upcoming Ares rocket program in lieu of a new program called Jupiter Direct, which relies heavily on proven current-gen space shuttle program technologies and rocket parts.

On paper at least, the Jupiter Direct program appears cheaper. Using a smaller and less cool-sounding rocket than the Ares 1, called the Jupiter 120, the program would require the modified external tank from the space shuttle, which would be shot into space by two RS-68 liquid-fuel engines. Liftoff would occur thanks to the two four-segment solid rocket boosters engineers would bring over directly from the existing shuttle program (which is obvious once you see that image).

And better yet, the Jupiter Direct program has longevity built right in. Because its engine configuration is theoretically more powerful than Ares, the 120 rocket would have the extra oompf necessary for a lunar flyby. A larger Jupiter 232 rocket would allow man (and woman) to land on the moon after a hookup with NASA's Orion lander capsule, which the program leaves unchanged.

Ultimately, the plan is about saving money and keeping space flight missions ongoing after the shuttle program is retired, not usurping NASA. The Obama transition team provided no comment on the rogue meeting, or on the Ares program, for that matter. [Popular Mechanics]

Indeed, this is a far cry from the glorified Depends former NASA astronaut Lisa Nowak drove cross country in a couple of years back. These can detect when you relieve yourself, remove the waste with suction and clean you up after each use. They can even eliminate unpleasant sounds and odors.

Unfortunately, the wearable toilet project won't be completed for another five years—but I can see a market for this outside of the space program. It's perfect for the incontinent, elderly and just plain lazy. [Yomiuri via Pink Tentacle]

Yeah, it's just slowly trucking down the runway, but it's the first time we've actually seen this thing in any sort of action. The next step? The first flight, which is expected to happen around the 19th of this month. We still have a bit of a wait before it'll actually deliver SpaceShipTwo into space, but it's exciting to see progress being made. Now just drop the tickets, Virgin. I want to go. [FlightGlobal]

Photo Credit Alan Radecki

The flying fishbowl will launch from Spaceport America, near Las Cruces, with tickets running an estimated $100,000. Scuba gear will probably cost extra.

And a related FYI: Rocket Racing, which is also funding the bubble ship, is developing a NASCAR-inspired rocket racing league. This can't lose! [New Scientist]

"We started working together at the end of June to track down any Apollo-era heat shields that they had in storage," said Elizabeth (Betsy) Pugel of the Detector Systems Branch at NASA Goddard. "We located one and opened it. It was like a nerd Christmas for us!"

Specifically, the team is hoping to gather information on how to build next gen shields by examining the design of the carrier structure that connected the shield to an Apollo capsule that flew in Low Earth Orbit. They are also interested in the shields thermal response.

Honestly, every time I watch a documentary, read an article or visit a museum dealing with early spaceflight I am reminded of how brilliant the engineers behind these accomplishments really were. This is yet another example. [NASA and Science Daily]

The Falcon 9, which has nine rocket engines to the Falcon 1's one, is scheduled to go on its maiden voyage in 1Q 2009. If SpaceX meets the reliability milestones metered out by NASA, it'll get a $278 million award—about a tenth of the cost the government agency paid Lockheed Martin to develop its own people-transporting, space-faring rocket. [Wired]

Li explained how the system will work: images taken from orbit will combine with images from the surface to create maps of lunar terrain; motion sensors on lunar vehicles and on the astronauts themselves will allow computers to calculate their locations; signals from lunar beacons, the lunar lander, and base stations will give astronauts a picture of their surroundings similar to what drivers see when using a GPS device on Earth. The researchers have named the entire system the Lunar Astronaut Spatial Orientation and Information System (LASOIS)

NASA has awarded Li a $1.2 million grant to develop the LASOIS system over the next three years. He hopes that it will help the astronauts explore the lunar surface with a greater degree of confidence and avoid the stress that comes with getting lost. After all, losing your bearings on the moon is a far cry from taking the wrong exit on the highway. [Physorg]

SpaceShipTwo is the spaceship that'll actually go into space, while White Knight Two is the plane that'll bring it up high enough to launch itself away. SpaceShipTwo will be able to tote eight people at a time into sub-orbit, two pilots and six passengers, each of whom will pay $200,000 for the right to be one of the few humans to see the earth from above.

The White Knight Two is already almost complete, with testing scheduled for later this year, while SpaceShipTwo is about 60% complete. The flights will take off from the Spaceport that Virgin Galactic is building in the New Mexico desert. As much as I'd like to say $200,000 is a ridiculous amount to spend on a flight into space, you know what? If I had so much money that $200,000 wasn't a big deal, I would be all over this. Hey, Branson! How's about a press preview flight, hmm? Good reviews can be bought with free trips to space. [Virgin Galactic via BBC]