Star Trek voyages edge closer to reality

Beyond the security gate at the Johnson Space Centre's 1960s-era campus in Houston, Texas, inside a two-storey glass and concrete building, there is a floating laboratory.

Harold White, a physicist and advanced propulsion engineer at Nasa, beckoned towards a table full of equipment there on a recent afternoon: a laser, a camera, some small mirrors, a ring made of ceramic capacitors and a few other objects.

He and other Nasa engineers have been designing and redesigning these instruments, with the goal of using them to slightly warp the trajectory of a photon, changing the distance it travels in a certain area, and then observing the change with a device called an interferometer.

So sensitive is their measuring equipment that it was picking up myriad earthly vibrations, including people walking nearby. So they recently moved into this lab, which floats atop a system of underground pneumatic piers, freeing it from seismic disturbances.

The team is trying to determine whether faster-than-light travel - warp drive - might someday be possible.

Warp drive. Like on Star Trek.

"Space has been expanding since the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago," said White, 43, who runs the research project. "And we know that when you look at some of the cosmology models, there were early periods of the universe where there was explosive inflation, where two points would've went receding away from each other at very rapid speeds.