![]() The Star Wars universe postulates a hyperdrive, a computer-guided system that allows spacecraft to enter hyperspace at faster-than-light speeds and navigate to a successful exit at a distant destination. The reimagined Battlestar Galactica (2003) uses the same kind of travel but calls the mechanisms “FTL drives.”Ī production model of the Millennium Falcon was on display at the Museum in 1998-99 as a part of the "Star Wars: The Magic of Myth". Because fictional jump drives turn long flights into direct hops, allowing ships to disappear from one place and reappear in another, they facilitate storytelling without interrupting it. Beginning in the 1940s, Isaac Asimov included jump drives in the short stories that later became his Foundation (1951) series of novels. Rather than just having the vehicles fly faster, some science fiction suggested traveling through or outside of normal four-dimensional space (including time), either by jumping within ordinary space, utilizing hyperspace, or exploiting natural or artificial shortcuts through space. Instead, imagined propulsion that bent space-time or traversed alternate dimensions become more prevalent. After Star Trek, undifferentiated flying saucers and flame-spewing pointed rockets largely disappeared from fictional depictions. Jefferies’ design raised the bar for imagined vehicles. As seen in Star Trek: First Contact (1996), the first flight of Zephram Cochran’s warp-capable Phoenix demonstrated the mark of a culture that was ready to participate in interstellar civilization. With the two engine nacelles, Jefferies effectively invented warp drives, fictional engines that could propel the ship at multiples of the speed of light. Walters “Matt” Jefferies, a WWII flight engineer and private pilot, used “aircraft logic” to design a vehicle with components that visually communicated their purpose. Enterprise created for Star Trek (NBC, 1966-69) represented a major leap forward. By the mid-1960s, however, as both the United States and the Soviet Union made regular human spaceflights, science fiction audiences became more intuitively aware of the time that it took to travel in space.Ĭonsists of three main sections: a saucer-shaped primary hull housing the Command section a secondary, cigar-shaped hull (Engineering section) connected beneath it by a large, slanting pylon and at the rear of the saucer, connected to the Engineering hull by pylons, are the two long, projecting engine pods the series of small domes on the top center of the saucer is the bridge, the ship's command and nerve center containing all the computer controls the primary Command hull could operate independently of the other components and contained its own impulse engine at the rear of the saucer but was limited to sub-light speeds overall, painted gray and gray-green. After a loudspeaker announcement, however, the crew stood in “DC stations” that held them immobile while the ship slowed. From the exterior, the C-57D ship was an undifferentiated flying saucer. Forbidden Planet (1956) was the first film to depict a fictional faster-than-light spaceship created by humans. The technology was inherently alien, however, and faster-than-light travel was not featured regularly afterward. In 1955, he introduced interstellar travel in “The Man from Nowhere” trilogy. Frank Hampson’s British comic Dan Dare offered one of the earliest uses of faster-than-light travel. Writers extrapolated supersonic speeds into the idea of spacecraft traveling at multiples of the speed of light. In 1947, Chuck Yeager broke the speed of sound aboard the Bell X-1 Glamorous Glennis. Within a couple of decades, the fictional idea of faster-than-light travel made intuitive sense to a public familiar with recent supersonic flights. Smith’s cover story appeared in the same issue of Amazing Stories in 1928 that included Philip Francis Nowlan’s first short story about Anthony (later “Buck”) Rogers. ![]() “Doc” Smith imagined spaceships traveling faster than the speed of light in his “Skylark of Space” stories. ![]() But relativistic theory shows that mass increases with acceleration until mass becomes infinite at light speed. In classical physics, speed has no limits. Scientific understanding of light speed as an absolute natural limit derives from Albert Einstein’s publications on special relativity in 1905, confirmed by his work on general relativity in 1916. Some authors suggested faster-than-light drives, hyper drives, jump drives, worm holes, and black holes. Although some of these ideas predated the space age, after the 1950s, fictional depictions of space travel needed to suggest conceivable ways to cross interstellar distances to seem plausible. The idea that characters can fly from planet to planet, or star to star, defying current science and technology, is central to science fiction.
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