NASA's New Star Trek-Like Spaceship 'Travels Faster than Light'

NASA, which is scheduled to plummet a flying saucer-like test vehicle towards Hawaii in a bid to assist future human expeditions to Mars, has unveiled a "faster than light," Star Trek-like spaceship that could make interstellar travel a reality.

The space agency's "warp ship" was cleverly crafted by NASA engineer and physicist Harold White, and "Star Trek" graphic artist Mark Rademaker. Images of the prototype design were revealed at a SpaceVision 2013 conference, and have been posted on Rademaker's Flickr page and Facebook account. Titled as "NASA's New Design for a Warp Drive Ship," it's no surprise that the images almost immediately went viral.

"The Flickr views went from 119 yesterday to 2 million today," Rademaker told NBC News.

Rademaker based his creation off the concept known as Alcubierre warp drive, an idea first put forth by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre, which suggests that faster-than-light travel might be achieved by manipulating spacetime both in front of and behind a spacecraft.

What was supposed to be a contribution to the Star Trek Ships of the Line 2014 calendar has now been altered to a ring-ship design that could provide means for manned missions to Mars or other worlds.

"I could have walked away, but I wanted this to be really good, so I put in an extra three months of spare time, with the new images as the result," Rademaker said.

The hypothetical design, dubbed IXS Enterprise, includes a sleek ship nestled at the center of two enormous rings, which create the warp bubble. According to White, iO9 reports, space vehicles equipped with warp drives could attain such remarkable speeds by making the empty space behind a starship expand rapidly, pushing the craft in a forward direction - passengers would perceive it as movement despite the complete lack of acceleration.

White speculates that the innovative concept could take a spacecraft to the star Alpha Centauri in a mere two weeks - even though the system is 4.3 light-years away.

These ambitions have yet to be considered realistic, as scientists still haven't found a way to warp spacetime. However, according to The Space Reporter, NASA officials at Johnson Space Center said last year that White and his team could soon create a warp-drive interferometer capable of finding tiny warp bubbles in spacetime.