AAWSAP DIRD, Advanced Space Propulsion Based on Vacuum (Spacetime Metric) Engineering, March 2010

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craft's material properties would appear "hardened" relative to the environment owing
to the increased binding energies of atoms in its material structure. Such a craft could,
for example, impact water at high velocities without apparent deleterious effects.
SPATIAL ALTERATION
The fourth entry in Table 1 (spatial measure) indicates the size of an object within an
altered spacetime region as seen by a remote observer. The size of, say, a spherical
object is seen to have its radial dimension, r, scale asl/Fi::. In the vicinity of a
dense massM, > 1, in which case an object within the altered spacetime region
appears to a remote observer to have shrunk. As a corollary, metric engineering
associated with an advanced aerospace craft to produce this effect could in principle
result in a large craft with a spacious interior appearing to an external observer to be
relatively small. Additional dimensional aspects, such as potential dimensional changes,
are discussed below in "Refractive Index Effects."
VELOCITY OF LIGHT/CRAFT IN SPACETIME-ALTERED REGIONS
Interior to a spacetime-altered region, the locally measured velocity of light, v;_ = c , is
given by the ratio of (locally measured) distance/time intervals for a propagating light
signal, as expressed in Equation (6) above. From a viewpoint exterior to the region,
however, the observed coordinate ratio measurement can yield a different value v1
greater or less than c as given by the fifth entry in Table 1 (velocity). As an example of
a measurement less than c, one speaks of light "slowing down" as a light signal
approaches a dense mass (for example, a black hole.) In an engineered spacetime in
which g 00 > 1, lg111< 1, however, the effective velocity of light v~ as measured by an
external observer can be > c.
Given that velocities in general in different coordinate systems scale as does the
velocity of light-that is, v ➔ .Jg 00/-g 11 v -for exotic propulsion an engineered
spacetime metric can in principle establish a condition in which the trajectory of a craft
approaching the velocity of light in its own frame would be observed from an exterior
frame to exceed light speed-that is, exhibit motion at superluminal speed. This opens
up the possibility of transport at superluminal velocities (as measured by an external
observer) without violation of the velocity-of-light constraint within the spacetime­
altered region, a feature attractive for interstellar travel. This is the basis for discussion
of warp drives and wormholes in the GR literature (References 2-6). Therefore,
although present technological facility is far from mature enough to support the
development of warp drive and wormhole technologies (Reference 22), the possibility of
developing such technologies in the future cannot be ruled out. In other words,
effective transport at speeds exceeding the conventional speed of light could occur in
principle, and therefore the possibility of reduced-time interstellar travel is not
fundamentally ruled out by physical principles.
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