(engine racing)
(subway clacking)
(jet engine roaring)
We live in an exciting time in human history.
Time when the world has never been smaller.
(dramatic music)
Time when we can drive,
sail and fly to almost anywhere.
Three, -: We can even
leave our planet. Two,
one, liftoff.
(rocket engine blasting)
How did this happen?
This is the incredible story
of our civilization's ceaseless desire to move.
(laughing)
(train swooshing)
I'm Sean Riley, I've always been fascinated by speed.
(dramatic music)
Come with me on a journey,
to better understand the game changing engineering,
courageous innovators,
god, it really fights ya,
and the machines that take us further,
higher, and above all faster.
(serene music)
Space is the most hostile environment we know.
Navigating it involves crossing unprecedented distances.
It's the greatest engineering challenge
humanity has ever undertaken.
(intense music)
To see how far we can travel,
I'm exploring what speed the human body can withstand.
Seeking out the pioneers
who've dreamed of reaching other worlds,
and the revolutionary technology,
pushing the boundaries of space exploration.
(dramatic music)
(screaming)
Breaking away from the Earth means
engineering machines capable of fighting
one of the most fundamental forces of our universe.
Now, the really exciting bit is just up the track,
in that direction.
This roller coaster loop is around 60 feet high.
To stand any chance of negotiating it,
I need to defy gravity.
I means you have to put energy into the vehicle,
and get it up to a really fast speed.
Woo, okay.
Here we go, and upside down, and back flip.
Ha ha.
Speeding at over 40 miles an hour,
upside down again,
means I can overcome Earth's gravitational pull,
for just a few seconds.
Any slower, and I couldn't loop up
and around the track.
(dramatic music)
Awesome.
If that's the kind of energy it takes
to get me to overcome gravity here,
at about 60 feet,
think about how much power it takes
to put something into orbit.
About 250 miles up.
(dramatic music)
Speed is essential for leaving Earth.
And there are two key velocities.
Reaching Earth orbit means accelerating
to around 17,500 miles an hour.
Slower than that, and gravity wins.
Breaking away from Earth altogether
means going even faster.
Over 24,000 miles an hour, that's seven miles a second.
Today, the only way we know
of reaching these phenomenal speeds
is by creating a sustained, controlled explosion.
A rocket.
At the beginning of the 20th century,
the audacious dream of leaving Earth
will come to preoccupy this man, Robert Goddard.
From an early age, Goddard is fascinated by space flight,
inspired by science fiction novels.
And one day, while pruning a tree at his home,
the 17 year old has an epiphany.
What if he can turn the dream of reaching space
into a reality?
(serene music)
For hundreds of years,
rockets have been fueled with explosive gunpowder.
But gunpowder is inefficient.
To go faster means finding
a significantly more powerful fuel.
In a flash of inspiration, Goddard realizes
he can create a more powerful rocket using liquid fuels,
made from gasoline and oxygen.
(dramatic music)
Goddard starts experimenting with liquid fueled rockets.
His wife, Esther, films his early efforts.
(rocket blasting)
(rocket exploding)
Through dogged determination, he launches larger,
more powerful rockets.
And in 1935, he achieves the unprecedented.
Building the first rocket to break the sound barrier.
Over 700 miles an hour.
But accelerating into space requires huge amounts of fuel,
making single rockets too heavy.
Goddard has an ingenious solution.
To put one rocket on top of the other.
By jettisoning each stage, once its fuel is spent,
it's possible to shed weight as the rocket climbs,
allowing it to accelerate faster.
Goddard is convinced that a multistage rocket
is the key to leaving Earth,
and reaching the near vacuum of space.
(dramatic music)
At the time, many refute the audacious idea
that a rocket can travel through a vacuum.
And without air to push against, how will it move?
(serene music)
Goddard's dream of interplanetary travel is ridiculed.
The press calls his ideas absurd.
The criticism has a damning effect on Goddard.
He's a modest man and he shuns all future publicity.
But, he never gives up.
Goddard continues his pioneering rocket research,
right up to his death in 1945.
But his work sets humanity on a trajectory into space.
First to seize on the power of liquid rocket dream
are the Germans.
During World World II, their V-2 rocket,
the world's first ballistic missile,
travels at more than three times the speed of sound.
Used as a formidable weapon, not for the stars.
In 1957, the Soviets create the R-7.
This two stage rocket is the first
powerful enough to break free of Earth's gravity,
and place an object into orbit, Sputnik 1.
By adding a third stage, in 1961,
the Soviets build Vostok 1, which has enough energy
to accelerate the first man into space, Yuri Gagarin.
But it's America's massive, three staged, Saturn V rocket,
which finally fulfills Robert Goddard's dreams,
of a manned rocket, powerful enough
to leave the Earth altogether, and head to the Moon.
(gentle music)
If you're looking for the legacy of Robert Goddard,
or if you're looking for an example of courage
on a grand scale,
you don't have to look any further than this.
This is the massive Apollo Saturn V Moon rocket.
And it is a phenomenal piece of human engineering.
[Capsule Communicator] Ignition sequence starts.
Five, four, three, two, one, zero.
(dramatic music)
Liftoff, we have a liftoff.
The Saturn V is the fastest manned rocket ever built.
At launch, five mighty F-1 engines
guzzle over 3,000 gallons of fuel a second.
66 seconds later, the rocket smashes the sound barrier.
At a height of 42 miles, the first stage drops away,
and the second stage kicks in,
accelerating the astronauts even faster.
Nine minutes after launch,
a single third stage rocket fires,
placing the spacecraft into Earth orbit,
at over 17,000 miles an hour.
A final boost of speed accelerates the crew
to over 24,000 miles an hour.
Enough to escape the Earth's gravity,
and to change the course of human history.
(serene music)
It's one small step for man,
one giant leap for mankind.
It's been a long way but we're here.
My oh my.
That is a very impressive sight.
Between 1968 and 1972, the mighty Saturn V
sends 24 men to the Moon.
(serene music)
As soon as I stand out here
in the wonders of the unknown,
I sort of realize there's a fundamental truth to our nature,
man must explore, and this is exploration at its greatest.
(serene music)
(mysterious music)
Today, 50 years after the first Moon landing,
we stand on the brink of a new age in human exploration.
The goal now is to build a new generation of rockets.
To not only send humans back to the Moon,
but further still.
(dramatic music)
To Mars.
Lying tens of millions of miles away,
this planet offers a unique testbed,
where we can learn to live on a new world.
But getting humans there will mean undertaking
the most hazardous journey in history,
and speed will be critical.
(mysterious music)
You know, walking around out here, you get a real sense
for just how giant this next generation of rockets
is going to be.
NASAs latest is a beast, the Space Launch System.
Like its predecessors, the Space Launch System, or SLS
is a staged rocket.
Its mission, to carry us faster, and further into space,
than any other rocket.
And potentially on to Mars.
This rocket will be the most powerful ever built.
Even outperforming the Saturn V.
(dramatic music)
But the first leg of the SLSs journey of extreme speed
will be anything but fast.
This is NASAs massive crawler transporter,
the largest self powered moving machine on the planet.
For over 50 years, its job
has been to carry NASAs giant rockets to the launch pad.
Inching forward at only one mile an hour,
this beast has to keep its valuable cargo perfectly level.
One wrong move could be catastrophic.
The final hurdle is climbing the ramp to the launchpad.
Using laser guidance, and a hydraulic leveling system,
the crawler makes precise millimeter adjustments
to keep its towering payload safe.
Once in place, the rocket is fueled, and ready for launch.
(serene music)
(rocket blasting)
(dramatic music)
This incredible footage shows the beating
that a rocket gives a launchpad during takeoff.
The SLS will test the launchpad to its limits.
NASA protects its pad and high tech rockets
with a low tech solution.
(gentle music)
(water roaring)
We have a 400,000 gallon water tank.
And that protects the mobile launcher from the heat.
We dump about 400,000 gallons out,
in less than 25 seconds, just before liftoff,
and continue after liftoff.
This deluge of water protects both the pad
and the rocket from the extreme heat and energy
produced during launch.
(dramatic music)
(rocket engine blasting)
Onboard the SLS, as it speeds into space,
will be a new generation of spacecraft.
NASAs first in 40 years.
The Orion module, designed for missions to the Moon,
and Mars, Orion has nearly twice the capacity
of Apollo's command module.
Large enough to accommodate four astronauts into deep space.
But getting into space is one thing.
Returning to Earth is another.
For that, Orion depends on its most critical feature,
the heat shield.
Reentering the Earth's atmosphere
is a battle against speed.
In fact, the fastest humans ever were the crew of Apollo 10.
Returning from the Moon at almost 25,000 miles an hour,
hitting the atmosphere at these speeds
generates temperatures of around 5,000 degrees.
Orion and its crew are protected by the largest heat shield
NASA has ever created.
Measuring 16 feet across, 320,000 tiny cells are filled
by hand with a synthetic material called AVCOAT.
AVCOAT is a resin designed to be consumed
by the heat of reentry.
It slowly burns away, taking the heat with it as it goes,
protecting the spacecraft.
But before Orion can be trusted with a crew,
its heat shield has to pass a trial by fire.
Reentering the Earth's atmosphere.
[Capsule Commander] Five, four, three, two, one.
And liftoff, at dawn, the dawn of Orion,
and a new era of American space exploration.
(rocket blasting)
Orion slams into the atmosphere,
at over 20,000 miles per hour, slowing rapidly.
This onboard camera captures the blaze
left in its wake, as the capsule's heat shield
faces temperatures half as hot as the surface of the sun.
Orion survives its battle with speed,
all thanks to an incredible material.
It's a major milestone for future missions
to the Moon and Mars.
When I was a kid, I loved rockets.
I still love rockets.
I grew up with images of these massive, historic,
multistage rockets lifting off into the sky.
Awesome stuff.
But the only time these rockets look like this
is at launch.
As soon as the stages are used, they're junked.
(dramatic music)
To provide a platform to move into deeper space,
the goal is to make space travel as regular as air travel.
But imagine how expensive flying would be
if after each flight, a plane had to be thrown away.
(intense music)
Each Saturn V rocket cost over 750 million dollars
in today's money, only to be used once.
(exciting music)
To help reduce the cost of getting to space,
and open up the possibility of more regular trips,
NASA has teamed up with private rocket companies,
like SpaceX, whose engineers are transforming
the way rockets work.
Their idea, to land each of the rocket stages
safely on Earth,
so that they can be refueled and reused,
drastically reducing costs.
It might sound simple, but pulling it off is anything but.
(light airy music)
Take a look at this video, posted by SpaceX.
Ooh.
Wow, crazy right?
I mean you look at this and you think,
god, do these people know what they're doing?
The truth is, what these people are trying to do,
no one knows how to do it, right?
They're way off the map here.
Personally, I think it's admirable
they're willing to share their failures.
I mean they're basically saying if you wanna make an omelet,
you gotta break a few eggs, that's how you learn.
(dramatic music)
And in just eight years, look how far they've come.
In February 2018, SpaceX launched
the most powerful operational rocket on the planet.
The Falcon Heavy.
Its payload, a Tesla Roadster.
Launched to Mars and beyond.
An incredible publicity stunt.
But the real test is to successfully land
the Falcon Heavy's three rockets.
Traveling at over 4,000 miles per hour,
engines burn, and fins deploy to slow the rockets,
and keep them upright.
One of the rockets fails.
Two fight on.
A final burn, and the rockets slow
to just five miles per hour.
Falcon Heavy's successful maiden voyage
is a huge achievement.
Reusable rockets will drastically reduce
the cost of future missions to space,
providing a platform to speed into orbit
and beyond more regularly.
But the journey to Mars is long and hazardous,
taking approximately nine months just to get there.
During that time, the astronauts will be exposed
to the dangers of deep space.
Longer than anyone before.
(mysterious music)
I seen a light flash.
A few flashes, I'm not quite sure what they're ascribed to.
Houston, so far we've all seen just point sources of light.
Hard evidence of these hazards first came to light
with a mysterious observation 50 years ago.
During the Apollo missions to the Moon,
astronauts noticed bright flashes of light.
Even when their eyes were closed.
Tranquility, we come to you on the ground.
Once returned to Earth,
scientists examined their helmets with powerful microscopes.
Tiny holes, invisible to the naked eye,
revealed the hidden dangers of deep space.
We tend to think about space as being empty, a vacuum.
But in reality it's full of high energy subatomic particles
we call space radiation.
Are these particles dangerous?
(balls blasting)
Think of this tennis ball as an example
of one of these tiny particles.
These particles as radiation have enormous speed and energy,
so they can go through the walls of spacecraft.
They can go into our bodies, through our bodies.
And the end result of that is
that they can start breaking bones,
and the molecules that make us up.
The longer you spend in space,
the more this damage can build up,
and therefore that can have long term consequences
in terms of astronaut health.
Things like mutations,
potentially the increased risk of cancer.
(mysterious music)
Some space radiation comes from our sun.
But the most likely source of these deadly cosmic rays
is from outside of our solar system.
When stars, much heavier than our sun die, they explode,
resulting in a huge celestial event called a supernova.
Supernovae send particles flying throughout the galaxy,
at close to the speed of light,
tearing through everything in their path.
The flashes of light, seen by the Apollo astronauts
were caused by these cosmic rays hitting their optic nerves.
So, in a nutshell, space is full of these deadly particles,
and you don't wanna let 'em hit you.
So the best way to minimize exposure
is to minimize the amount of time you spend in space,
which means on a trip to Mars and back,
you wanna go as fast as you possibly can.
(dramatic music)
To do that, scientists are developing
revolutionary new propulsion systems.
One is based on an idea that remained hidden for decades
behind the Iron Curtain.
In the late 1920s, a young Russian scientist,
Valentin Glushko becomes fascinated by rockets,
and interplanetary travel.
But Glushko wants to look beyond liquid fueled rockets
for a more efficient fuel.
He has a radical idea.
Perhaps electricity could be used to generate thrust.
Glushko puts his theory to the test,
using high current electricity,
he vaporizes thin wires of metal,
which produces an ultra fast jet of atoms, known as ions.
Glushko realizes not only can he use this jet of atoms
to produce thrust, but at far greater speeds
than liquid fueled rockets.
The potential is staggering.
(serene music)
His genius earns him a leading role
in the Soviet rocket program.
But with fame comes attention,
and during Stalin's great purge,
Glushko is arrested by the secret police
and thrown into prison.
Glushko's breakthrough research remains locked away
until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Then scientists in the west finally get to see
Glushko's pioneering work with electric thrusters.
(dramatic music)
This technology has the potential
to propel us to Mars, and beyond.
It's the promise of faster speeds that is inspiring
a whole new generation of rocket pioneers.
I'm here to talk with someone
who knows more about space travel than most.
That's because he's been there, and done that,
over and over again.
Ex NASA astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz.
Franklin has been to space seven times.
This modern day pioneer is currently developing
his very own working electric thruster.
Aw, wow, look at that.
That's cool.
So, what am I looking at right now?
What you see here is a vacuum chamber.
It's just a can.
Your engine is inside that?
The engine is inside, but we have to create
the conditions of space, inside this can.
That's the noise that you hear.
That's the vacuum pumps.
That's the vacuum pumps, pumping away.
(dramatic music)
In the simulated vacuum of space,
Franklin's electric thruster, or ion drive
uses argon gas as a fuel by turning it into a plasma.
First, it takes the argon gas and applies enough heat
to break the gas apart into its elemental components.
Stripping electrons from the atoms,
and creating plasma, a soup of charged particles,
made of ions.
(rock music)
We come across plasma every day.
You can see it in florescent lights, and neon signs.
But to use plasma as a fuel, the challenge is
to heat it up to millions of degrees.
As hot as the center of the sun.
At these temperatures, the ions have huge amounts of energy,
moving at super fast speeds inside the engine.
Next, you need to turn the ions into thrust.
For that, a magnetic field is used
to direct the ions, expelling them out
the back of the engine, and creating thrust.
So is it firing right now?
It is on, yes, it's on and we can walk over there
and have a look.
Yeah what does it look like
when it's actually working?
You can see a little bit of the halo
that is just on the edges of the plasma,
and that's what shows the effect of the magnetic field.
So that's actually shaping the plasma?
Exactly, and you can see the plasma
doesn't touch any of the surrounding hardware,
because if it did, it would vaporize it.
So hot. -: It would be very.
So the hotter the rocket,
the higher the speed of the exhaust.
And you want to increase the speed of the exhaust
as much as you can.
(serene music)
Franklin and his team aim to engineer an ion drive
that can reach speeds up to 10 times faster
than conventional rockets.
Traveling at these speeds could open up a whole new era
of space exploration.
Reaching Mars would take just six weeks,
rather than months, drastically reducing our exposure
to space radiation.
With shorter travel times, Mars might provide humanity
with a new place to call home.
(serene music)
The race to reach other worlds
is being driven by a very real imperative,
our survival as a species.
Take the dinosaurs, they dominated this planet
for over 100 million years, and then bam,
and now all that's left of them are their fossils.
Putting humans on more than one planet
will dramatically increase our chances
of continuing existence.
(dramatic music)
Mars provides a unique opportunity where we can learn
to live on another planet.
But as robotic scouts learn more
about our planetary neighbor,
we're discovering it's no substitute for Earth.
Conditions there are almost as hostile as in deep space.
We need to look beyond our solar system,
for more Earth like planets.
Speed gives us a way to put powerful telescopes into orbit,
delivering an unprecedented view of our galaxy,
and allowing us to detect new worlds
in far flung solar systems.
So far, nearly 4,000 planets, orbiting distant stars,
have been discovered.
(serene music)
Remarkably, an Earth like planet Proxima b,
sits on our galactic doorstep.
Igniting new desires to travel faster
and further than ever before.
If we have any hope of making interstellar travel a reality,
we're going to have to increase
the speed of our spacecraft exponentially.
And one idea for making
those hyper-fast spacecraft of the future,
relies on an ancient piece of technology, the sail.
Almost two centuries ago, the power of the wind
carried our ancestors to new worlds.
And it's during this golden age of sail
that a brilliant physicist reveals another natural force
that pushes like the wind.
A discovery that could propel us to distant destinations.
(gentle music)
In the 1860s, Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell,
is attempting to understand
the link between electricity and magnetism,
when he makes a groundbreaking discovery.
His work shows that although light behaves like a wave,
it consists of tiny packets of energy, call photons.
Maxwell fundamentally changed
the way we understand our universe.
One of the most profound implications
for today's space pioneers is that light can exert force.
(gentle music)
This is a crucial breakthrough in our understanding
of how light works, and NASAs actually using that idea today
to build the spacecraft of the future,
which is why I'm all dressed up.
I've come to NASAs Marshall Space FLight Center,
to see how they're using Maxwell's breakthrough
to develop a new way of accelerating us
through the solar system, solar sails.
Let's just wrap our heads around light exerting force.
Okay. -: How's that work?
Well, you don't feel it, but on a sunny day,
as the light is reflecting from you,
it's actually pushing on you.
And that's because light is made up of little particles
called photons, but as they reflect from you,
it's just like a wind off a sail, they bounce off,
they impart a little bit of the momentum to you
when they do that,
but it's a very, very small force, you don't feel it.
Right, so if it's so small,
how does that help us get deep into space, and go fast?
Well, because in space, as long as the sun is shining,
you've got thrust.
That little bit of acceleration over time
adds up to a large velocity.
(serene music)
Our sun constantly streams photons into space.
These photons gently push when they impact upon objects.
When a photon hits the mirror like surface of a solar sail,
it bounces off, transferring its momentum,
which pushes the sail forward.
So what is the sail actually made out of?
Well it's made out of a plastic,
it's sort of like plastic wrap
that you find in your kitchen.
It's about the thickness of a human hair,
and it's got aluminum on it to make it reflective,
so it reflects the sunlight to make it move.
It's fairly fragile, but more robust than you think.
You can hold it. Thank you.
It is incredibly light.
If I had my eyes closed,
I'd have no idea that was in my hand.
(dramatic music)
Before using solar sails to take us to other planets,
NASA needs to test their validity.
They're powering an unmanned spacecraft to a distant goal.
The satellite will be launched into orbit
using traditional rockets.
There, it will detach, and deploy its solar sail.
Using sunlight, the sail will provide
an additional boost in speed of about 10,000 miles per hour,
propelling the spacecraft towards its target,
a near Earth astroid.
Providing scientists with a unique opportunity
to observe an asteroid of this size, close up,
and pave the way for future solar sail missions.
This is what the Near-Earth Asteroid Scout will look like,
once it gets out into space.
You can see the full width of the spacecraft here,
so all this is packaged up, and our sail is within it.
This is a very cool material.
How much of this goes into the solar sail?
Well our solar sail for the Near-Earth Asteroid Scout
is 86 square meters.
(serene music)
By harnessing the constant push of sunlight,
it's thought that solar sail powered craft
could reach speeds of up to 67 million miles an hour.
That's 10% the speed of light.
To reach these speeds will take
an almighty feat of engineering,
with super light spacecraft, powered by solar sails
stretching hundreds of feet across.
But for traveling beyond our solar system,
solar sails have a fundamental problem.
Acceleration is extremely gradual,
meaning it could take years just to get up to speed.
We need to get faster quicker.
(intense music)
Gs or G-force is a measure of acceleration.
One G is the amount of force we experience
from Earth's gravity.
In modern fighter jets, pilots can be subjected
to high Gs simply during flight maneuvers.
But the most extreme Gs are experienced
when the pilot has run out of options.
Rocket propelled ejection seats
are a tried and tested method of escape.
But they show the hazards of extreme acceleration,
and I'm about to learn why.
I've come to the U.S. Air Force
Biodynamics Research Facility, and I'm pretty excited.
I'm hoping to see something you don't get to see too often.
(mysterious music)
The experiments here are designed to do one thing,
better understand how the human body reacts
to the extreme forces experienced during rapid acceleration.
So what is this guy set up to test right now?
Here we have a mannequin in an actual F-35 ejection seat.
So we're going to be accelerating the seat down the track,
at about 10 Gs which is close
to what a pilot would experience in an actual ejection.
From zero to 50 miles an hour
in less than a quarter of a second.
Okay, this guy's gonna do it?
This guy'll do it.
Hang in there buddy.
And I'm the guy that gets to push the button.
Systems are on.
'Kay, going to stand-by, going all the way to arm.
(dramatic music)
Starting countdown.
Five, four, three, two, one.
So what happens to a pilot's body,
when he ejects out of a plane?
So during that very small amount of time,
the pilot actually can experience up to 2,000 pounds
of spinal loading, as well as
three to 400 pounds of neck loading.
There's a very real possibility of spinal or neck injury.
And what other parts of the human body
are at risk under those high Gs?
There's also potentially concussions
when you have the severe head flexion.
You also have the potential for limb flail,
at higher air speeds, where the limbs can literally be torn.
Right, okay so modern aircraft ejection seats,
spacecraft, these are all applying huge amounts of force.
Seems like the name of the game
is to avoid those fast changes.
Exactly, so it's not so much the what we call
the velocity, but the rate of change of the velocity.
And that's what really causes the injury.
The experiments here have really hit home.
If we want to accelerate in space,
to reach super fast speeds, we'll need to do it slowly.
Potentially adding years to any journey.
So, have we hit a major speed bump
in our quest to reach the stars and planets
beyond our solar system?
Perhaps not, what if, in order to travel great distances,
you didn't have to go fast at all?
(serene music)
Not only are we limited
by how fast our bodies can accelerate,
we're also limited by the fundamental laws of physics.
The universe has a speed limit, the speed of light,
186,000 miles per second, and nothing can travel faster.
It requires an insurmountable amount of energy.
Okay, so we can't go faster than the speed of light.
You can't go faster than the speed of light.
What if we could get close to it,
can we get anywhere if we're going say,
half the speed of light?
Well, even then, just the universe is so big.
It's gonna take a long time to get anywhere.
Nearest star is four light years away,
so if we were going at the speed of light,
it would take four years to go there.
Half the speed of light, eight years to get there.
These distances are vast.
Traveling to Proxima b,
our nearest potentially habitable planet,
is equivalent to circumnavigating the Earth
almost a billion times.
Even our fastest spaceships would take
thousands of years to get there.
But there may be a way to take a shortcut.
Einstein's theory of relativity tells us
that we might be able to build a tunnel through space,
that connects one point to another.
How does that work?
So suppose the surface of this balloon
is the space in our universe.
Okay.
And we wanna go from A to B.
Right.
Well, if I can have you hold.
Okay, I've got the universe.
What we could do, theoretically,
is we can push those points together.
(serene music)
This idea is extraordinary.
By bending the fabric of the universe,
to bring two points closer together,
we could effectively create a shortcut through space time.
So that's a pretty cool trick.
I like it, but in order to pull that off,
you have to be able to warp the shape of the universe.
Yeah.
How do you do that?
For that we need a wormhole.
A wormhole?
(dramatic music)
Alright, how could we build a wormhole?
Well, let's take this ball.
This ball is already bending space.
Really?
Just by virtue of being there,
it has mass, it has gravity,
it's already bending space around it.
Right, like all things that have mass and gravity,
you and I, and everything else,
are bending space time a little bit around us.
That's right, just a little bit.
But the more massive we make that ball,
the denser we made that ball,
the more it'll bend the space around it.
And if you were to make the ball, say,
a few times the mass of the Earth,
packed into the same size,
then it would punch through space time.
Right, and then what happens?
Then it becomes a black hole.
(serene music)
Now, theoretically, that black hole
could be the entrance to a wormhole.
Okay, I mean it sounds really far fetched,
but actually the cool part is that all of that crazy science
still fits within the way we know the universe works.
It's all still possible.
That's right, it all fits within Einstein's theory.
(dramatic music)
The potential of wormholes is profound,
bringing the whole universe within our reach.
We could travel to Proxima b, or even reach other galaxies
thousands of light years away,
without the need for powerful accelerating rockets.
And, in a fraction of the time.
In other words, wormholes could cheat speed.
Far out ideas, like folding space,
will always have naysayers.
Thankfully, there will always be pioneers,
like Robert Goddard.
Pioneers who are willing to think outside the box,
to go against conventional wisdom.
Pioneers whose tenacity will continue to change
the course of human history.
(serene music)
Throughout our history,
mankind's greatest discoveries and achievements
have be intrinsically linked to speed.
Each new leap in speed
has brought our civilization closer together.
Now humanity is on brink of a new era,
where exponential jumps in speed propel us
to achieving an age old dream,
traveling to other worlds.
And securing the future of our species.
(dramatic music)