Warp drive looks more promising than ever in recent NASA studies

Hope I am still around for this...
"Warp drive looks more promising than ever in recent NASA studies

"Interstellar travel may still be in its infancy, but adulthood is fast approaching, and our descendants will someday see childhood's end." The Starflight Handbook

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The first steps towards interstellar travel have been taken, but the stars are very far away. Voyager 1 is about 17 light-hours distant from Earth and is traveling with a velocity of 0.006 percent of light speed, meaning it will take about 17,000 years to travel one light-year. Fortunately, the elusive "warp drive" now appears to be evolving past difficulties with new theoretical advances and a NASA test rig under development to measure artificially generated warping of space-time...."

"The warp effect uses gravitational effects to compress the spacetime in front of a spacecraft, then expand the spacetime behind it. The bit of spacetime within the warp bubble is flat, so that the spacecraft would float at zero-g along the wave of compressed and expanded spacetime. The net effect is rather like surfing, where you are nearly stationary with respect to the wave, but are traveling with the speed of the wave. Whereas many of the theoretical studies consider a warp bubble moving at ten times the speed of light, there is no known limit to the potential speed.

Such a warp bubble could in principle be used to enable subluminal travel (travel slower than light) as well as superluminal travel (travel faster than light). This may seem a silly choice – why travel slow rather than fast? However, it is likely to turn out far easier to achieve a subluminal warp drive for a number of fundamental reasons. Besides, space travel at 90 percent of the speed of light is far superior to anything we currently have on the books."