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NASA Engineers Fact-Check the Starship Enterprise

'Star Trek' tech is more advanced than what we have today, but it's an inspiration for the future.

In the words of Spock, "insufficient facts always invite danger." So a few NASA scientists decided to fact-check the Starship Enterprise, the fictional spacecraft in the Star Trek series. Did the iconic sci-fi movie and TV series adhere to the rules of reality, or was it light years beyond modern science?

In this video from The Scene, NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab chief engineer, Brian Muirhead, and aerospace engineer, Anita Sengupta, break down the plausibility of the Starship Enterprise. By analyzing the the physics and spacecraft features, they determine just how factual, or otherwise dangerously incredible, it would have been in real life.

Trekkies, fear not. While many features of the Starship Enterprise were ahead of our time, scientists agree Star Trek offered a sophisticated depiction of the world in the future and inspiration for space engineers.

Certain technologies in Star Trek have yet to exist, but they're models of what we can work toward. The Starship Enterprise's warp drive is an example of that, requiring a distortion of space time to travel faster than the speed of light. Another example is the vehicle's deflector shield. Space craft today don't have protective deflector shields, but they do have magnetic shields to protect against radiation.

Perhaps the most plausible part of the Starship Enterprise was the holodeck, which simulated other people and environments. That kind of technology today is used in artificial intelligence and virtual reality, but would be useful for the psychology of astronauts traveling in deep space, the video explained. It would allow them to feel less isolated and disconnected from other people and their communities. Perhaps one day the holodeck could be the first of the Star Trek-inspired technology applied in real life to help space travelers live long and prosper.