Ben Rich is a UCLA engineering alumnus who was also the director of Lockheed Martin’s super high tech aircraft division called Skunk Works from 1975 to 1991. Rich admits that the key to space travel among the stars is not necessarily advanced mechanics, or the ultimate rocket fuel, but something more esoteric – ESP.
One of the main hurdles to mankind in reaching other worlds off-planet has been the sheer distance and time it would take to get there. Our current space shuttles (at least with the horse-and-buggie-like technology that has been released to the public) only travel 17,500 miles per hour. This means that visiting the second nearest star to our planet, Proxima Centauri, a meager 4.22 light years away, would take several life times. Of course, then there are fuel costs, which would be more than prohibitive using conventionally imagined space travel.
Worm holes could be used like short cuts through Sunday traffic, and ‘warp drive’ or anti-gravity, which Boeing has admitted to working on could also shorten the ride, but we’d still be looking at more rocket fuel than Exxon, Saudi Aramco, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, and BP combined have ever even sneezed at.
