NASA Aims for Faster than Light Space Travel

Perhaps you have heard that NASA has recently set its sights on building a spacecraft that can traverse space at a rate greater than 300,000 km/s - the speed of light.  The final product may well arrive a century from now, but at first glance, the very prospect of a spacecraft exceeding the speed of light seems to violate special relativity.  One of the first things we learn when studying relativistic physics is that 300,000 km/s is a cosmic speed limit.

Before investigating this apparent violation of physical law, let us examine what a faster than light speed spacecraft really means in the context of current space travel standards.