What exactly is inspiration? One definition is,"Something, such as a sudden creative act or idea, that is inspired." When I went to school they taught us never to use the word that you were defining in a definition, yet here it is. I guess someone should tell this to the people who edited this dictionary. I think you get the idea however. Inspiration is an idea that is the basis for an invention if we are talking about where inventions come from. Some people had a dream and when they woke up, they wrote it down and came up with useful inventions. I wish I could have dreamed about inventing something that was worth a lot of money! When I was younger and more foolish I sent an idea for a spray can modification to one of the big can producing companies. It wasn't patented and you guessed it, they adopted the modifications and all spray cans that dispense shaving cream have them. I was never notified or offered anything and learned a lesson the hard way.

They say that the inspiration for the first flight to the moon came from the novel by Jules Verne, "From The Earth To The Moon". It is also said that Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon inspired rocket travel. Oh, you may not know who these people were if you are too young, they were characters that flew around the universe in rocket powered ships. Movies were made about their adventures and Buck Rogers even was a tv show. Warp drive is said to have been inspired by John Campbell in the 1930s. It was reinforced by the movie Forbidden Planet, which is said to be the inspiration for the tv show Star Trek. Ideas are funny things, there are ideas based on what we know, but there are also ideas based on what we would like to achieve.

Over the years NASA has studied many different ideas for space propulsion. Here are five that were considered the most promising:

1. Project Orion
2. Project Daedalus
3. Interstellar Ramjet
4. Interstellar laser sails
5. Antimatter Project

Project Orion began to be studied around the 1950s and is still talked about. The idea was to detonate small nuclear bombs that would push the spaceship through space. I personally hate this idea. Can you imagine if there is other life out there, what would they think of such wholesale contamination? The ship was to have a very strong back plate and the tiny bombs were to be set off just far enough away from the ship as not to cause any damage to it. The resultant shock wave would push the ship along.

Project Daedalus was an idea from the 1970s, it was the brain child of the British Interplanetary Society. The ship would scoop up fuel from Jupiter and use a modified version of the Project Orion plan. The idea was to send a vehicle to Barnard's star and get there in about 50 years.

The interstellar ramjet was first thought of in the 1960s. The idea was to scoop up fuel along the way, thus you wouldn't have to worry about carrying fuel into orbit. The idea was that the ship would scoop up individual protons from space and use some process to fuse, thus creating a nuclear rocket. This idea had many drawbacks. No one knew exactly how many protons could be scooped up and how much drag this would create on the ship. Besides these problems, it wasn't known how you would create the nuclear fusion from doing this.

Interstellar laser sails were suggested by Robert Forward. In space even the act of light hitting something can supply energy to move it. The idea was for a ten million gigawatt laser to shine through a thousand kilometer lens onto a thousand kilometer sail. Supposedly a vehicle weighing a thousand tons, with a crew, could get to the nearest star in ten years. So why didn't we do this? We didn't because we couldn't. The laser we are talking about would consume ten thousand times the power of all energy used on earth. Without a new power source, this is impractical.

The Antimatter Project was being investigated by Penn State University. So far this is way beyond anything we could ever achieve, but this could change as technology advances.Some people don't know what antimatter is, it is just ordinary matter with the electrical charge reversed. Here is a tidbit for you, antimatter behaves the same with gravity as matter. We are making progress in this area, we are now able to store some types of antimatter for weeks at a time.( http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/research/warp/antistat.html) Here is the current problem, the cost of making one milligram of antimatter is about one hundred billion dollars.

While scientists feel that faster than light travel is a must to get to anywhere outside our solar system, they are faced with a growing body of evidence that Einstein was right and it is impossible. One of the troubling properties of this type of travel is that it is believed that time slows down as you travel faster. The theory suggests that you could never reach the exact speed of light because the energy required at that point would be more than is available in the universe. Is this true? It seems to be, but without trying light speed flight out, how can we know for sure? Ways around this phenomena are being explored. They include space time warping, quantum paradoxes, tachyons, and wormholes.

Will we be able to fly around the galaxy on some future date? I am a believer and I think that will happen. It may not happen for another hundred years or more, but we could be surprised by a break through. Let's keep our fingers crossed.