Sitting by the runway-facing window, I heard my phone ping with an alert from the airport Wi-Fi, and I logged in. It was the lead story everywhere. More details would be released later, and the initial announcement was brief: NASA engineers had made a radical breakthrough in propulsion technology. There were rumours that spacecraft could achieve more than 10,000 times their previous velocity. For now, the Scientific Council said it was confident ‘major applications’ would be found in the coming years. Researchers were setting up larger trials, and it was already being described as one of the
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