  Conventional rockets are not a suitable technology for deep space missions.
Chemical rockets require a very large weight of propellant, travel very slowly
compared to light speed, and require significant energy to maintain operation
over periods of years. For example, the 722 kg Voyager spacecraft required
13,600 kg of propellant to launch and would take about 80,000 years to reach
the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, about 4.3 light years away. There have been
various attempts at developing ideas on which one might base a spacecraft that
would permit deep space travel, such as spacewarps. In this paper we consider
another suggestion from science fiction and explore how the quantum vacuum
might be utilized in the creation of a novel spacecraft. The spacecraft is
based on the dynamic Casimir effect, in which electromagnetic radiation is
emitted when an uncharged mirror is properly accelerated in the vacuum. The
radiative reaction produces a dissipative force on the mirror that tends to
resist the acceleration of the mirror. This force can be used to accelerate a
spacecraft attached to the mirror. We also show that, in principal, one could
obtain the power to operate the accelerated mirror in such a spacecraft using
energy extracted from the quantum vacuum using the standard Casimir effect
witha parallel plate geometry. Unfortunately the method as currently conceived
generates a miniscule thrust, and is no more practical than a spacewarp, yet it
does provide an interesting demonstration of our current understanding of the
physics of the quantized electromagnetic field in vacuum.
