As seen in: Star Wars; Star Trek; most space movies

What’s The Science? NASA has started work on a way of using lasers to move things around in a vacuum, which might one day be used to clear debris from orbit (there’s a lot of it up there) and in the meantime is pretty darn cool. A team at NASA has just landed $100,000 funding (which should just about pay for pencils and lab coats) to investigate three types of laser beams that might work. The most exciting is, at present, only on the theoretical drawing board, but this “Bessel beam” would indeed draw objects towards the source of the beam. OMG like the Death Star pulling in the Millennium Falcon! Read more here

So how long until we see practical results? Well, it’ll be a while before we’re using these to move spaceships, but NASA does have a storied history of actually accomplishing amazing things, and tests on the first two types of lasers have already had some success on a very small scale: the team can already use “optical tweezers” and the optical solenoid beam to move particles around.

Which films might this change? While Star Wars and Star Trek can consider their science vindicated by this, Armageddon and other space movies set closer to home would see their plots changed dramatically were tractor beams available.