I agree with you that there is a lot of room to be skeptical and I share your view that Alcubierre drive is, at best, problematic. Of course, as already said in my post, I believe in experimental facts. If they are able to give extraordinary evidence to their claim I will be happy to change my skeptical view in a strong support.

Marco

Also, NASA devotes a small amount of funds to a lot of “blue-sky” ideas, including ones that are thoroughly outside the mainstream of physics–see for example the page here where they talk about the possibility of using vacuum energy for propulsion, specifically mentioning the ideas of “Haisch, Rueda, and Puthoff” which I’ve seen several mainstream physicists dismiss as nonsense, see John Baez’s comments here. So, the fact that NASA decided to fund Dr. White’s research doesn’t really tell us much about its scientific respectability.

The interesting matter here is that NASA decided to fund such studies and, possibly, White’s arguments should have been very good to convince the administration. Said this, it is plausible to think that, changing the geometry of the matter generating the bubble, the requirement can be significantly less demanding. I would like to remember that in a previous geometry it was required a quantity of exotic matter as Jupiter mass. This is what one needs to generate the bubble and a lot of literature discussed a lot on this. While we wait for further results on 2012 to be announced, I invite you to read all you can find, just googling around, about White’s work. All the details are filled in.

Marco