In the process of building the Impulse drive our physicists believe they have discovered a way to generate and control antimatter, which they theorize could lead to even faster methods of propulsion.
Description
While the existence of antimatter has been known for a couple centuries, being able to work with it was extremely difficult. Containment was energy intensive and contamination from vacuum energy made it difficult to control a reaction within safe parameters. The scalable energy source created by cold fusion overcame the containment energy problem. Use of the Casmir Effect Bubble as the reactor vessel allowed the reaction to be controlled to very exacting parameters.