Some of the exhibits are based on real scientific concepts, but there is "just a little bit" of engineering to be done for it to become reality.

"There are models of ramjets that harvest the Hydrogen in deep space to power them," Connell said. But those harvesting shields would need to be several kilometers across. Since a structure like that could not be launched it would have to be built in space and that would take more money than anyone has at the moment."

Another is dubbed "dataless" and uses nuclear fusion as the fuel. It is a concept that dates back to the 1970s and one originally from the Interplanetary Society.

"This is an anti-matter rocket and this has been in the news a bit lately with the new Large Hadron Collider. There is also talk of being able to harvest anti-matter for fuel. The principles are there but the engineering is a fair way off."

The physical space ship models were used on the making of the Star Wars movies before it was cheaper to do it with computers. And some aspects of the graphics in the most recent movie were limited by a need to maintain some sort of continuity with the "former, later" films.