Yes and no. It depends on the material you are in. In order to keep things from traveling into the past, and thereby preserve local conservation of mass-energy, and thereby prohibit the universe from exploding in an instant, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in vacuum. Supersonic airplanes break the sound barrier by flying faster than the speed of sound. This is possible because sound is just a traveling vibration of air molecules. As airplanes approach the speed of sound, their sound waves pile up into a wall of air pressure that shatters apart weak airplanes. Airplanes that are strong enough can poke through this wall of air pressure and create a shock wave that trails behind them. When this sonic shock wave passes ground observers, we hear it as a sonic boom. By analogy, if a space ship traveled faster than the speed of light, it would create a shock wave made entirely of light. The problem is that nothing can go faster than the speed of light in vacuum, so a space ship can never go fast enough to break the light barrier. It's not a question of engineering, but of fundamental physics. As an object approaches the speed of light, it takes an increasing amount of energy to accelerate. It would take literally an infinite amount of energy for a space ship to exactly reach the speed of light in vacuum. This fact is verified every day in particle accelerators. Using the electrical power consumption of a small town, particle accelerators channel that energy into getting a handful of tiny particles like protons and electrons traveling very close to the speed of light in vacuum. Every year, particle accelerators are being improved to reach ever higher speeds. For instance, one decade the record was that the particles were traveling at 99.99% the speed of light in vacuum, and then the next decade an improved machine reached 99.999% the speed of light in vacuum, and the following decade saw a record of 99.9999% (these numbers are for illustration purposes only and are not exact). The current record is held by the LHC which has accelerated protons to 99.999997% the speed of light in vacuum. A ship in space can't ever reach the speed of light in vacuum, and therefore can't ever break the light barrier and create an optical shock wave.