StokedUp said: Awesome, sonat out current fastest speeds achieved in in space in will only take 800,000 years to reach them! |
Supposing we could accelerate at 1g for half the duration and decelerate at 1g for the other half it would only take 7.3 years for the travellers, with 41.9 years passed on Earth. http://nathangeffen.webfactional.com/spacetravel/spacetravel.php
Except the best we can do now for sustained acceleration is a solar sail at about 0.001 m/s^2, or 1232 years. That wouldn't work ofcourse as that acceleration will go down to nothing once getting further from the sun. Yet perhaps with a powerful concentrated laser you can push a spacecraft all the way, then you just need to worry about slowing down.
http://www.zmescience.com/space/lasers-mars-travel-04232/ Very promising for probes: “As an example, on the eventual upper end, a full scale DE-STAR 4 (50-70 GW) will propel a wafer scale spacecraft with a 1 m laser sail to about 26% the speed of light in about 10 minutes (20 kgo accel), reach Mars (1 AU) in 30 minutes, pass Voyager I in less than 3 days, pass 1,000 AU in 12 days and reach Alpha Centauri in about 15 years. Pretty amazing!