Speeding Up Space Travel

The most widely discussed topic of space news has become increasing the speed in which spacecraft can travel. Let me start by saying everyone knows at current speeds we are severely limited in our space activities, even in the solar system. When one is talking about taking almost nine and one half years for the New Horizons probe to reach the dwarf planet Pluto, you can see how impractical space travel really is at this point. Forget about reaching the nearest star using the current technologies. Astronomers think there may even be other more distant planets in our solar system, can you imagine how long it would take to reach them? It might take so long the scientists who launched a probe to one of them would have been retired and maybe died before the probe ever got to its destination. This is why we need a much faster way to travel through the universe. We have heard about Einstein’s theories which state no one can reach the speed of light, because it would take more than all the energy in the universe to propel a ship this fast.

First of all I want to say nothing is standing still in space. The solar system is traveling at 45,000 miles an hour, but since everything in it is being dragged along we can’t get any closer to planets by just going into orbit. There is chaos in our universe and some of the galaxies are moving toward each other. Even our own Milky Way will be hit by the Andromeda Galaxy in about four billion years. So theoretically if we wanted to travel to a place in that galaxy, it is getting closer all the time, but the universe is expanding and many other galaxies and objects are getting further away. All this means is it will take more power every day to reach most galaxies if we ever have the ability to reach one, which we might never be able to, due to their distances. We are talking about distances so huge it takes light billions of years to reach us from many of them, which is so long we don’t even know if these galaxies exist anymore.

One hope for speedy space travel is finding out Einstein was wrong and we can travel faster than light using some sort of warp engine. It always seems to get back to UFOs, but I have to say this, there are those who believe some UFOs can travel far faster than the speed of light and they are powered by sheer brain power. Can anyone imagine a being having a brain so powerful it is capable of flinging a vehicle across space far faster than light itself? We are beginning to see our brains are evolving and capable of things like controlling computers and who knows how much more they will develop in the future. Perhaps there will be a time when our brains get so powerful we will also be capable of this feat, but until then we need new technology to travel faster through the vast reaches of space.

We have heard many whistleblowers say there is technology hidden in black projects which is already capable of reaching the stars in a reasonable amount of time. This would mean we already have the ability to travel faster than light or at least as fast, but for now let’s say we can’t be sure it exists, so this leaves us with what is being developed now. I think most of us who are interested in space travel have seen some of the latest announcements about laser powered craft. A few months ago NASA stated they were working on a laser powered vehicle which would be able to reach Mars in three days. Then there was another announcement by a scientist who claimed he was working on a system to send small ships to mars in thirty minutes. The propulsion is based on powerful earth lasers using a laser beam to push a ship to ¼ the speed of light in about ten minutes. This is only the first step and if we can accomplish this I am sure we will figure out how to make the ships bigger without losing speed. There is no friction in space so it is just a matter of getting more mass to accelerate quicker. This system would be a very good start, but I think if we could shrink down the lasers without reducing their output and even increase it and put them onboard the craft itself, it would free us to be able to go anywhere. Don’t get me wrong, even at approximately 740 million miles per hour, it is far too slow for exploring other solar systems. It takes light about three hours and fifty-two minutes to reach us from Pluto. This means if we can perfect this system of travel it would take our laser ship about sixteen hours to reach Pluto. While this might be okay for traveling around the solar system, it is insufficient for traveling to other star systems. The closest star to us is 4.37 light years away so using this system, even if it could extend our beam far enough to still power our laser ship, it would take us about 17 years to reach this star. We could never survive on a spaceship that long. We would either kill each other, have some tragedy strike or just run out of provisions.
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There is a plan to send probes to the nearest star however. Yuri Milner is a Russian billionaire. He is interested in extraterrestrial intelligence and funds some science prizes. He has contributed one hundred million dollars to a project to send robotic probes to the nearest star in a decade. He is getting help from Stephen Hawking and other very high profile people such as Elon Musk. The program he is backing is named Breakthrough Starshot. When I tell you what he is trying to do you will be amazed. He want to shrink our space probe technology into a gram-scale sized craft. Once he gets these craft down to this tiny size he wants to accelerate them to fantastic speeds using a ground based 100 gigawatt laser which will pulse through the atmosphere a few minutes at a time. A meter wide sail which is only a couple of atoms thick will be attached to the tiny ship and the laser will hit it and push the ship.

Hawking said light had the best promise right now for propulsion of space craft. The star they are aiming at is Alpha Centuri the nearest star. Currently our fastest probe which is either heading out of our solar system toward this star or has gotten past what we believe is the edge of our solar system is traveling at about a speed which would take roughly 30,000 years for it to get there. It is estimated the nano craft would only take about 20 years. Too slow for human travel, but incredibly faster than anything we have ever sent into space.