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Is Interstellar Travel Just a Dream?
Space is big, really big. Even the closest stars are unimaginably far away. Alpha Centauri — the Sun’s nearest neighbour — is so distant that light itself takes more than four years to cover the distance. And that’s just the closest one— most of the stars you see in the night sky are hundreds of times further away.
Could we ever cross these vast distances? Could a man, or woman, ever walk on a world around another Sun? To do so we’ll either need to spend centuries or even millennia en route, or find a way to go really, really fast.
To date, humans have only travelled to our closest cosmic neighbour, the Moon. That journey, a paltry 240,000 miles (380,000 km), took the Apollo astronauts just over three days, averaging three thousand miles per hour. At that speed, assuming our plucky astronauts can tolerate the cramped living conditions, it would take almost a million years to reach Alpha Centauri.¹
The Apollo programme used the biggest rocket ever constructed, the Saturn V, burning more than 40,000 pounds of fuel every second. But, even with all that power, we are still nowhere near reaching the stars. More than fifty years have now passed since the Moon landings. Surely modern technology can do better?
Indeed it can, but not by much. Since the 1970s humanity has launched five probes to the outer solar…
