The Fastest Spacecraft

The Fastest Spacecraft

The solar neighborhood, the immediate environs of the Sun in space, includes the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri. It is really a triple system, two stars revolving around each other, and a third, Proxima Centauri, orbiting the pair at a discreet distance. At some positions it its orbit, Proxima is the closest know star to the Sun – hence its name. Most stars in the sky are members of double and multiple star systems. Our solitary Sun is something of an anomaly.

The second brightest star in the constellation Andromeda, called Beta Andromedae, is seventy-five light-years away. The light by which we see it now has spent thus seventy-five years traversing the dark of interstellar space on its long journey to Earth. In the unlikely event that Beta Andromedae blew itself up last Tuesday, we would not know it for another seventy-five years, as this interesting information, travelling at the speed of light, would require seventy-five years to cross the enormous interstellar distances. When the light by which we now see this star set out on its voyage, the young Albert Einstein, working as a Swiss patent clerk, had just published his epochal special theory of relativity here on Earth.

The two Voyager spacecraft are the fastest machines ever launched from Earth. But they are traveling at only one ten-thousandth the speed of light. Image : Spaceship as seen in the deep of the warm-hole © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

The two Voyager interstellar spacecraft, the fastest machines ever launched from Earth, are now travelling at one ten-thousandth the speed of light. They would need 40, 000 years to go the distance to the nearest star. Do we have any hope of leaving Earth and traversing the immense distances even to Proxima Centauri in convenient periods of time? Can we do something to approach the speed of light? What is magic about the speed of light? Might we someday be able to go faster than that?