Light Could be the Answer to all our Space Travel Problems

Mining & Minerals - Evaluations / Off-World Exploration, Mining, & Technology

Date posted: 03/22/17

Space travel as the bloggers know it is plagued by a few problems, most of which boil down to striking a balance between speed and time. The faster one travels, the more energy one needs. Without gravitational assists, that means more fuel will be required, and that has to be carried somehow. Faster speeds, required to reach long distances in a reasonable timeframe, also mean more difficulty slowing down. So far, New Horizons is the fastest spacecraft ever in terms of launch velocity. Its launch speed was about 58,000 km per hr. After a flyby of Jupiter, New Horizons picked up a gravitational boost, but even still its speed was only 48,000 km per hour as it approached Pluto. It was thanks to those gravitational flybys that Voyager 2 became the fastest spacecraft to leave the solar system. After getting boosts from the four outer planets, Voyager 2 achieved a speed of about 60,000 km per hr on its way out. To put that into context, a trip to Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to ours, would take about 78,000 years at this pace. Furthermore, a craft making the trip would need to slow down when it arrived. Deceleration would require yet another series of gravitational flybys, which are only possible around large planets, none of which appear to orbit Proxima Centauri, the smallest star in the Alpha Centauri system. So, if there is no possibility of a gravitational assistance, the crafts would have to bring along enough fuel to slow the craft down, which is about as much as you would need to achieve top speed to begin with. That makes the craft heavier, and therefore harder to launch, and then you are back to the drawing board. In short, the whole process has long been unfeasible, until now. Researchers are working on a way to use light to overcome these obstacles. One issue with sending a spacecraft like Voyager to another star is its mass. The Breakthrough Starshot project aims to launch extremely lightweight craft, weighing only grams.