For thousands of years, mankind has looked up at the stars wondering what they are and could we somehow get there. In this day and age, we have figured out what they are but how to get to them is another matter altogether.
A trip to the nearest star besides our sun would take our fastest, most-powerful rocketship a staggering 75,000 years! And that is just a one-way trip. How could we survive such a journey?
Our bodies are fragile. Space is lethal. The time frame needed to travel to another star is simply beyond our comprehension and ability. Science fiction writers solve the problem using suspended animation. Some kind of machine that will keep you alive while you travel for years across the vast void of space. But could you trust a machine with your life for 75,000 years? Remember, no one would be there to fix it if something went wrong.
A decade ago, a group of scientists got together to pursue a radically different way to travel to the stars. They called it Starshot. Plagued by dried-up funding and a need for technology that does not yet exist, the project has been put on hold, perhaps indefinitely. There are still people working on it trying to solve some of the technical problems and scrape together more funding. Nobody knows how much it will cost. Estimates run into the trillions of dollars.
Tiny tech
What makes Starshot so radically different from today’s space program is a huge reduction in size. Forget about the magnificent images we see on television of huge rockets gracefully soaring upward from their launch pads. The spaceships of tomorrow will be the size of a postage stamp and weigh as little as a couple of paper clips.
Why so small? Actually it is all Albert Einstein’s fault. He told us that as an object goes faster and faster approaching the speed of light, it gets heavier and heavier, using more and more fuel. So if you do not like that inconvenient little fact, take it up with him. That postage stamp cannot go the speed of light at all because it would weigh an infinite number of tons and take an infinite amount of fuel to push it to that speed.
What would power our tiny spaceships? Oh yes, there might be hundreds of them, and they are called nanocraft. A light sail about three feet square and one-tenth as thick as a piece of Saran Wrap for each one of them should work. Light sails have been around awhile, at least the idea has. Generally, they are powered by the Sun. But for these little nanocraft, a bank of powerful lasers aimed at the light sails will do the job.
The lasers will fire for only 10 minutes and in that small amount of time the tiny spaceships will be halfway to Mars, a journey that takes conventional rocket ships months. Also and most importantly, they will be traveling at 20% of the speed of light. Maybe that does not sound very fast to you, but that comes out to 134,123, 040 miles per hour. There is nothing in our solar system going anywhere near that fast.
The fleet of space probes will head out past all the planets, past the Oort Cloud, which is a huge reservoir of comets way past Pluto. Their final destination is Proxima Centauri, a tiny red dwarf star which happens to be the closest star to us. Travel time is 20 years.
Once there, the nanocraft will take a few pictures of the star and its planet and send them back to Earth. Traveling at the speed of light, the pictures will arrive here in a little over four years. Then the nanocraft will continue their journey to infinity.
More problems
It is an ambitious project and very intriguing, but I don’t think I will be around to see the pictures. There are some problems that need to be overcome.
That bank of lasers used to accelerate those spaceships to millions of miles per hour in just a few minutes means they would be incredibly powerful. In the wrong hands they could be a formidable weapon. They would have to be developed in an atmosphere of trust and good will. Two commodities that are in short supply in today’s world.
Also, how do you keep those lasers from incinerating the spacecraft and their sails? Dust in interstellar space could grind them into little pieces. There are other problems as well, so do not hold your breath. It will be awhile before we get to the stars. For now, we have to be content with just looking at them.
