71–80 of 410 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's 111 light years away. For all intents and purposes, that's a one way trip right there; irregardless of the rocket equation. Even at relativistic speeds, you can't come home anymore.
Theoretically, you can. At 0.99c 111 light years take about 15 years of ship time to travel.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Theoretically, you can. At 0.99c 111 light years take about 15 years of ship time to travel.
You can make the trip arbitrarily small from your perspective (in theory at least :) ). The issue is that by the time you've made it back home, it's 222 years later. Hence "you can't go home anymore". :)
I say let's go. Now, whether you believe it or not, it is a fact that the US government has acquired alien technology and yet continues to keep it hidden by being stuck in a cold war mindset of, "well, we can't let the Chinese or Russians get their hands on this". That is the ultimate expression of narrow thinking, especially when there is a whole universe out there! Bring on the downvotes but history will vindicate…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly From the reference article: > Travelling from the surface of Earth to Earth orbit is one of the most energy intensive steps of going anywhere else. This first step, about 400 kilometers away from Earth, requires half of the total energy needed to go to the surface of Mars. Which means that if we use something like a balloon/blimp in the first stage, it would be a lot more energy efficient. Anyone knows why it…
most of the energy spent getting to that 400km low earth orbit is spent accelerating to very very fast lateral speeds. If you use a balloon to get your rocket up as high as you can before launching it you limit the weight of the rocket you can lift up there, and most of the weight of rockets is used to gain that lateral speed. The plane + rocket idea has been shelved for now, as reusable rockets have decreased the pr…
If you go straight up far enough you’ll be out of Earth’s gravity well.
You’ll still need acceleration to escape the solar gravity well, but you’ll never need horizontal acceleration necessary for Earth orbit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surface gravity will be around 2g, so even if it has a rocky surface it's not going to be a very comfortable home from home.
So a 150lb person will weigh 300lb. Sure that's gonna suck on day one but there's plenty of people who weigh that much who get by. Without all the health complications from high body fat it wouldn't be that bad. You'd probably die young but I don't think that would bother people.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can make the trip arbitrarily small from your perspective (in theory at least :) ). The issue is that by the time you've made it back home, it's 222 years later. Hence "you can't go home anymore". :)
If you put some money in an interest-bearing account you could at least buy a new home when you got back.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Theoretically, you can. At 0.99c 111 light years take about 15 years of ship time to travel.
And how much time will it take a person to reach that speed at human-safe acceleration? And how much energy would it take?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can make the trip arbitrarily small from your perspective (in theory at least :) ). The issue is that by the time you've made it back home, it's 222 years later. Hence "you can't go home anymore". :)
If you put some money in an interest-bearing account you could at least buy a new home when you got back.
With a planet this large, visiting it would be a one way trip due to the "The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation" [0]. I'm looking forward to the day we start finding exo-planets that are closer to Earth in size and which could potentially have space-faring races (and which we could leave if we were ever to visit them). [0] - https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/exped...
So that's purely for a chemical rocket, right? Is there any combination of tricks that can realistically push the envelope there? For example can we use a space elevator to start higher/faster (or, I don't know, balloons? a catapult or railgun or something?), laser power delivery from the ground, so we don't have to carry all the fuel, and an orbiting way-station for refueling, etc.?