Are we there yet??🚀

In my entire life, I have never traveled outside of the country. Most people on Earth have never traveled off of Earth. And none of us have ever traveled outside of our Solar System! We know that travel to the Moon is possible, but is it possible to visit worlds in other planetary systems? Is it as easy as they make it seem in movies?

There are so many challenges that make interstellar travel difficult. Since it’s so hard to even get close to the speed of light, space travel will take an incredibly long time to even reach the closest star system. Our Universe has a speed limit of 3×10^8 m/s (aka the speed of light!), and the fastest going engine that humans have been able to invent so far is still tens of thousands of times slower than that. To even get close to the speed of light, we will need to design new engines that have insanely high energy requirements (we would probably need more energy than our Earth uses in one year to make a spacecraft half the speed of light… that’s a lot to ask for).

The craziest thing I learned from our textbook is that when traveling at such high speeds is that time will be much slower there than on Earth due to Einstein’s theory of relativity. Maybe it would only take a few years to travel to another star, but so many more years would pass on Earth during the few years we spend traveling!! It’s almost scary to imagine traveling to space, because even if I only took a quick one-year space trip, when I return to Earth, everyone I know would be way older than me. (but is that really a bad thing?)

Parker Solar Probe is the fastest spacecraft so far, traveling around 200km/hr!! (image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben)

We’ve launched five spaceships into space so far, but unfortunately due to all these barriers, they will not be returning anytime soon. Space travel is incredibly difficult, but astronomers are constantly working towards making better spacecraft designs and figuring out other ways we can learn about our vast Universe. 🚀