The closest star is Proxima Centauri to our planet. However, it is 4.25 light-years away from us, or around 40 trillion kilometers. The Parker Solar Probe, which is currently in orbit, will reach a top speed of 450,000 miles per hour, making it the world’s fastest spacecraft. This solar probe will take approximately 6633 years to our neighboring star. People would have to move faster than light if humans ever desire to travel conveniently between stars. Fastest Space Travel needs the fastest spacecraft. However, until now, faster-than-light travel has only appeared in Science Fiction.
Light moves extremely fast. In reality, it is the quickest object that exists, and no other thing can go faster than light as described in the laws of the cosmos. Light travels at a speed of 300,000 km/s, and it takes roughly one second to reach from the Earth to the Moon.
Although 1% of something may not seem like much. But, when it comes to light, that’s still a lot of speed which is roughly 7 million mph. It would almost one second to go from Los Angeles to New York at 1% the speed of light. This is up to thousands of times quicker than a typical airplane.
The Fastest Spacecraft: Fastest Space Travel
With a maximum pace of 7,000 mph, NASA’s X3 jet plane is the quickest aircraft on the planet. Although this is great, it is still just 0.001% of light speed. Spacecrafts are considered as the quickest thing which is human ever made. They utilize rockets to break away from the gravity of the Earth, which requires a velocity of 25,000 mph.
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is the spaceship that made the fastest space travel possible. After launching from Earth in 2018, it grazed the Sun’s hot environment and accelerated to 330,000 mph using the Sun’s gravity. That is incredible speed, yet it is just 0.05 percent the speed of light.
Why it is difficult to achieve the speed of light?
What is limiting humans from achieving 1% of the speed of light? In a nutshell, energy. Any moving thing has kinetic energy because of motion. If you want to travel quicker, you must increase your kinetic energy. The issue is that increasing speed requires a lot of kinetic energy. It takes four times the energy to make anything go with double speed. Increasing the speed of something by three times necessitates nine times the energy, and so on.
