What has long been considered science fiction is commonplace today. So, more recently, in real time, the whole world watched the stunning space show - the launch of the crewed spacecraft Crew Dragon on the ISS. Today it may seem that the first manned flight into space was a very long time ago, but if you look at the speed of technology development, it is stunning: the first rocket in history to study the parameters of the air environment was launched only 83 years ago! During this time, the Internet appeared in the world, as well as SpaceX's Falcon9 rockets, which return and land automatically. So maybe the technology of the future will make space travel a reality?
Interstellar travel
Who among us in childhood did not dream of interstellar travel? Why, I don't know about you, but I still dream that one day a flying saucer will land next to my house and invite you on a tour of the endless Universe. No wonder, as interstellar travel is a staple of science fiction series. One way or another, as technology advances - from the famous Boston Dynamics peels and the beautiful robot Sophia, to more advanced rockets and space probes - the question arises: is it worth hoping that someday we will colonize the stars? Or, if we put aside this distant dream, can we send space probes to foreign planets and use them to see what is happening there?
The truth is, interstellar travel and exploration is technically possible. There is no such law of physics that would directly forbid this. But this does not mean that humanity will soon invent such technologies. Interstellar travel is a real headache, and in our century people will definitely not fly to colonize other stars. But there is some good news - we have already reached the status of interstellar exploration. Several spacecraft are moving to the edge of the solar system, and once they leave it will never return. NASA's Voyager, Pioneer, and New Horizons missions have begun their long journey outward.
Agree, it sounds great: we have interstellar space probes that work. But the problem is that they are in no hurry. Each of these fearless interstellar explorers travels at tens of thousands of kilometers per hour. They are not moving in the direction of any particular star, because their missions were designed to explore planets within the solar system. But if any of these spacecraft were heading for our closest neighbor, Proxima Centauri, which is only 4 light years from Earth, they would reach it in about 80,000 years.
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All this is very cool, but NASA's budget is unlikely to be designed for such a timeframe. Plus, by the time the probes reach something interesting, their instruments will stop working and end up just flying through the void. In fact, this is a kind of success: the ancestors of man did not look like children capable of launching robotic vehicles into space with gold plates on board.
Speed matters
To make interstellar travel more "intelligent", the probe must move very quickly. About one-tenth the speed of light. At this speed, a spacecraft can reach Proxima Centauri in a few decades, and in a few years send images back - all within the confines of human life. Is it so foolish to want the same person who started the mission to complete it?
But driving at these speeds requires a tremendous amount of energy. One option is to keep this energy on board the spacecraft as fuel. But if so, then the extra fuel adds mass, making it even more difficult to accelerate to the desired speeds. There are designs and sketches of atomic spacecraft that try to achieve exactly this, but if we don't want to start building thousands and thousands of nuclear bombs just to fit them into a rocket, we need to come up with something else.
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Perhaps one of the most promising ideas is to keep the spacecraft's energy source stationary and somehow transport that energy to the spacecraft as it travels, Discover writes. One way to do this is with lasers. Radiation transfers energy well from one place to another, especially over vast distances in space. The spacecraft can then capture this energy and move forward.
But when it comes to getting the spacecraft to move at the required speed, the 100 gigawatt laser itself is orders of magnitude more powerful than any laser we've ever designed. And a spacecraft, whose mass should not exceed the mass of a paper clip, must include a camera, a computer, a power source, a circuit, a shell, an antenna for communication with the house, and a perfectly reflecting light sail. The real journey begins after accelerating to one-tenth the speed of light. For 40 years, this small spacecraft will have to withstand all the tests of interstellar space. And although such technologies today seem to be something from the category of science fiction, there is no such law of physics that would forbid its existence. The question is: are we willing to spend enough money to find out if such a ship can be built?