I think that we have all heard the term 'speed kills'. This is true when it come to driving too fast, or boating too fast, but it is not true when it comes to flying in space. As a matter of fact the opposite is true, 'slowness kills'. In order to reach even the nearest star system from our own, you need speed and lots of it. I mean, who wants to spend their entire lives in a spaceship trying to get somewhere? This is the scenario that we face today. Even if we could build a ship that would fly flawlessly for 70 or 80 years one way, the passengers would have been long dead from the radiation in space, before they ever reached their target. So, as I see it, we have 2 great problems with space travel:
1. Speed
2, Radiation in space
Is there any kind of answer to the speed problem and are space ships and probes getting any faster? Lets take a quick look at some of the space speed records. The fastest vehicle ever, was Helios 2. It was in orbit around our Sun and attained the speed of 241,350 km/h. This is roughly 150,000 mph. That means that it was able to travel about 2,500 miles a minute or 41.6 miles in a second. When we think about this using an Earthly scale it seems fantastic, but there are a couple of things to remember:
1. It did this while in an orbit around the Sun.
2. It didn't attain this speed because of propulsion.
The trip around the sun attained this speed because of a sort of sling shot effect. The fastest object to fly by a planet was the old Pioneer 11. It hit a speed of 173,000 km/h or about 107,500 mph.

The actual fastest speed for an object under its own power was made by Voyager 1. It hit an escape velocity of 62,100 km or about 38,600 mph. Think about this for a second. At its closest point Mars is about 128,402,967 miles and and it farthest distance from Earth is about 154,863,553 miles away. If we could fly there in a straight line and we can't, when it is closest to us and travel at the velocity of 38,600 mph, it would take about 139 days to reach it. This figure is far short of the real time, since you would have to allow for deviations in the path. Remember that the planets are always moving and you have to plot a course to WHERE IT WILL BE, when you get there. Since Mars is the second nearest planet to Earth, this speed is really unacceptable. How could we ever get to even the outer planets in a reasonable time at such a slow speed? We might reach them eventually, but it would take a good portion of years to do so.

Helios 2

When we think about a way to fly into space with our current technology, we have to think about fuel of some sort. All fuel adds weight to our vehicle and takes up space. Much of it has to be used to escape from the Earth's gravity. Of course I said that we are thinking using current technology as a basis for our decisions. What if there were other technologies available, technologies that we hardly ever hear about? One of these technologies called for building a ship that had the capability to refuel while traveling. It scooped in atoms of hydrogen that the scientists said existed even in space. They claimed that this ship would be able to attain the speed of 1/10 that of light. Light travels at about 186,000 miles per second. This means that our ship would be able to reach 18,600 miles per second, 1,116,000 miles per minuet and 66,960,000 per hour. This is a much more realistic speed and even this is not enough for traveling through the galaxy, let alone exploring other ones. I am not going to go into the engines or other propulsion systems of space vehicles here, only a simplified explanation will be seen, because we are talking about speed not how things work. If we had a ship of this kind we could reach Neptune, which has a mean distance from the Sun of 2,700,000,000 miles in about 38 hours. It would actually take a little longer, but since we are traveling so fast the planets would not have moved that much, so we would also save on distance.

Another ship that had been discussed in the past ran on deuterium and hellum-3 pellets. It was a nuclear pulse rocket. Don't get me wrong here, I am not endorsing polluting space with radioactive materials, this is just an exercise. The ship was said to be able to reach 1/8 the speed of light. That is an improvement even over the ship mentioned above. It it would have lessened the time it took to reach Neptune from Earth because it would be able to travel at 83,700,000 miles per hour. We could fly to Neptune in a little over 31 hours. This seems to be more than acceptable for getting around our solar system, but what about interstellar travel, is this good enough?

When we start to figure distance to stars, using miles makes no sense, the distances are just too great, but for the sake of this article I will use miles once and that will be for calculating the nearest star to our sun. The nearest star to the sun is Proxima Centauri. You will usually see the distance listed as roughly 4.3 light years. Hey that doesn't look to bad, it is only 4.3, but wait what is a light year? A light year is approximately 2,932,848,000,000 miles. Proxima Centauri is 4.3 times that distance or 12,611,246,400,000 miles away. If we had a space ship that could reach the speed of light, it would take it 4.3 years to get there, but our ship only reaches 1/8 that speed, so it will take us about 34.5 years to get there. This still isn't an acceptable speed for interstellar travel. It is beginning to look like we need a vehicle that is capable of traveling far in excess the speed of light, but wait, Einstein said it can't happen. He said that the faster our ship goes, the more fuel it will need until it requires more matter to power it than exists in the universe. So what do we do now? I guess we could forget about interstellar travel, we could try and find a way around this, or we could try and prove Einstein wrong.

Well anyone that is interested in this stuff, has probably taken the time to read a few articles on it. If they have, they know that scientists are talking about worm holes, folding space and traveling through time. None of these things seem to violate Einstein's statement, since they are shortcuts through time and space and don't need to exceed the speed of light. In a way I think that it is a shame that Einstein said this about the speed of light, because he was such a respected individual that it may have prevented many scientists from trying to prove it wrong. One theory that I would like to discuss is harnessing radiation to power a mythical ship. There is plenty of radiation in space. What is radiation but a form of light. It travels in a magnetic wave. If someone could harness these waves, assuming that they exist in interstellar space, they might be able to travel without fuel. We know that if we had an anti gravity machine, it would allow us to travel between planets, but not in deep space. If these waves exist in deep space, it might solve our problem. I am not saying that this would allow us to travel faster than light, I am saying that it might solve the fuel problem and who knows how fast we might go, if we figure out a way to accelerate them?

There is no doubt about it, we need speed if we are ever going to get into interstellar space. Somehow we must ultimately be able to travel millions of times the speed of light. We are making progress with things like the ion engine, but we are still in primitive times, as far as space travel. If we could have only put a fraction of the money that we spend in the military budget into a real development program for a realistic propulsion system to take us to the stars, we would probably have one already. Look at it this way, we have devices that accelerate our internet connection, lenses that triple the power of whatever the system sees, but nothing to increase the power of the space systems we already have. Every avenue should be considered in the need for speed. Lets hope that the next president puts an end to some of the waste in the military and increases funding for space exploration and doesn't just give it lip service by saying that certain things will happen over 10 years down the road, long after he is gone.Talk is cheap.

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