How fast do space vehicles travel

Once at a steady cruising speed of about 16,mph 26,kph in orbit, astronauts no more feel their speed than do passengers on a commercial airplane. The Orion spaceship has to have shielding a foot thick in places because of the danger of minimeteorids Credit: Nasa. To protect the vessel and its crew, Orion has a protective outer layer varying in places from 18 to 30cm thick, plus other shielding and clever equipment placement.

To be sure, micrometeoroids are not the only hindrance to future space missions where higher human travel speeds would likely come into play.

Shortening travel times, though, would mitigate these issues, making a go-faster approach very desirable. This need for speed will pose fresh obstacles. But such systems have severe speed limitations because of the low amounts of energy they release per unit of fuel.

So, in order to achieve significantly faster travel speeds for humans bound for Mars and beyond, scientists recognise that new approaches will be required. In brief, they are the energy-releasing phenomena of fission, fusion and antimatter annihilation.

The first method is the splitting of atoms, as is done in commercial nuclear reactors. The far-and-away best case for powering fast spacecraft is antimatter, the doppelganger to regular matter. When the two matters make contact, they obliterate each other as pure energy. Technologies to generate and store admittedly minuscule quantities of antimatter exist today.

Yet production of antimatter in useful amounts would need dedicated, next-generation facilities, and engineering challenges galore would loom for the intended spacecraft. But Davis says plenty of good ideas are on the drawing board. With antimatter-fuelled engines, spacecraft could accelerate over periods of months or years to very high percentages of the speed of light, keeping Gs to a tolerable level for occupants.

These fantastic new speeds, however, would usher in fresh dangers for the human body. He worked with his late father, William Edelstein, a professor of radiology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, on a paper exploring the effects of cosmic hydrogen atoms on ultrafast spaceflight. The hydrogen would shatter into subatomic particles that would pass into the ship, irradiating both crew and equipment.

He and his father roughly estimated that barring some sort of conjectural magnetic shielding to divert the lethal hydrogen rain, star ships could go no faster than about half of light speed without killing their human occupants. Assuming we do learn to swim, so to speak, might we also someday learn how to surf spacetime, to extend the analogy, and travel at faster-than-light superluminal speeds?

The Apollo 10 astronauts are probably the fastest humans in history - but for how long? Called an Alcubierre drive, it involves compressing the normal spacetime described by Einsteinian physics in front of a star ship, while expanding it behind. The ship, however, remains at rest within its pocket of normal spacetime, avoiding any violation of the universal light-speed limit.

The exact speed depends on the Shuttles orbital altitude, which normally ranges from miles to miles kilometers to kilometers above sea level, depending on its mission. Each of the two solid rocket boosters on the Shuttle carries more than one million pounds of solid propellant. The Shuttles large external tank is loaded with more than , gallons of supercold liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, which are mixed and burned together to form the fuel for the Shuttles three main rocket engines.

Is the flag still on the Moon? Although not visible to the naked eye from Earth, the American flag is still on the Moon. What is a launch window? A launch window is the precise period of time, ranging from minutes to hours, within which a launch must occur for a rocket or Space Shuttle to be positioned in the proper orbit. Sometimes, this window is determined by the passing of an orbiting spacecraft with which the Shuttle must rendezvous, such as the International Space Station or an ailing satellite.

At other times, the Shuttle or an unmanned rocket must be launched within a certain window so that it can release its satellite payload at the right time to place it in an orbit over a certain region of Earth.

Who was the youngest astronaut to date? Who was the oldest astronaut to fly on the Space Shuttle? How much does it cost to launch a Space Shuttle? When are we going to Mars? And when are we going back to the Moon? NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin has stated that we must accomplish at least four objectives before we are prepared for a Mars mission. We must successfully build and operate the planned International Space Station, gain working-level experience with other nations in space cooperation, develop an affordable mission scenario that can be accomplished in about one decade, and allow time for the world economy to improve substantially.

With these goals in mind, NASA currently plans to operate the Space Station for at least the first decade of the next century, sending astronauts back to the Moon or on to Mars during the second decade of the new century. This time frame could change with technological breakthroughs.

Can I apply to take a ride on the Space Shuttle? Can I be the first kid in Space? NASA has no immediate plans to send children, teenagers or any other general citizens into space.

For the near future at least, spaceflight remains too risky and too expensive for anyone but highly trained astronauts and payload specialists to take part in. However, one of our goals is to help industry develop new rocket systems that would make spaceflight much more simple and routine, so that many more people could go into orbit in the future. Is there any chance for a school to run a science experiment on the Shuttle?

What are the names of the Space Shuttle orbiters? The Enterprise was flown only within Earth's atmosphere, during Shuttle approach and landing tests conducted in Columbia flew the first five Shuttle missions, beginning in April , and was modified to fly extended duration missions as long as 16 days. Challenger was built as a vibration test vehicle and then upgraded to become the second operational Shuttle.

The Challenger and her seven-member crew were lost in a launch accident on January 28, The fastest ever spacecraft, the now- in-space Parker Solar Probe will reach a top speed of , mph. If humanity ever wants to travel easily between stars, people will need to go faster than light.

But so far, faster-than-light travel is possible only in science fiction. As a kid, I read as many of those stories as I could get my hands on. I am now a theoretical physicist and study nanotechnology, but I am still fascinated by the ways humanity could one day travel in space. Warp drives are theoretically possible if still far-fetched technology. Two recent papers made headlines in March when researchers claimed to have overcome one of the many challenges that stand between the theory of warp drives and reality.

But how do these theoretical warp drives really work? And will humans be making the jump to warp speed anytime soon? General Relativity states that space and time are fused and that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. General relativity also describes how mass and energy warp spacetime — hefty objects like stars and black holes curve spacetime around them.

Early science fiction writers John Campbell and Asimov saw this warping as a way to skirt the speed limit. What if a starship could compress space in front of it while expanding spacetime behind it? In , Miguel Alcubierre, a Mexican theoretical physicist, showed that compressing spacetime in front of the spaceship while expanding it behind was mathematically possible within the laws of General Relativity.

So, what does that mean?