Quote:
Originally Posted by Jay-qu
No need to wait for FTL drives Renormalised, we just need to hit 1g sustained acceleration.
By my calculations, a trip to Gliese 581 (20light years) should take ~5 years (due to relativistic time dilation), though in Earth time it would be more like ~22 years. So a round trip, while only taking 10 years (+time to explore) will return you 44 years after you left..
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can I just back up a few paces here - how fast would you be going if you accelerated at 1g for 5 years (or is that 22 years?)? And how the hell do you slow yourself from this velocity to a safe landing velocity?
I think you might make a good projectile like the one that kicked up all that water on the moon! At least the resulting spray might give us some good data about the composition of the planet - although you would have to make allowances for the organic matter of the unlucky astronauts.....
Seriously though - there seems to be a lot of thought given to acheiving a high velocity to shorten the trip, but little consideration of how to stop at the other end. What are the options for slowing a spacecraft?
Adam