“The 100-year ship would leave Earth with the intention of colonizing a planet, but it would likely be a one-way trip because of the time it takes to travel 35 million miles.”
Um, at only 1,000 mph, you can go 876,000,000 miles in 100 years. Wow “journalists” suck at math. Or at English. Or both.
Now, at “space shuttle” speed of about 17,500 mph, you’d go 15,330,000,000 miles in 100 years, or about 0.26% of a light year. The closest star is about 4 light years away, and the closest known exoplanet is about 10.5 light years away. Even ion engines used on exploratory satellites aren’t nearly fast enough to reach those, so yeah, they definitely need a faster engine than existing ones.
PS Incidentally, at “space shuttle” speed, you could reach Mars in about 5 months if you timed the launch properly with respect to the Earth’s and Mar’s orbits. Of course, the shuttle isn’t designed for that kind of trip.
Just stop there and cover all the bases.
/johnny
There is one contmeplated means of traveling between the stars that might work at present. Using a pusher plate secured to the rear of the ship you drop nuclear warheads out the back and set them off at say several minute intervals. Theoretically you could reach about 10% of the speed of light. Of course radiation is a problem and shockwave absorption.
There was a pilot for a new TV series, that didn’t get picked up a while back in 2008 maybe, where they used this type of propulsion after they had started to leave the solar system.
On a pop culture aside, I would like to see a scifi series based on near future technology. A generational ship to a distant star system, where the ship carried a small cities worth of people and stories revolved around human interaction in such a circumstance. Say a five season arch with multiple generations of characters. Please no lame excuses for leaving like global warming, the suns to hot, pollution!!! How about mankind wants to explore and colonize the universe, for adventure and profit like Christopher Columbus, Megellan.