Posted on 12/27/2017 3:54:49 PM PST by Simon Green
If you thought NASA was playing the long game with its plan to put people on Mars in the 2030s, you haven't seen anything yet. New Scientist has learned that a team at the administration's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has started planning a mission that would send a spacecraft to the Alpha Centauri system in... 2069. Yes, that's 52 years away, and timed around the 100th anniversary of Apollo 11's trip to the Moon. The probe would look for signs of life around the potentially habitable exoplanet Proxima b, giving humanity a much better look than it could get with observation from home.
So why the long wait? Simple: the technology to make this trip realistic doesn't exist yet. The JPL is counting on propulsion technology advancing to the point where the results would come back in time to be meaningful. When Alpha Centauri is nearly 4.4 light-years away, a ship traveling at a tenth the speed of light would take 44 years to arrive. As such, it's doubtful that you or even the next couple generations of your family would live to see the results. The probe wouldn't reach the system until around 2113, and of course the data wouldn't get back to Earth until 4.4 years later at best.
Nonetheless, it's notable that NASA even has a mission like this on its radar, assuming budget cuts and other decisions get in the way. It's starting to think about its role in the very long term, when interstellar exploration won't just be limited to telescopes. And if the time frame gets you down, take heart. Breakthrough Starshot is hoping to launch a small probe that would both depart much sooner and travel much faster, arriving as quickly as 20 years. Think of NASA's 2069 mission as a backup if Starshot doesn't work, or a follow-up that could study the star system in greater depth.
That’s where Will Robinson was heading to.
Breakthrough Starshot relies on a huge investment in ground based lasers. I do like the idea of extremely small robotic probes. However I am skeptical of their means of propulsion. By the time they could build something like this scientists would have come up with a better solution.
Total Suck.
I’ll be dead.
Please put Pelosie, Shummer, Hillary and the rest on it. Please.
NASA lies to the public for a living so I wonder what they really want to do with their time and money?
Danger, Will Robinson!
I recall the sf novel "Rocheworld" by Robert L. Forward in which the first manned starship is propelled to a quarter the speed of light using solar-powered lasers covering the surface of Mercury.
I’ll be dead by then. For sure I’ll be dead by the time the probe arrives!
The distances in the universe are mind-boggling. It is idiocy to think any type of propulsion-type spacecraft would serve any purpose. Long before anything like it would reach its destination technology would surpass it. Man, in a physical form, will never see these distance places.
Judy Robinson...the others can stay lost.
I’ll be dead.
Keith Richards will get to see it.
Maybe not, we might yet get a full repeal of Obamacare !!!
Unless Alpha Centauri is suffering from global warming as a result of light-skinned multi-ped worshippers of a universal creator who is ignoring their destruction of the Centauri climate that harms the child-bearing, youth, and life-giving fauna, who will teach our future engineers to be qualified to get there?
-PJ
But Sheila Jackson Lee will bump Keith out of a first class seat.
The first season was (relatively) serious. It only devolved into pure camp in the 2nd & 3rd seasons.
(Trivia: the guy losing his dignity in the carrot suit is actor Stanley Adams, who also portrayed conman Cyrano Jones on the Star Trek episode "The Trouble With Tribbles")
True that.
Hope he laughs at me.
True that.
Hope he laughs at me.
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