by Aldrin A Wilding-West

Created on: February 10, 2010   Last Updated: February 13, 2010

Deep Space Exploration – The Reality So Far

Remember the heady days of space exploration?  The Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions, Sputnik and Soyuz, Viking landers on Mars, Voyager and Pioneer missions looking at the furthest reaches of our Solar System?..........Where are they now?

Well, if truth be known, they’re not actually all that far away from us even now, not in terms of interstellar travel, travel between the stars, and as for reaching other stars or other galaxies......not in your or my lifetimes I’m afraid, unless substantially faster forms of propulsion can be found, perfected and made a reality.

We can’t take anything away from those pioneering engineers, astrophysicists, astronomers and astronauts that have put us where we are today though.  The obstacles in the way of these thinkers and explorers did and still do test us to the limits of our minds and bodies, yet the still almost incomprehensible size of the universe itself, and the questions it asks still call to us on a very deep level.

For now though, to put things in perspective, it's important to look at just what we've achieved to date in terms of actually exploring space.  Let’s take a look at the manmade object that has travelled further from our tiny planet than any other.

Made even more famous to sci-fi fans by its appearance as an intelligent entity in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, having been drawn into a wormhole, meeting an intelligent machine race and then seeking its creator, the truth behind Voyager 1 is a little less dramatic.  Even now, it is only actually around 112 AU’s or Astronomical Units away from the Earth.

An Astronomical Unit is the name given to the mean distance between the Earth and the Sun, and is used in solar system astronomy because it is a relatively easy to comprehend unit.  An astronomical unit (AU) is equivalent to 93 million miles or 149 million kilometres.

So Voyager 1, launched 32 years ago on September 5th 1977 is 112 AU away from Earth now, and heading out of our solar system at a very approximate speed of around 3.5 AU per year.

Let’s take a look at where Voyager might actually be, for instance in the year 2277, 300 years after launch, and at the roundabout time when Star Trek was actually set.  At 3.5 AU per year, that’s 1,050 AU away in 2277.  I hate to put a dampener on Gene Roddenberry  and crew’s wishful thinking, but consider if you will that this is not even 1 percent of the distance required to fully escape the gravitational influence of our sun.

If Voyager were pointed in the right direction and wanted to reach our nearest neighbouring star, Proxima Centauri, it would take it, even at these speeds, around 76,000 years.

Voyager of course was unmanned too.  The furthest a human being has been from our planet is the other side of the moon (in orbit during the Apollo missions).  He would have to travel 371 times further to complete 1 AU.  Kind of puts things into perspective a little.

You’ll see that if we’re ever going to truly explore interstellar space, or planets orbiting other stars, we’re going to have to come up with something approaching FTL (Faster Than Light) travel if we’re ever to accomplish it.

In reality, at least for now, we seem bound to our own solar system and exploring and maybe colonizing the satellites and planets that are within our reach......

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