Is space travel a reality?

Space travel is no longer an unreal phenomenon that could only occur in science fiction movies. Now that space tourism is a reality, will civilians travel to space and when? This summer, billionaires Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson each made a sub-orbital flight on their respective supersonic rockets, starting a new era of space travel, in which anyone who can afford it can get a ticket to space.

Is space travel a reality?

Space travel is no longer an unreal phenomenon that could only occur in science fiction movies. Now that space tourism is a reality, will civilians travel to space and when? This summer, billionaires Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson each made a sub-orbital flight on their respective supersonic rockets, starting a new era of space travel, in which anyone who can afford it can get a ticket to space. Regardless of how it is achieved, a propulsion system that can produce continuous acceleration from departure to arrival would be the fastest method of travel. Light in a vacuum travels about 300,000 kilometers (186,000 miles) per second, so 1 light-year is equivalent to about 9,461 × 1012 kilometers (5,879 trillion miles) or 63,241 AU.

While these requirements are still well below the requirements for interstellar travel on human timescales, the study seems to represent a reasonable reference point with respect to what could be achieved within several decades, which is not impossible to overcome the current state of current technology. More recently, companies such as Japan's Shimizu Corporation have focused on designing an orbital hotel in space, with rotating rings to provide artificial gravity. Therefore, the distances between stars are usually expressed in light years (defined as the distance that light travels in a vacuum in a Julian year) or in parsecs (a parsec is equivalent to 3.26 ly, the distance at which the stellar parallax is exactly one second of an arc, hence the name). Majd Mayyasi (GRS'09, '1), senior researcher at the Center for Space Physics at the University of California, discusses the future of civil space travel and its impact on the study of space with Doug Most, editor of BU Today.

Since particles that travel at these speeds acquire more mass, it is believed that this change in mass could generate an acceleration. Many different spacecraft propulsion systems have been proposed to give spacecraft the required speeds, including nuclear propulsion, beam-propelled propulsion, and methods based on speculative physics. However, they won't approach another star for hundreds of thousands of years, long after they've stopped working (although in theory the Voyager Golden Disc could be reproduced in the unlikely event that the spaceship were recovered by an alien civilization). The speed of a manned round trip over a few decades, even to the nearest star, is several thousand times greater than that of current space vehicles.

Bussard proposed the Ramjet Bussard, a fusion rocket in which a huge spoon would collect diffuse hydrogen from interstellar space, burn it on the fly through a proton-proton chain reaction and eject it from the rear. The crew of an interstellar ship would face several major hazards, including the psychological effects of prolonged isolation, the physiological effects of extreme acceleration (if it exceeds 1 g of acceleration), the effects of exposure to ionizing radiation from space and possibly from the ship's engines, and the physiological effects of weightlessness on muscles, joints, bones, the immune system and the eyes. DeMicco and Silvia Ciccarelli, a geoeconomist who was recently a visiting fellow at UD, jointly wrote “Outer space as a new frontier for hospitality and tourism”, which will soon be published in an issue of Hospitality Educator. We had to experience three times the force of gravity when we fell, which is what people would experience when going to space and flying sub-orbital with the Virgin Galactic module.

And what's most interesting, I think it was very convenient to be able to have the opportunity to go to space. An elevator that soars tens of thousands of miles into space is a possibility that scientists and businessmen are considering. .

Nadine Hassler
Nadine Hassler

Award-winning troublemaker. Devoted internet maven. Friendly pop culture guru. Extreme travel buff. Friendly food aficionado. Freelance travel expert.

Leave Message

Required fields are marked *