Interstellar Travel - Methods For Slow Manned Missions

Methods For Slow Manned Missions

Slow interstellar travel designs such as Project Longshot generally use near-future propulsion technologies. As a result, voyages are extremely long and risky, starting from about one hundred years and reaching to thousands of years. Crewed voyages (speculative) might be one-way trips to set up colonies.

Nevertheless, serious if preliminary discussions are taking root for the ~100 year time scale, with trials of the MMSEV/Nautilus-X concept preliminary to asteroid exploration in preparation.

The duration of a slow interstellar journey presents a major obstacle. The following are some proposed solutions:

Read more about this topic:  Interstellar Travel

Famous quotes containing the words methods, slow and/or missions:

    Parents ought, through their own behavior and the values by which they live, to provide direction for their children. But they need to rid themselves of the idea that there are surefire methods which, when well applied, will produce certain predictable results. Whatever we do with and for our children ought to flow from our understanding of and our feelings for the particular situation and the relation we wish to exist between us and our child.
    Bruno Bettelheim (20th century)

    I thank you for your letter. I was very glad to get it; and I am glad again to write to you. However slow the steamer, no time intervenes between the writing and the reading of thoughts, but they come freshly to the most distant port.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind.... Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to.
    Joseph Heller (b. 1923)