• Question: How long would it take for the latest rocket to reach the nearest star

    Asked by 13marbles to Adam, Chris, Eleanor, Jessamyn, Sinead on 11 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Christian Wirtz

      Christian Wirtz answered on 11 Nov 2013:

      The nearest star is our sun, which is on average about 150 million kilometres away.
      A lot of rockets are not built for speed but efficiency. If you only have to fly the 390 km to the international space station it doesn’t matter too much if it takes one or two hours but if you can save a lot of fuel and money you’ll go with the slower version so the latest rocket may actually not be the fastest!
      If we go by the speed of the Galileo satellite which was sent to Jupiter and traveled with 173770 km/h it would only take 863 hours (36 days) to get to the sun.

      Assuming that you meant the nearest star that’s not the sun, which is proxima centauri and 4.24 light years away from us, it will take a good bit longer. 6214 years to be precise. A bit too long for you and me to still be around I’m afraid…

    • Photo: Eleanor Holmes

      Eleanor Holmes answered on 11 Nov 2013:

      I am doing what, in science, is called a “Back of the envelope” calculation on this. I’ll show my work.

      The nearest star to us is…The Sun! 8 light minutes (or 149,600,000 km) away. But for fun we can also do the next nearest star Proxima Centauri, 4.24 light years away.

      Wikipedia tells me that the fastest, manned rocket can go 40,000 km/h. So at that speed it would take 3740 hours or 155.8 days to reach the Sun.

      Proxima Centauri is 1,041,844,320 hours (~120,000 years) away for a manned rocket.

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