Challenges of space travel
Space travel is not as easy as it is often portrayed in science fiction movies. The main challenge is the huge distances between objects in space.
The scale and size of the distances between stars can be difficult to comprehend.
Travel to a nearby planet such as Mars would take a couple of years and even then only when the planets鈥 orbits are in alignment.
If we take the distance between the sun and Earth as one Astronomical Unit (called one AU), then the most distant man-made object, the Voyager 1 satellite, was 149 AU away in 2022. The nearest star outside our solar system is 268,770 AU away, which would take Voyager 1 over 40,000 years to reach. With these vast distances and the time involved, manned space travel to other stars seems unlikely with our current technology.
Watch the video below to see how our current space ships developed over time.
How space travel has changed through the years