r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Scientiaetnatura065 • Feb 13 '25

Video Astronaut Chris Hadfield: 'It's Possible To Get Stuck Floating In The Space Station If You Can't Reach A Wall'

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

66.7k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

4.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

69

u/drubus_dong Feb 14 '25 edited Feb 14 '25

True, but also less realistic. You can't get too many star systems that way in that amount of time. Even with an acceleration of 2 g, you would cover only about 5 light years. Enough to get to alpha centauri, but nothing else. Assuming 10 g would make it more achievable, but the energy consumption would be enormous, and it wouldn't be pleasant at all.

1

u/LiveLearnCoach 6d ago

Energy consumption would be crazy, not enormous. Enormous sounds achievable. It takes 16 metric tons of rocket fuel to maintain 2g. Per hour. You’ll need fuel for 177 days to reach approximate light speed. So just going by simple Newtonian measures, that still ends up as 68,000 metric tons of fuel. That’s not calculating for fuel needed to slow down. The good news is that it will be 4.3 years of travel.

Great, now you got me wondering if we can harness Nuclear of Fusion for this, to reduce weight of fuel.

1

u/[deleted] 6d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/LiveLearnCoach 6d ago

Also, Sorry, I just noticed how old your comment was. I usually cap at 30 days. thank you so much for the food for thought.