freeenergy4everyone

The problem of traveling to the stars must also be viewed from an entirely different perspective than is useful for understanding our recent flights to the moon and flights of instrument packages to other planets. Distances within the solar system can be measured in light-seconds, light-minutes, or at most in a few light-hours. Stars are at least several light-years away. Our chemical rockets carry astronauts to the moon in about sixty-nine hours, and the Viking spacecraft to Mars took about ten months to reach its destination. But they are propelled by forces other than gravity for only seventeen minutes or one hour respectively. The rockets are coasting and slowing down until they are close to the target for almost the...