![]() A few spacecraft have used solar sails to show that they work, and scientists think that a solar sail could propel spacecraft to 10 percent of the speed of light. These are large, thin sheets of plastic attached to a spacecraft and designed so that sunlight can push on them, like the wind in a normal sail. One promising way to get something moving very fast is to use a solar sail. Scientists are researching many other ways to go fast - even warp drives, the faster-than-light travel popularized by Star Trek. Nuclear fusion, the process that powers the Sun, is also much more efficient than chemical fuel. Other methods for pushing a spacecraft involve using electric or magnetic forces. The problem is that burning fuel is very inefficient. All rockets, even the sleek new rockets used by SpaceX and Blue Origins, burn rocket fuel that isn’t very different from gasoline in a car. Yes! But engineers need to figure out new ways to make things move in space. Could humans make something go even faster? It’s possible to get something to 1 percent the speed of light, but it would just take an enormous amount of energy. Photon Illustration/Stocktrek Images/Stocktrek Images/Getty Images How fast can we go? Light sails like these seen in an illustration could get us to the stars. That’s roughly the same amount of energy that 2 million people in the U.S. Making something go three times as fast requires nine times the energy, and so on.įor example, to get a teenager who weighs 110 pounds to 1 percent of the speed of light would cost 200 trillion Joules (a measurement of energy). To make something go twice as fast takes four times the energy. The problem is that it takes a lot of kinetic energy to increase speed. To go faster, you need to increase kinetic energy. Any object that’s moving has energy due to its motion. What’s holding humanity back from reaching 1 percent of the speed of light? In a word, energy. Why even 1 percent of light speed is hard That’s blindingly fast - yet only 0.05% of the speed of light. After it launched from Earth in 2018, it skimmed the Sun’s scorching atmosphere and used the Sun’s gravity to reach 330,000 mph. The spacecraft that is traveling the fastest is NASA’s Parker Solar Probe. They use rockets to break free of the Earth’s gravity, which takes a speed of 25,000 mph. The fastest human-made objects are spacecraft. That sounds impressive, but it’s still only 0.001 percent the speed of light. The fastest aircraft is NASA’s X3 jet plane, with a top speed of 7,000 mph. ![]() NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben What is the fastest man-made objectīullets can go 2,600 miles per hour (mph), more than three times the speed of sound. Symbols, abbreviations, or full names for units of length,Īrea, mass, pressure, and other types.The Parker Solar Probe, seen here in an artist’s rendition, is the fastest object ever made by humans and used the gravity of the Sun to get going 0.05% the speed of light. You can find metric conversion tables for SI units, as wellĪs English units, currency, and other data. It is commonly abbreviated in everyday use in the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere to mph or MPH, although mi/h is sometimes used in technical publications.Ĭonversion calculator for all types of measurement units. Miles per hour is a unit of speed, expressing the number of international miles covered per hour. Speed of sound to mph, or enter any two units below: Enter two units to convert From: You can do the reverse unit conversion from
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