A Sober Look at Space Travel

Here is an article in the NY Times by Seth Shostak on the foreseeable future for space travel. The news is not good for human touring, but Shostak is upbeat about telepresence. The key bits:

The fastest rocket ever launched, NASA’s New Horizons probe to Pluto, roared off its pad in 2006 at 10 miles per second. That pace would be impressive in the morning commute, and it’s passably adequate for traversing the solar system, something we’ve done and will continue to do. Combustion rockets, like New Horizons, can deliver you to the Moon in a matter of days, Mars in a matter of months, and the outer planets in a matter of years. But a trip to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star beyond the Sun and 100 million times farther from us than the Moon, would consume a tedious 800 centuries or so. You’ll want to upgrade.

...

The energy required to reach even the nearest stars in a decade or less with a very modest-size starship (say, the tonnage of the 17th-century Mayflower) equals the total energy consumed in the United States last year. At 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, that’s a fuel bill of $5 trillion.

...

But there’s another technology that’s developing at a breakneck clip, and with which our grandchildren could make virtual trips to other solar systems. It’s called telepresence — a collection of technologies that extends vision, hearing and touch far beyond the corporeal confines of our nervous system.