Questions tagged [space-travel]
For questions about the process of traveling through space, including in orbit around a planet or moon. Consider also [spaceships]. See also the tag information (click "info") for more details on when this tag applies.
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Could a self-consuming rocket be useful or cheaper than regular ones?
Technically speaking, all rockets are self-consuming, since they are basically tin cans with fuel. And to carry even less weight with then, they have stages. Allowing not only the rocket to go farther,...
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Moving galaxies to prevent them from passing the cosmic light horizon
Humans have become the leader of the Virgo Cluster faction, 800 billion years in the future. Our enemy factions are, the Fornax, Centaurus, and the Coma clusters, as well as a few dozen lesser ...
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Kessler Syndrome, but with extremely small particles
Congratulations! You're the new leader of the future UN(Unified Earth Country governing body), and you want to push for space travel for all. But at this point(in the futures), centuries of space ...
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Would the crew of a generation spaceship obey population control for a century? [closed]
I'll try to keep this concise and focused on the question at hand.
A generation spaceship leaves Earth around the year 2060 on a journey to Alpha Centauri A. Thanks to fusion power and other new tech ...
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Navigation in space
I'm trying to write a science fiction YA novel which takes place in a world with FTL travel like in star wars and star trek. One problem I've been thinking about is how a spaceship would navigate in ...
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Does the sun provide enough energy to accelerate a large ship to a decent proportion of the speed of light?
This came up when running some numbers on the hard science possibilities of interstellar colonization and I mostly want to know whether I made some major errors and am off by a few orders of magnitude ...
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Would an Antimatter Engine be dangerous to use around people?
I was considering having the spacecraft in my setting use antimatter-matter spacecraft, but then I realised that at least some of the annihilation of protons and electrons with antiprotons and ...
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Deflecting an incoming star, railgun style
A friend of mine, ɹɐqooɟ, lives in a large globular cluster where stellar encounters and collisions are very common. His civilization is a Type 1.8 civilization, having built half of a Dyson Sphere ...
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How would humanity uplift an intelligent ice moon species?
Now in a previous question I tried to figure out what would a realistic response to humanity learning that we are unequivocally alone in the universe, (check it out here, How would humanity react to ...
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How can you create non-centripetal artificial gravity and apply it to propel a spacecraft by riding the gravitational space time warp?
I like the idea that it is possible to use the warping of spacetime as a propelling force to move spacecraft through an independent non-centripetal artificial gravity drive.
This drive uses the ...
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How would you have a space ship set out on a journey to a distant planet, but find themselves arriving back home without realising it?
I've been thinking of doing a kinda riff on Planet of the Apes, where a space faring civilization sets out to colonize the stars only for one of the ships to wind up back on the home planet.
I like ...
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Orientation of a cylindrical habitat/ship in transit
Assume you have an inhabited O'Neill or McKendree-style cylindrical habitat or ship designed to move between star systems—not unlike Rama. What are the major advantages and disadvantages of ...
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Crew member overboard! Interstellar Space Edition [closed]
I am just curious what would happen to those poor souls whom are thrown overboard while the spaceship which is enveloped in a warp bubble, does the bubble acts like a firewall similar to the black ...
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Would coating a space ship in liquid nitrogen mask its thermal signature?
One of the biggest problems with stealth in space is heat.
My idea was to have a gap between hulls filled with a liquid similar to liquid nitrogen which would chill the outer hull and electric ...
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How to stop serial killers in space? [duplicate]
So I was writing a scene where some charters space a dude and then edit the camera footage to make it look like a suicide. That’s when I realized I had an issue. With good editing software and a “...
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Ways in which a 20th century tech-level society could detect an interstellar society: is it possible?
A wealthy, 22nd century trillionaire, for whatever reason, builds an EIS (Embryonic Interstellar-Ship). He sends a ship with frozen human embryos, and an AI system to grow and educate them, to a ...
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How long would it take for a starship to escape from near the event horizon of a black hole?
An automated Spamazon delivery starship suffers a catastrophic system failure and finds itself hurtling towards a black hole on a direct collision course. In particularly dramatic fashion, it manages ...
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Black Hole for ship artificial gravity?
So in my universe ship use thrust or spin to create gravity. But what if I could “contain” (assume I can contain it) a black hole to use it for gravity. This way ships can drift and still have gravity....
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Simulated warship quarters?
This universe is 500 to 700 years in the future. Navy vessels are a kilometer long cylinder with rotating hab rings. The main cylinder is basically a railgun, reactors and a bunch a nuclear missiles. ...
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How to regulate or control an intergalactic highway?
Background:
This universe is set 500 to 700 years in the future. Humans have been able to expand across the galaxy using a series of “star gates”, basically 5 mile wide rings that warp space to ...
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Dropping into a new star system: how would you set up a frame of navigational references for use at planetary distances?
My question arises from how to treat navigation within an unknown star system, based on what is in that star system. System North and South can be easy to determine - just observe the directions in ...
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Used Space Ark Purposes
So we have a space-saving species that build an space ark to survive a cataclysmic event on their homeworld and save their species. They have successfully terraformed the new target planet but now ...
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Could baby superman or Supergirl land on Earth today in their spaceship and not be detected before arriving on Earth?
In EVERY Superman origin story, we see always see the same thing with Superman and later his cousin arriving on earth in their auto piloted ship.
Their spaceship is then found either by a loving ...
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How would you arrange wormholes throughout the galaxy so that they don't violate the Chronology protection conjecture?
Any form of FTL, including traversable wormholes, allows backwards time travel. (EDIT: I mean going backwards in coordinate time. We get to closed timelike curves later in the post.) My world has ...
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What would a prison on a space station or huge ship in Lower Earth Orbit be Called? [closed]
What would the proper term be for the Brig/Prison/Jail where someone gets thrown for a crime on a giant space station or ship? Any idea what the interrogation room for such a ship would be called (if ...
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Cockpit or Bridge?
Would a mid-sized transport spaceship (able to carry up to two hundred people, including crew and a fair amount of supplies - enough to survive in space for up to a couple of weeks, if need be) have a ...
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Would a Micro Black Hole locked in Mirror Storage have a felt weight?
I understand that Black Holes, even the small ones, are very dense and heavy. Even a micro black hole will probably weigh as much as a skyscraper, a few million tonnes.
I then saw a starship ...
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Disadvantages to Liquid Breathing Space Fighter Pilots
The setting: 27th Century Alpha Centauri system
From everything I have seen, it is generally accepted that future space combat might not do very well with individual fighter-craft (similar to a modern ...
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Would high-g travel require medical assistance?
I was reading about the "Osteo-X" and "the juice" from The Expanse series, and it got me wondering about my own setting. Would transportation services, say, from the moon and back, ...
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Allowing "drop of the hat" spacewalks?
In real life, astronauts spend upwards of a day preparing for spacewalks, mainly acclimating to the lower pressure in their suits and adjusting to breathing pure oxygen. If they don't do this, and ...
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How might a pre-modern civilization make it to the "Moon"?
Backstory
There is a double planet system. Both planets are habitable. One planet has humans and the other one animals. So instead of seeing a grey Moon in the sky, the humans living on the first ...
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Is there a semi-dense deuterium state?
Deuterium as Fusion Fuel
For a future fusion thruster I was going to use a deuterium fusion drive similar to the Epstein drive from the Expanse. I've looked into the fuel sources online as well as ...
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After the aliens had established first contact, where would it be most rational to put their embassy on Earth? [closed]
Considering a scenario set in a relatively realistic space opera (Something Mass Effect'esque) where aliens had come to our planet at our current level of development, accepted us in some galactic ...
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Is my fusion thermal drive theoretically possible?
I'm designing what I call a "fusion thermal drive" for my world.
Characteristics
The drive's purpose is brachistochrone-based intra-system travel.
The maximum specific impulse of about 16 ...
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Time needed to travel to Proxima Centauri in 2050 and technology behind [closed]
Given:
current (2020 year) knowledge and science status of human-kind and
that human-kind and human science development will occur in exactly the same way as it did so far,
how long will a ship ...
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How could the crew on a small spacecraft (6 people) on an isolated long (10yr) mission remain productive and harmonious?
Near future, Earth is starting to die, we send out dozens of small spacecraft to investigate promising exo-planets for habitability among neighbouring star systems:
AI isn't smart enough to do the ...
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Ability of frozen embryos to withstand many Gs, and the cosmological event horizon for a laser-powered sail ship?
I'm writing a book about a civilization started by humans who sent a laser-powered sail ship with AIs and frozen embryos to the edge of the cosmological event horizon (the furthest we can travel ...
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Allow interstellar travel but not intergalactic travel
I would like a technology which makes interstellar travel possible but not intergalactic travel. I came up with a rift field which compresses space-time proportional to field density. This rift field ...
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Proper combat distance scaling for a sci-fi space opera tabletop setting
I'm making a completely homemade tabletop system with the intent of generating a hardish scifi, more sim-like experience for my friends. I've settled on no FTL and all space battles would be ...
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Planet unhabitable by certain demographic [closed]
Space explorers with same tech level as in alien franchise found a planet. Planet had some carbon based, earth-like flora and fauna on it, but it still needed some additional touches, not a full blown ...
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Are purely electromagnetic propulsion systems feasible at all?
It seems that one of the main hurdles of creating an interstellar propulsion system is the need to carry reaction mass to accelerate while conserving momentum. Pretty much every "fringe science&...
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What features should my space-adapted cyborg have? [closed]
It's the far future: Thousands of planets and solar systems are colonized, some flavor of FTL travel works fine, and there are even nifty things like "inertial dampeners" and "...
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Could you actually make a green space program?
Is it plausible to build and maintain a space program without adding to climate change?
While obviously there are larger problems in the near term with respect to climate change, I'm thinking about a ...
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Effect of opening up a hyperspace portal on a planet surface? [closed]
Let's say we know how to enter hyperspace. Someone decides it's a good idea to open a "portal" into hyperspace on the planet surface. (I'm assuming this would take a fair amount of energy?)
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Is a Solar Jet possible?
A "Solar Jet" in my imagination would be a thruster that collects solar wind with magnetic fields, charges the particles, then expels those charged particles through a nozzle. It could be ...
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The most efficient spaceport
In my works of worldbuiling I have constantly come across the problem, How to depict and create the most efficient spaceport possible for an interstellar, super advanced, space fairing species. ...
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Backyard Planetary Escape: From the Earth to the Moon, the Jeb Kerman way [closed]
A pair of aerospace engineers discovers that the New World Order wants to depopulate Earth by means of starting a nuclear war on the 1st of January of [Enter number between 2025 and 2040]. The elite ...
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Metallic Hydrogen vs. Nuclear Thermal Propulsion [closed]
I'm trying to design a spacecraft (only 100-150 years in the future) that will carry a crew of astronauts (probably ≤10) on an extended mission through interstellar space (they have some sort of hand-...
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What sort of protection could Interstellar spacecrafts use?
Of course, there are a lot of different kinds of ITV's (Interstellar Transport Vehicles). Some only fly at 0.05c and some quiet a lot faster.
Today, I would like to ask what kind of Protection against ...
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How to set a law allowing space explorers to collect keepsakes
I'm in the early stages of thinking up a space science fiction story about a particular group of scientists and young explorers on mission to investigate some points of interest in the galaxy. Their ...
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