Sky rockets in flight

Relativistic Rocket

A relativistic rocket is one idea of how to archive great distances in one's lifetime without going faster than light. If someone traveled at a very fast speed, because of time dilution the time would move slower on the traveling ship and great distances could be traveled in short time spans from the ship's point of view.

One idea for the relativistic rocket is to have it accelerate constantly at 9.81 m/s².This is the same acceleration due to gravity on earth. If you could keep up that acceleration you would eventually gain the benefits of a relativistic rocket. For the actual equations for such a rocket click here.

A future relativistic rocket? Found here.

Here are the distances and relativistic times of some distances in light years.

t (time felt on ship) yrs	T (Time passed on earth) yrs	d (distance) ly	v (velocity of ship) c	γ (time dilution)
1	1.19	.56 light years	.77c	1.58
2	3.75	2.90	.97	3.99
5	83.7	82.7	.99993	86.2
8	1840	1839	.9999998	1895
12	113,243	113,242	.99999999996	116,641

Note* if you wanted to stop at your destination you would have to accelerate half way and decelerate the second half. This would double t the time it took on the ship.

Here are some common landmarks in space.

4.3 ly	Nearest star	3.6 years
27 ly	Vega	6.6 years
30,000 ly	Center of our galaxy	20 years
2,000,000 ly	Andromeda galaxy	28 years
n ly	Anywhere less than one thousand million ly	1.94 arccosh (n/1.94 +1) years

Note* you can't use this equation for n's greater than one thousand million light years because of the expansion of the universe.

These facts and figures were borrowed from The Relativistic Rocket.

Relativistic Rocket

Bibliography