When "Star Trek" and the USS Enterprise hit the television screen in 1966, the science-fiction series had trouble finding its own space and time slot.Decades later, a similar visionary zeal to seek new worlds and new civilizations is a factual enterprise for a new generation of galactic explorers. They are taking on spacetime and hoping to boldly go where no spacecraft has gone before—out to far-flung stars and the planets that circle them. There is no doubt there are worlds out there beyond our own cabal of planets, but even if you've got the heaviest of foot on the accelerator, plotting a speedy route to the stars is not easy. In case you missed it, the first interstellar probes are already en route. Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft are headed into interstellar space. But they weren't targeted toward any nearby stars. Furthermore, these craft lack the power sources or communications gear that a true interstellar probe would require.

More to the point: You don't have to be a rocket scientist or an astronomer to appreciate the fact that space is vast, said Steven Howe, co-founder and chief executive officer of Hbar Technologies LLC, based in West Chicago, Illinois. As an example, Howe points out, NASA's Voyager 1 — the most distant object produced by humans — is now 90 astronomical units or 8.4 billion miles from the sun. (One astronomical unit, or AU, is equal to the distance between Earth and the sun: 93 million miles or 149 million kilometers.) Voyager 1 was boosted from Earth back in 1977, and is clocking a speed of 3.6 AU per year. Contrast that to the Kuiper Belt around our solar system at around 200 AU, the Oort cloud at some 10,000 AU out, and the nearest star at 260,000 AU away.

View: Full Article | Source: MSNBC