• Question: How fast would you travel through space?

    Asked by Alex the lemon man to Julian, Jane, Hugh, Helen, Heather on 13 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Julian Onions

      Julian Onions answered on 13 Nov 2014:

      As fast as you can. However as you have to take your fuel with you, and usually from Earth, its usually a problem. So we’d like to go as fast as possible but you need enough fuel to do that.
      There are also limitations on how fast you can speed up. The human body is ok with about 3G, but above about 6G things get difficult and humans can’t operate very well at that level even with training.
      Ultimately you can’t go faster than the speed of light, 186,000 miles/second. So thats the top speed!

    • Photo: Helen Johnson

      Helen Johnson answered on 14 Nov 2014:

      To add to Julian’s rather perfect answer, here’s a video of Brian Cox experiencing much more acceleration (many more Gs) than usual… it’s pretty hilarious http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOyfrwbOFJ8
      You can probably see from this that even 3G really wouldn’t be comfortable!
      I’ll also add that if you managed to gain a lot of speed, you then have a very high ‘momentum’, and it would take a lot of force acting to slow you back down again. Just like the comet mission Rosetta had to be careful to slow to match its speed to 67P before landing on it, these things are important in space travel.

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