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Interstellar travel is the hypothetical travel of spacecraft between star systems. Due to the vast distances between the Solar System and nearby stars , interstellar travel is not practicable with current propulsion technologies.
This plot shows a ship capable of 1-g (10 m/s 2 or about 1.0 ly/y 2) "felt" or proper acceleration [6] can travel vast distances, although is limited by the mass of any propellant it carries.
In gravitationally bound systems, the orbital speed of an astronomical body or object (e.g. planet, moon, artificial satellite, spacecraft, or star) is the speed at which it orbits around either the barycenter (the combined center of mass) or, if one body is much more massive than the other bodies of the system combined, its speed relative to the center of mass of the most massive body.
Intergalactic travel is the hypothetical travel between galaxies. Because the Milky Way and its closest neighbors are separated by millions of light-years , any such venture would also require millions of years based on current physics.
Faster-than-light (superluminal or supercausal) travel and communication are the conjectural propagation of matter or information faster than the speed of light (c). The special theory of relativity implies that only particles with zero rest mass (i.e., photons) may travel at the speed of light, and that nothing may travel faster.
With current technology severely limiting the velocity of space travel, the differences experienced in practice are minuscule. After 6 months on the International Space Station (ISS), orbiting Earth at a speed of about 7,700 m/s, an astronaut would have aged about 0.005 seconds less than he would have on Earth. [11]
Orbit of AMC-8 satellite around the Earth in 2000, transferring from a geostationary transfer orbit to a geostationary orbit. An orbital spaceflight (or orbital flight) is a spaceflight in which a spacecraft is placed on a trajectory where it could remain in space for at least one orbit.
Interplanetary spaceflight or interplanetary travel is the crewed or uncrewed travel between stars and planets, usually within a single planetary system. [1] In practice, spaceflights of this type are confined to travel between the planets of the Solar System .