[TheOldLady]

Hey, that Daedalus is really cool. They're planning on its traveling at 0.071 c, which is 47,541,600 MPH in its first stage, and then a boost to 0.12 c (80,352,000 MPH) for the cruise.

Once attaining 12% of light, it would take less than an hour for her to travel the equivalent of earth's distance from the sun.

Sigh. Talk about being born too early. Heck. I would have worked my tail off to get on that puppy for an interstellar mission.

[cripplecreek]

Still a long ride to the nearest stars but everything in our solar system would be a matter of hours away. Icarus pathfinder would be a small test run craft expected to go out to 1000 AU and Icraus Starfinder would be a test vehicle to run out to 10,000 AU. Icarus starfinder MK II would be a 50,000 AU test vehicle.

Gallery: Visions of Interstellar Starship Travel

For reference the New Horizons craft is only a bit more than 22 AU from the sun (about 3 light hours out) and still 10 AU from its pluto flyby.



For further reference...

[cripplecreek]

BTW Voyager 1 was 119 AU from the sun as of October.

Alpha Centauri is something like 280,000 AU from here.