[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...

[TheOldLady]

Wow! Thanks for the interesting charts of our drone exploratory spacecraft! That's neato!

Yeah, I don't think we can attain the speeds necessary for interstellar flight while we're still within our solar system.

It takes quite a while to get going that fast, two years to get to 0.071 c, and after jettisoning that stage, another 1.8 years to get to 0.12 c. We can't accelerate fast because it would crush the passengers.

I was just using 1 AU to illustrate how fast the interstellar speeds will be.