Hey there, this is Taizo, and welcome back to Astrocenter. Today we’re taking a look at Passengers, a 2016 film starring Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence.
Warning: This post contains spoilers for the film Interstellar.
Passengers certainly doesn’t have the most coherent plot, but it gives us a pretty good clue about what long-distance space travel is gonna look like. Chris Pratt’s character wakes up in a colony ship transporting thousands of colonists from Earth to another planet. He’s all alone, without any company, in this very… strangely shaped ship.
Here’s the thing about long-distance travel spaceships: they don’t need to be streamlined and aerodynamic the way rockets do, because they don’t have to endure the stress of liftoff or landing. You also see this in the shape difference between the Endurance and Ranger and Interstellar.
The Ranger is designed for atmospheric exit and entry, as shown in Cooper’s dramatic landing on the surface of Miller’s planet. The Endurance, meanwhile, looks pretty fragile but works just fine as a long-distance ship because there’s no air resistance in space. That is... if you don’t have a psychopath scientist onboard trying to blow the ship up. Sorry, Dr. Mann. Now, the ship in Passengers is powered by a “fusion reactor” that involves plasma. The visuals are modified to look cool in a sci-fi way, but the base idea is pretty realistic. Here’s another difference between long-distance ships and space shuttle-like ships, which is the method of propulsion.
Traditional rocket fuel, which is mostly liquid hydrogen or helium, is used to wrench the craft from Earth’s gravitational hold. But rocket fuel is heavy, not to mention the space required to store it all. So the boosters take the spacecraft into orbit, at which point they’re detached to either burn in the atmosphere or undergo controlled reentry to be reused.
From there, the spacecraft can attach itself to the long-distance ship, and ion or plasma engines take over. The astronauts can go wherever they please… following the laws of physics, of course.
Another method of interstellar travel that’s been brought up is the solar sail or light sail. It uses a super-thin giant sail that is pushed by light energy from the sun or an extremely powerful and precise laser beam. We’re talking 0.1mm thin for the sail - literally paper-thin! And this concept goes way back in time to Johannes Kepler, an astronomer of the 1600s. Pretty cool guy.
He wrote in a letter to his colleague Galileo Galilei: “Provide ships or sails adapted to the heavenly breezes, and there will be some who will brave even that void.” Granted, this was after his observation of comet tails pointing away from the sun, but the idea was there. Since then, many astronomers and scientists have worked on the physics of this concept. However, only recently has it come to fruition, as prior scientists didn’t have the technology for the model to be feasible.
Professor Avi Loeb is one of the researchers recently at the forefront of developing this technology, overseeing the Breakthrough Starshot Initiative. This project aims to send a solar sail-powered craft to Alpha Centauri within a generation by accelerating to 20% of light speed. It would undergo a journey of 4.4 light years or 25.6 trillion miles.
Considering that it would take conventional liquid-fuel rockets today around 165,000 years to complete this travel, it’s an exciting concept. Professor Loeb’s book is also a very interesting read about possible extraterrestrial technology and SETI. I hope to cover it soon in a future article.
As always, more books and movies about space travel and colonization will be listed down below if you’re interested. I’ll see you in the next one!
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Bibliography
“Starshot.” Breakthrough Starshot, Breakthrough Initiatives, https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/initiative/3.
Choi, Charles Q. “How to Get to Alpha Centauri.” Space.com, Space, 12 Mar. 2008, https://www.space.com/5094-alpha-centauri.html.
Other works about space travel/colonization:
Martian
Moon
2001: A Space Odyssey
Lost in Space
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