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Here's What Actually Happens When You Travel at the Speed of Light, According to NASA

NASA created a fun video to answer all of our burning questions about near-light-speed travel.

Ever wish you could travel at the speed of light to your favorite destinations ? Once you see the reality of that speed, you may rethink everything.

"There are some important things you should probably know about approaching the speed of light," NASA's video, Guide to Near-light-speed Travel , explains. "First, a lot of weird things can happen, like time and space getting all bent out of shape."

According to the video, if you're traveling at nearly the speed of light, the clock inside your rocket would show it takes less time to travel to your destination than it would on Earth. But, since the clocks at home would be moving at a standard rate you'd return home to everyone else being quite a bit older.

"Also, because you're going so fast, what would otherwise be just a few hydrogen atoms that you'd run into quickly becomes a lot of dangerous particles. So you should probably have shields that keep them from frying your ship and also you."

Finally, the video tackles the fact that even if you were moving at the speed of light, the "universe is also a very big place, so you might be in for some surprises." For example, your rocket's clock will say it takes about nine months to get from Earth to the edge of the solar system. An Earth clock would say it took about a year and a half. Fortunately, NASA astronauts have a slew of tips for avoiding jet lag along the way.

"If you want to get to farther out vacation spots," the video explains, "you'll probably need more than a few extra snacks. A trip to the Andromeda Galaxy, our nearest large neighbor galaxy, can take over one million years. And a trip to the farthest known galaxy where it currently sits might take over 15 billion years, which is more vacation time than I think I'll ever have."

The video doesn't explain how your rocket will travel at the speed of light. Our technology just isn't there yet, but maybe the aliens will share that tech with us soon. Until then, you can track the first crew launch of Artemis II , a rocket that will fly around the moon in 2024 before making its first lunar landing in 2025.

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Scientists Believe Light Speed Travel Is Possible. Here’s How.

A functioning warp drive would allow humans to reach the far ends of the cosmos in the blink of an eye.

White and his team in LSI’s Houston laboratory were conducting research for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, and had set up these particular experiments to study the energy densities within Casimir cavities, the mysterious spaces between microscopic metal plates in a vacuum. The data plot indicated areas of diminished energy between the plates, which caused them to push toward each other as if trying to fill the void. This is known as negative vacuum energy density, a phenomenon in quantum mechanics called, appropriately enough, the Casimir effect . It’s something that’s helping scientists understand the soupy physics of microscale structures, which some researchers hope can be applied to energy applications that are more practical, such as circuits and electromechanical systems.

But White noticed that the pattern of negative vacuum energy between the plates and around tiny cylindrical columns that they’d inserted in the space looked familiar. It precisely echoed the energy pattern generated by a type of exotic matter that some physicists believe could unlock high-speed interstellar travel. “We then looked, mathematically, at what happens if we placed a one-micron sphere inside of a four-micron cylinder under the same conditions, and found that this kind of structure could generate a little nanoscale warp bubble encapsulating that central region,” White explains.

That’s right—a warp bubble. The essential component of a heretofore fictional warp drive that has for decades been the obsession of physicists, engineers, and sci-fi fans. Warp drive, of course, is the stuff of Star Trek legend, a device enclosed within a spacecraft that gives the mortals aboard the ability to rip around the cosmos at superhuman speed. To the lay sci-fi fan, it’s a “black box”—a convenient, completely made-up workaround to avoid the harsh realities of interstellar travel. However, after decades of speculation, research, and experimentation, scientists believe a warp drive could actually work.

To emphasize: White didn’t actually make a warp bubble. But the data from his study led to an aha moment: For the first time, a buildable warp bubble showed promise of success.

Warp technology’s core science is surprisingly sound. Though the specific mechanics of an actual device haven’t been fully unpacked, the math points toward feasibility. In short, a real-life warp drive would use massive amounts of energy, which can come in the form of mass, to create enough gravitational pull to distort spacetime in a controlled fashion, allowing a ship to speed along inside a self-generated bubble that itself is able to travel at essentially any speed. Warp drives popped up in fiction intermittently for several decades before Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry plugged one into the USS Enterprise in 1966. But Miguel Alcubierre, PhD, a Mexican theoretical physicist and professed Star Trek enthusiast, gave the idea real-world legs when he released a paper in 1994 speculating that such a drive was mathematically possible. It was the first serious treatment of a warp drive’s feasibility, and it made headlines around the world. His breakthrough inspired more scientists to nudge the theoretical aspects of warp drive toward concrete, practical applications.

“I proposed a ‘geometry’ for space that would allow faster-than-light travel as seen from far away, essentially expanding space behind the object we want to move and contracting it in front,” Alcubierre says. “This forms a ‘bubble’ of distorted space, inside of which an object—a spaceship, say—could reside.”

Physicists tend to speak in relative terms. By injecting the sly qualifier “as seen from far away,” Alcubierre might sound like he’s describing the galactic equivalent of an optical illusion —an effect perhaps similar to driving past a truck going the opposite direction on the highway when you’re both going 60 miles an hour. Sure feels like a buck-twenty, doesn’t it? But the A-to-B speed is real; the warp effect simply shortens the literal distance between two points. You’re not, strictly speaking, moving faster than light. Inside the bubble, all appears relatively normal, and light moves faster than you are, as it should. Outside the bubble, however, you’re haulin’ the mail.

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Alcubierre’s proposal had solved one of the initial hurdles to achieving warp speeds: The very idea clashes with Einstein’s long-accepted theory of general relativity, which states that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, but it doesn’t preclude space itself from traveling faster than that. In fact, scientists speculate that the same principles explain the rapid expansion of the universe after the Big Bang .

While concluding that warp speed was indeed possible, Alcubierre also found that it would require an enormous amount of energy to sustain the warp bubble. He theorized that negative energy—the stuff hinted at by White’s experimentation with Casimir cavities—could be a solution. The only problem is that no one has yet proved that negative energy is real. It’s the unobtanium of our spacefaring imaginations, something researchers only believe to exist. In theory, however, this unknown matter may be sufficiently powerful that future warp drive designers could channel it to contract spacetime around it. In conceptual drawings of warp-capable spacecraft , enormous material rings containing this energy source surround a central fuselage. When activated, it warps spacetime around the entire ship. The more intense the warping, the faster the warp travel is achieved.

Of course, it’s not that simple. Physicist José Natário, PhD, a professor at the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, wrote his own influential paper about the mathematical feasibility of warp drives in 2001. However, he is concerned about practical conundrums, like the amount of energy required. “You need to be able to curve spacetime quite a lot in order to do this,” he says. “We’re talking about something that would be much, much more powerful than the sun.”

Alcubierre is similarly skeptical that his theoretical ideas might ever be used to develop a working warp drive. “In order to have a bubble about 100 meters wide traveling at precisely the speed of light, you would need about 100 times the mass of the planet Jupiter converted into negative energy, which of course sounds absurd,” he says. By that standard, he concludes, a warp drive is very unlikely.

Physicists love a challenge, though. In the 29 years since Alcubierre published his paper, other scientists have wrestled with the implications of the work, providing alternative approaches to generating the energy using more accessible power sources, finding oblique entry points to the problem, and batting ideas back and forth in response to one another’s papers. They use analogies involving trampolines , tablecloths, bowling balls, balloons, conveyor belts, and music to explain the physics.

They even have their own vocabulary. It’s not faster-than-light travel; it’s superluminal travel, thank you. Then there’s nonphysical and physical—a.k.a. the critical distinction between theoretical speculation and something that can actually be engineered. (Pro tip: We’re aiming for physical here, folks.) They do mention Star Trek a lot, but never Star Wars . Even the scruffiest-looking nerf herder knows that the ships in Star Wars use hyperdrive, which consumes fuel, rather than warp drives, which don’t use propulsive technology but instead rely on, well, warping. They’re also vague about details like what passengers would experience, what gravity is like on board since you’re carrying around boatloads of energy, and what would happen if someone, say, jumped out of the ship while warping. (A speculative guess: Nothing good.)

Such research isn’t typically funded by academic institutions or the DARPAs and NASAs of the world, so much of this work occurs in the scientists’ spare time. One such scientist and Star Trek enthusiast is physicist Erik Lentz, PhD. Now a researcher at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, Lentz was doing postdoctoral work at Göttingen University in Germany when, amid the early, isolated days of the pandemic, he mulled the idea of faster-than-light travel. He published a paper in 2021 arguing that warp drives could be generated using positive energy sources instead of the negative energy that Alcubierre’s warp drive seemed to require.

“There are a number of barriers to entry to actually being able to build a warp drive,” Lentz says. “The negative energy was the most obvious, so I tried to break that barrier down.”

He explored a new class of solutions in Einstein’s general relativity while focusing on something called the weak-energy condition, which, he explains, tracks the positivity of energy in spacetime. He hit upon a “soliton solution”—a wave that maintains its shape and moves at a constant velocity—that could both satisfy the energy-level challenge and travel faster than light. Such a warp bubble could travel along using known energy sources, though harnessing those at the levels needed are still far beyond our capabilities. The next step, he notes, may be bringing the energy requirements for a warp drive to within the range of a nuclear fusion reactor.

A fusion-powered device could theoretically travel to and from Proxima Centauri , Earth’s nearest star, in years instead of decades or millennia, and then go faster and faster as power sources improve. Current conventional rocket technology, on the other hand, would take 50,000 years just for a one-way trip—assuming, of course, there was an unlimited fuel supply for those engines.

“IF YOU COLLIDE WITH SOMETHING ON YOUR PATH, IT WOULD ALMOST CERTAINLY BE CATASTROPHIC.”

Like Alcubierre’s original thesis, Lentz’s paper had a seismic impact on the warp drive community, prompting yet another group of scientists to dig into the challenge. Physicist Alexey Bobrick and technology entrepreneur Gianni Martire have been particularly prolific. In 2021, they released a paper theorizing that a class of subliminal warp drives, traveling at just a fraction of light speed, could be developed from current scientific understanding. While that paper essentially argued that it’s perfectly acceptable to walk before you can run, they followed it up with another theory earlier this year that describes how a simulated black hole , created using sound waves and glycerin and tested with a laser beam, could be used to evaluate the levels of gravitational force needed to warp spacetime. The duo coded that breakthrough into a public app that they hope will help more quickly push theoretical ideas to practical ones. Though the team is waiting for the technology to clear a peer review stage before releasing details, the app is essentially a simulator that allows scientists to enter their warp-speed equations to validate whether they’re practical.

“When somebody publishes a warp metric for the first time, people say, ‘Okay, is your metric physical?’” Martire says. The answer to that question—whether the metric has practical potential or is strictly theoretical—is hard to establish given the challenges of testing these hypotheses. That determination could take six to eight months. “Now we can tell you within seconds, and it shows you visually how off you are or how close you are,” he says.

While useful, the app will speed up the preliminary math only for future researchers. Galaxy-sized challenges remain before we ever experience turbocharged interstellar travel. Alcubierre worries in particular about what may happen near the walls of the warp bubble. The distortion of space is so violent there, he notes, that it would destroy anything that gets close. “If you collide with something on your path, it would almost certainly be catastrophic,” he says.

Natário mulls even more practical issues, like steering and stopping. “It’s a bubble of space, that you’re pushing through space,” he says. “So, you’d have to tell space ... to curve in front of your spaceship.” But therein lies the problem: You can’t signal to the space in front of you to behave the way you want it to.

His opinion? Superluminal travel is impossible. “You need these huge deformations that we have no idea how to accomplish,” Natário says. “So yes, there has been a lot of effort toward this and studying these weird solutions, but this is all still completely theoretical, abstract, and very, very, very, very far from getting anywhere near a practical warp drive.” That’s “very” to the power of four, mind you—each crushing blow pushing us exponentially, excruciatingly further and further away from our yearned-for superluminal lives.

Ultimately, the pursuit of viable high-speed interstellar transportation also points to a more pressing terrestrial challenge: how the scientific community tackles ultra-long-term challenges in the first place. Most of the research so far has come from self-starters without direct funding, or by serendipitous discoveries made while exploring often unrelated research, such as Dr. White’s work on Casimir cavities.

Many scientists argue that we’re in a multi-decade period of stagnation in physics research, and warp drive—despite its epic time horizons before initial research leads to galaxy-spanning adventures—is somewhat emblematic of that stagnation. Sabine Hossenfelder, a research fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies and creator of the YouTube channel Science Without the Gobbledygook , noted in a 2020 blog post that physics research has drifted away from frequent, persistent physical experimentation to exorbitant infusions of cash into relatively few devices. She writes that with fewer experiments, serendipitous discoveries become increasingly unlikely. Without those discoveries, the technological progress needed to keep experiments economically viable never materializes.

When asked whether this applied equally to warp drive, Hossenfelder sees a faint but plausible connection. “Warp drives are an idea that is not going to lead to applications in the next 1,000 years or so,” she says. “So they don’t play a big role in that one way to another. But when it comes to the funding, you see some overlap in the problems.”

So, despite all the advances, the horizon for a warp drive remains achingly remote. That hasn’t fazed the scientists involved, though. A few years ago, while teaching in France, White visited the Strasbourg Cathedral with his wife. While admiring its 466-foot-tall spire, he was struck by the fact that construction began in 1015 but didn’t wrap up until 1439—a span of 424 years. Those who built the basement had no chance of ever seeing the finished product, but they knew they had to do their part to aid future generations. “I don’t have a crystal ball,” White says. “I don’t know what the future holds. But I know what I need to be doing right now.”

Eric Adams is a writer and photographer who focuses on technology, transportation, science, travel, and other subjects for a wide range of outlets, including Wired, The Drive, Gear Patrol, Men's Health, Popular Science, Forbes, and others.

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Would you really age more slowly on a spaceship at close to light speed?

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Every week, the readers of our space newsletter, The Airlock , send in their questions for space reporter Neel V. Patel to answer. This week: time dilation during space travel. 

I heard that time dilation affects high-speed space travel and I am wondering the magnitude of that affect. If we were to launch a round-trip flight to a nearby exoplanet—let's say 10 or 50 light-years away––how would that affect time for humans on the spaceship versus humans on Earth? When the space travelers came back, will they be much younger or older relative to people who stayed on Earth? —Serge

Time dilation is a concept that pops up in lots of sci-fi, including Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game , where one character ages only eight years in space while 50 years pass on Earth. This is precisely the scenario outlined in the famous thought experiment the Twin Paradox : an astronaut with an identical twin at mission control makes a journey into space on a high-speed rocket and returns home to find that the twin has aged faster.

Time dilation goes back to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, which teaches us that motion through space actually creates alterations in the flow of time. The faster you move through the three dimensions that define physical space, the more slowly you’re moving through the fourth dimension, time––at least relative to another object. Time is measured differently for the twin who moved through space and the twin who stayed on Earth. The clock in motion will tick more slowly than the clocks we’re watching on Earth. If you’re able to travel near the speed of light, the effects are much more pronounced. 

Unlike the Twin Paradox, time dilation isn’t a thought experiment or a hypothetical concept––it’s real. The 1971 Hafele-Keating experiments proved as much, when two atomic clocks were flown on planes traveling in opposite directions. The relative motion actually had a measurable impact and created a time difference between the two clocks. This has also been confirmed in other physics experiments (e.g., fast-moving muon particles take longer to decay ). 

So in your question, an astronaut returning from a space journey at “relativistic speeds” (where the effects of relativity start to manifest—generally at least one-tenth the speed of light ) would, upon return, be younger than same-age friends and family who stayed on Earth. Exactly how much younger depends on exactly how fast the spacecraft had been moving and accelerating, so it’s not something we can readily answer. But if you’re trying to reach an exoplanet 10 to 50 light-years away and still make it home before you yourself die of old age, you’d have to be moving at close to light speed. 

There’s another wrinkle here worth mentioning: time dilation as a result of gravitational effects. You might have seen Christopher Nolan’s movie Interstellar , where the close proximity of a black hole causes time on another planet to slow down tremendously (one hour on that planet is seven Earth years).

This form of time dilation is also real, and it’s because in Einstein’s theory of general relativity, gravity can bend spacetime, and therefore time itself. The closer the clock is to the source of gravitation, the slower time passes; the farther away the clock is from gravity, the faster time will pass. (We can save the details of that explanation for a future Airlock.)

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Have we made an object that could travel 1% the speed of light?

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Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to [email protected] .

Have we made an object that could travel at at least 1% the speed of light? – Anadi, age 14, Jammu and Kashmir, India

Light is fast . In fact, it is the fastest thing that exists, and a law of the universe is that nothing can move faster than light. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second (300,000 kilometers per second) and can go from the Earth to the Moon in just over a second. Light can streak from Los Angeles to New York in less than the blink of an eye.

While 1% of anything doesn’t sound like much, with light, that’s still really fast – close to 7 million miles per hour! At 1% the speed of light, it would take a little over a second to get from Los Angeles to New York. This is more than 10,000 times faster than a commercial jet.

The fastest things ever made

Bullets can go 2,600 mph (4,200 kmh), more than three times the speed of sound. The fastest aircraft is NASA’s X3 jet plane , with a top speed of 7,000 mph (11,200 kph). That sounds impressive, but it’s still only 0.001% the speed of light.

The fastest human-made objects are spacecraft. They use rockets to break free of the Earth’s gravity, which takes a speed of 25,000 mph (40,000 kmh). The spacecraft that is traveling the fastest is NASA’s Parker Solar Probe . After it launched from Earth in 2018, it skimmed the Sun’s scorching atmosphere and used the Sun’s gravity to reach 330,000 mph (535,000 kmh). That’s blindingly fast – yet only 0.05% of the speed of light.

Why even 1% of light speed is hard

What’s holding humanity back from reaching 1% of the speed of light? In a word, energy. Any object that’s moving has energy due to its motion. Physicists call this kinetic energy. To go faster, you need to increase kinetic energy. The problem is that it takes a lot of kinetic energy to increase speed. To make something go twice as fast takes four times the energy. Making something go three times as fast requires nine times the energy, and so on.

For example, to get a teenager who weighs 110 pounds (50 kilograms) to 1% of the speed of light would cost 200 trillion Joules (a measurement of energy). That’s roughly the same amount of energy that 2 million people in the U.S. use in a day.

How fast can we go?

It’s possible to get something to 1% the speed of light, but it would just take an enormous amount of energy. Could humans make something go even faster?

Yes! But engineers need to figure out new ways to make things move in space. All rockets, even the sleek new rockets used by SpaceX and Blue Origins, burn rocket fuel that isn’t very different from gasoline in a car. The problem is that burning fuel is very inefficient.

Other methods for pushing a spacecraft involve using electric or magnetic forces . Nuclear fusion , the process that powers the Sun, is also much more efficient than chemical fuel.

Scientists are researching many other ways to go fast – even warp drives , the faster-than-light travel popularized by Star Trek.

One promising way to get something moving very fast is to use a solar sail. These are large, thin sheets of plastic attached to a spacecraft and designed so that sunlight can push on them, like wind in a normal sail. A few spacecraft have used solar sails to show that they work, and scientists think that a solar sail could propel spacecraft to 10% of the speed of light .

One day, when humanity is not limited to a tiny fraction of the speed of light, we might travel to the stars .

Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to [email protected] . Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.

And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.

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What is the speed of light?

Light is faster than anything else in the known universe, though its speed can change depending on what it's passing through.

The universe has a speed limit, and it's the speed of light. Nothing can travel faster than light — not even our best spacecraft — according to the laws of physics.

So, what is the speed of light? 

Light moves at an incredible 186,000 miles per second (300,000 kilometers per second), equivalent to almost 700 million mph (more than 1 billion km/h). That's fast enough to circumnavigate the globe 7.5 times in one second, while a typical passenger jet would take more than two days to go around once (and that doesn't include stops for fuel or layovers!). 

Light moves so fast that, for much of human history, we thought it traveled instantaneously. As early as the late 1600s, though, scientist Ole Roemer was able to measure the speed of light (usually referred to as c ) by using observations of Jupiter's moons, according to Britannica . 

Around the turn of the 19th century, physicist James Clerk Maxwell created his theories of electromagnetism . Light is itself made up of electric and magnetic fields, so electromagnetism could describe the behavior and motion of light — including its theoretical speed. That value was 299,788 kilometers per second, with a margin of error of plus or minus 30. In the 1970s, physicists used lasers to measure the speed of light with much greater precision, leaving an error of only 0.001. Nowadays, the speed of light is used to define units of length, so its value is fixed; humans have essentially agreed the speed of light is 299,792.458 kilometers per second, exactly.

Light doesn't always have to go so fast, though. Depending on what it's traveling through — air, water, diamonds, etc. — it can slow down. The official speed of light is measured as if it's traveling in a vacuum, a space with no air or anything to get in the way. You can most clearly see differences in the speed of light in something like a prism, where certain energies of light bend more than others, creating a rainbow.

— How many moons does Earth have ?

— What would happen if the moon were twice as close to Earth?

— If you're on the moon, does the Earth appear to go through phases?

Interestingly, the speed of light is no match for the vast distances of space, which is itself a vacuum. It takes 8 minutes for light from the sun to reach Earth, and a couple years for light from the other closest stars (like Proxima Centauri) to get to our planet. This is why astronomers use the unit light-years — the distance light can travel in one year — to measure vast distances in space.

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Because of this universal speed limit, telescopes are essentially time machines . When astronomers look at a star 500 light-years away, they're looking at light from 500 years ago. Light from around 13 billion light-years away (equivalently, 13 billion years ago) shows up as the cosmic microwave background, remnant radiation from the Big Bang in the universe's infancy. The speed of light isn't just a quirk of physics; it has enabled modern astronomy as we know it, and it shapes the way we see the world — literally.

Briley Lewis (she/her) is a freelance science writer and Ph.D. Candidate/NSF Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles studying Astronomy & Astrophysics. Follow her on Twitter  @briles_34 or visit her website  www.briley-lewis.com .

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Star Wars Explains A Crucial Part Of Space Travel No One's Thought About

• In Star Wars, pilots are always able to find what they're looking for on a planet, even in rural areas.
• Lifeform scanners and beacons are used to navigate landing on well-populated planets.
• The Mandalorian season 2 partially explains how pilots find the right place to land using beacons, but the franchise still struggles to explain how they find locations with no lifeforms or beacons.

In A New Hope , Han Solo explains that navigating the Star Wars galaxy can be a tricky and dangerous task. Without the proper calculations, one could accidentally fly straight through a planet or a star at lightspeed. And even though Star Wars can’t decide how hyperspace really works , it has a more difficult time explaining how pilots are always able to find what they’re looking for on the planet. Oftentimes, the population of a planet is in the millions, billions, or even trillions. And while it makes sense for pilots to know where to land on well-mapped planets, it’s hard to explain how they know where to land on rural ones.

Of course, the first answer that comes to mind is to simply use a lifeform scanner. Many ships in Star Wars —such as Luke Skywalker’s X-Wing —had the ability to detect signs of life on any given planet. One merely needed to find an area that was densely populated and then land there. But things get a little more complicated when so many planets have hundreds or thousands of settlements and cities, or none at all. Nevertheless, the characters in Star Wars tend to always know where to land, and almost never have to travel long distances to the destination they’re looking for.

Star Wars: Why Some Ships Need Hyperspace Rings to Go to Lightspeed

The mandalorian season 2 finally explained how pilots always find the right place to land.

One throwaway line in The Mandalorian season 2, episode 5 helps partially explain how pilots find the right place to land. When Din Djarin and Grogu arrive above the planet Corvus, Din tells Grogu that he detects a “beacon” on the surface. This beacon leads him straight to Calodan, where Morgan Elsbeth resides. In other words, it seems like many towns and villages across the galaxy employ beacons to signal their location on the surface, making it easy for pilots to know where to land.

This Explanation Doesn't Fit Everything... But It Helps

Even though the beacon idea in The Mandalorian seems to solve the franchise’s problem, there are times when this explanation doesn’t make sense. For example, in the very next episode of The Mandalorian season 2, Din Djarin flies to Tython and lands directly next to an old Jedi Temple. There are certainly no lifeforms or beacons to guide him to the site he’s looking for, but he still manages to find it without any difficulty. Too often in Star Wars do characters find what they’re looking for without searching.

In any case, The Mandalorian season 2 gave one of the best explanations in the franchise for why pilots know where to land. Pilots use a combination of lifeform scanners and beacons to navigate their landing on foreign planets. But the franchise has yet to explain how pilots find planetary locations where no lifeforms or beacons are present. At some point, Star Wars needs to explain why most ships conveniently land exactly where they want to be.

Space elevators could get us to Mars in record time — and Japan is planning one for 2050

• A space elevator could make it much cheaper and faster to get goods to other planets, like Mars.
• The Obayashi Corporation based in Japan announced in 2012 plans to begin building one by next year.
• Not only would it cost $100 billion, there are huge technological and organizational challenges.

Imagine a long tether linking Earth to space that could launch us to orbit at a fraction of the cost and slingshot us to other worlds at record speed.

That's the basic idea behind a space elevator .

Instead of taking six to eight months to reach Mars, scientists have estimated a space elevator could get us there in three to four months or even as quickly as 40 days .

The concept of space elevators isn't new, but engineering such a structure would be no easy feat , and many other issues besides technology stand in the way.

That's why the ambition to seriously build one is fairly recent.

The Japan-based company Obayashi Corporation thinks it has the expertise.

Japan aims to build a space elevator by 2050

Known for constructing the world's tallest tower, the Tokyo Skytree , Obayashi Corporation announced in 2012 that it would reach even loftier heights with its own space elevator.

In a report that same year, the company said it would begin construction on the $100-billion project by 2025 and could start operations as early as 2050.

We checked in with Yoji Ishikawa, who wrote the report and is part of the company's future technology creation department, to see how the project is progressing ahead of 2025.

While Ishikawa said the company likely won't start construction next year, it is currently "engaged in research and development, rough design, partnership building, and promotion," he told Business Insider.

Some have doubted such a structure is even possible.

"It's been sort of a kooky idea," said Christian Johnson, who published a report on space elevators last year in the peer-reviewed Journal of Science Policy & Governance.

"That said, there are some people who are real scientists who are really on board with this and really want to make it happen," Johnson said.

A cheaper route to space

Launching humans and objects into space on rockets is extremely expensive. For example, NASA has estimated its four Artemis moon missions will cost $4.1 billion per launch .

The reason is something called the rocket equation . It takes a lot of fuel to get to space, but the fuel is heavy, which increases the amount of fuel you need. "And so you see the kind of vicious cycle there," Johnson said.

With a space elevator, you don't need rockets or fuel.

According to some designs, space elevators would shuttle cargo to orbit on electromagnetic vehicles called climbers. These climbers could be remotely powered — like through solar power or microwaves — eliminating the need for on-board fuel.

In his report for the Obayashi Corporation, Ishikawa wrote that this type of space elevator could help drop the cost of moving goods to space to $57 per pound. Other estimates for space elevators in general have put the price at $227 per pound.

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Even SpaceX's Falcon 9, which, at around $1,227 per pound, is one of the cheaper rockets to launch, is still about five times as expensive as the higher cost estimates for space elevators.

There are other benefits besides cost, too.

There's no danger of a rocket exploding , and the climbers could be zero-emission vehicles, Johnson said. At a relatively leisurely pace of 124 miles per hour, the Obayashi Corporation's climbers would travel slower than rockets with fewer vibrations, which is good for sensitive equipment.

Ishikawa said the Obayashi Corporation sees a space elevator as a new kind of public works project that would benefit all of humankind.

There's not enough steel on Earth to make a space elevator

Right now, one of the biggest obstacles to building a space elevator is what to make the tether or tube from.

To withstand the tremendous tension it would be under, the tube would have to be very thick if it were made out of typical materials, like steel. However, "if you try to build it out of steel, you would need more steel than exists on Earth," Johnson said.

Ishikawa's report suggested Obayashi Corporation might use carbon nanotubes . A nanotube is a rolled-up layer of graphite, the material that's used in pencils.

It's much lighter and is less likely to break under tension compared to steel, so the space elevator could be much smaller, Johnson said. But there's a catch.

While nanotubes are very strong, they're also tiny, a billionth of a meter in diameter. And researchers haven't made them very lengthy. The longest is only about 2 feet.

To be properly balanced while still reaching geosynchronous orbit — where objects stay in sync with Earth's rotation — the tether would need to be at least 22,000 miles long, per Ishikawa's report.

"So we're not there," Johnson said of the nanotube length. "But that doesn't mean it's impossible."

Instead, researchers might need to develop an entirely new material, Ishikawa said.

Other obstacles

Whatever the material turns out to be, there are still other problems.

For instance, a space elevator's tether would be under such incredible tension that it would be prone to snapping, Johnson said. A lightning strike could vaporize it. There's also other weather to consider like tornadoes, monsoons, and hurricanes.

Locating the tether base at the equator would lessen the likelihood of hurricanes , but it would still need to be in the open ocean to make it more difficult for terrorists to target, Johnson said.

It would also take a lot of trips to make up for that giant price tag for construction.

That's only scratching the surface of the challenges. And they can't all be solved by one company, Ishikawa said. "We need partnerships," he said. "We need different industries."

"Of course," Ishikawa said, "raising funds is very essential."

That's a lot of obstacles to overcome to start construction in time for operation by 2050, especially since Ishikawa estimated it would take 25 years to build. He noted that the 2050 estimate always came with caveats about the technology progressing. "It's not our goal or promise," he said, but the company is still aiming for that date.

"I think that those time estimates are optimistic," Johnson said, "even assuming there was a breakthrough tomorrow."

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Travel through data from space in new 3d instagram experiences.

A new project provides special 3D “experiences” on Instagram using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes through augmented reality (AR), allowing users to travel virtually through objects in space. These new experiences of astronomical objects – including the debris fields of exploded stars – are being released to help celebrate the 25 th anniversary of operations from Chandra, NASA’s flagship X-ray telescope.  

In recent years, Instagram experiences (previously referred to as filters) of NASA mission control, the International Space Station, and the Perseverance Rover on Mars have allowed participants to virtually explore what NASA does. This new set of Chandra Instagram filters joins this space-themed collection.

“We are excited to bring data from the universe down to earth in this way,” said Kimberly Arcand, visualization and emerging technology scientist at the Chandra X-ray Center. “By enabling people to access cosmic data on their phones and through AR, it brings Chandra’s amazing discoveries literally right to your fingertips.”

The new Instagram experiences are created from 3D models based on data collected by Chandra and other telescopes along with mathematical models. Traditionally, it has been very difficult to gather 3D data of objects in our galaxy due to their two-dimensional projection on the sky. New instruments and techniques, however, have helped allowed astronomers in recent years to construct more data-driven models of what these distant objects look like in three dimensions.

These advancements in astronomy have paralleled the explosion of opportunities in virtual, extended, and augmented reality. Such technologies provide virtual digital experiences, which now extend beyond Earth and into the cosmos. This new set of Chandra Instagram experiences was made possible by a collaboration including NASA, the Smithsonian Institution, and students and researchers at Brown University.

These Instagram experiences also include data sonifications of the celestial objects. Sonification is the process of translating data into sounds and notes so users can hear representations of the data, an accessibility project the Chandra team has led for the past four years.

“These Chandra Instagram experiences are another way to share these cosmic data with the public,” said Arcand. “We are hoping this helps reach new audiences, especially those who like to get their information through social media.”

The objects in the new Chandra Instagram experience collection include the Tycho supernova remnant, the Vela Pulsar, the Helix Nebula, the Cat’s Eye Nebula, and the Chandra spacecraft. The 3D models of the first three objects were done in conjunction with Sal Orlando, an astrophysicist at Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) in Palmero. The Cat’s Eye Nebula was created with data from Ryan Clairmont, physics researcher and undergraduate at Stanford University. Arcand worked with Brown’s Tom Sgouros and his team, research assistant Alexander Dupuis and undergraduate Healey Koch, on the Chandra Instagram filters.

The experiences include text that explains what users are looking at. The effects are free and available on Instagram on mobile devices for at least six months, and some will remain viewable in perpetuity on the Smithsonian’s Voyager 3D website.

“There is a lot of rich and beautiful data associated with these models that Healey and I looked to bring in, which we did by creating the textures on the models as well as programming visual effects for displaying them in AR,” said Dupuis.

NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Chandra X-ray Center controls science from Cambridge Massachusetts and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts. The Chandra X-ray Center is headquartered at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, which is part of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian.

Read more from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.

For more Chandra images, multimedia and related materials, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/mission/chandra-x-ray-observatory/

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Megan Watzke Chandra X-ray Center Cambridge, Mass. 617-496-7998

Jonathan Deal Marshall Space Flight Center Huntsville, Ala. 256-544-0034

LGBTQ+ Pride Month is starting to show its colors around the world. What to know

NEW YORK -- Pride Month, the worldwide celebration of LGBTQ+ culture and rights, kicks off Saturday with events around the globe.

But this year's festivities in the U.S. will unfold against a backdrop of dozens of new state laws targeting LGBTQ+ rights, particularly transgender young people.

Here are things to know about the celebrations and the politics around them.

WHY IS JUNE PRIDE MONTH?

The monthlong global celebration began with Gay Pride Week in late June 1970, a public celebration that marked the first anniversary of the violent police raid at New York's Stonewall Inn, a gay bar.

At a time when LGBTQ+ people largely kept their identity or orientation quiet, the June 28, 1969, raid sparked a series of protests and catalyzed the movement for rights.

The first pride week featured marches in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco, and it has grown ever since. Some events fall outside of June: Tokyo's Rainbow Pride was in April and Rio de Janeiro has a major event in November.

In 1999, President Bill Clinton proclaimed June as Gay and Lesbian Pride Month.

WHAT'S BEING CELEBRATED?

Pride's hallmark rainbow-laden parades and festivals celebrate the progress the LGBTQ+ civil rights movement has made.

In the U.S. in April, a federal appeals court ruled North Carolina and West Virginia's refusal to cover certain health care for transgender people with government-sponsored insurance is discriminatory.

In one compromise in March, a settlement of legal challenges to a Florida law critics called "Don't Say Gay" clarifies that teachers can have pictures on their desks of their same-sex partners and books with LGBTQ+ themes. It also says books with LGBTQ+ characters and themes can remain in campus libraries and gay-straight alliance chapters at schools need not be forced underground.

Greece this year legalized same-sex marriage, one of three dozen nations around the world to do so, and a similar law approved in Estonia in June 2023 took effect this year.

WHAT'S BEING PROTESTED?

Rights have been lost around the world, including heavy prison sentences for gay and transgender people in Iraq and the death penalty for "aggravated homosexuality" in Uganda. More than 60 countries have anti-LGBTQ+ laws, advocates say.

Tightening of those laws has contributed to the flow of people from Africa and the Middle East seeking asylum in Europe.

In recent years, Republican-controlled U.S. states have been adopting policies that target LGBTQ+ people, and particularly transgender people, in various ways.

Twenty-five states now have laws banning gender-affirming care for transgender minors. Some states have taken other actions, with laws or policies primarily keeping transgender girls and women out of bathrooms and sports competitions that align with their gender.

GOP state attorneys general have challenged a federal regulation, set to take effect in August, that would ban the bathroom bans at schools. There also have been efforts to ban or regulate drag performances.

Most of the policies are facing legal challenges.

Since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, leading to restrictive abortion laws in most GOP-controlled states, LGBTQ+ advocates are worried about losing ground too, said Kevin Jennings, CEO of nonprofit civil rights organization Lambda Legal. On the eve of Pride, the organization announced a $180 million fundraising goal for more lawyers to challenge anti-LGBTQ+ laws.

Progress such as the 2015 Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide could be lost without political and legal vigilance, Jennings said.

"Our community looks at what happened to reproductive rights thanks to the Dobbs decision two years ago and has enormous anxiety over whether we're about to have a massive rollback of what we've gained in the 55 years since Stonewall," Jennings said.

WHAT ABOUT BUSINESSES?

While big businesses from Apple to Wells Fargo sponsor events across the U.S., a pushback made ripples last year at one major discount retailer.

Target was selling Pride-themed items last June but removed some from stores and moved displays to the back of some locations after customers tipped them over and confronted workers. The company then faced additional backlash from customers who were upset the retailer gave in to people prejudiced against LGBTQ+ people.

This year, the store has said it would not carry the items at all its stores. But the company remains a major sponsor of NYC Pride.

ARE EVENTS SAFE?

Keeping the events safe is the top priority, organizers said, but there could be challenges.

The FBI and U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued an advisory in May that foreign terrorist organizations could target events associated with Pride. The same month, the State Department renewed a security warning for Americans overseas, especially LGBTQ+ people and events globally.

Law enforcement officials noted ISIS sympathizers were arrested last year for attempting to attack a June 2023 Pride parade in Vienna and that ISIS messaging last year called for followers to attack "soft targets."

The agencies say people should always watch out for threats made online, in person or by mail. People should take note if someone tries to enter a restricted area, bypass security or impersonate law enforcement and call 911 for emergencies and report threats to the FBI.

NYC Pride has a heavy security presence and works with city agencies outside the perimeter, said Sandra Perez, the event's executive director. The group expects 50,000 people marching in its June 30 parade and more than 1.5 million people watching.

"The fight for liberation isn't over," Perez said. "The need to be visible and the need to be mindful of what we need to do to ensure that the future generations don't have these struggles is really top of mind."

Related Topics

• NEW YORK CITY
• LGBTQ PRIDE
• PRIDE MONTH
• CIVIL RIGHTS
• PRIDE PARADE

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