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Ask HN: Is anyone seriously working on a space drive?

1 points by chris_dcosta ↗ HN
There are plenty of serious companies looking at "rockets", and alternative launch and propulsion methods to get us somewhere more or less in the "local" space of our solar system, but are there any serious attempts at creating and testing anything that might lead us to travel to the stars?

I've seen a load of crackpot stuff but very few genuine efforts. Is there even anyone looking at challenging the science in a significant way that might lead to something?

3 comments

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Sword_Monkey
Any attempt at interstellar travel in the near-future is likely to be pointless only because humanity will likely invent a faster way of travelling between stars before the first mission is completed.

Why send a craft toward the nearest star if it'll take the thing a hundred years when in a decade we might be able to halve that time? Only once we've gotten to grips with local space travel, and really pushed the limits of speed will we be able to appraise an attempt at interstellar travel.

And hey we might figure out faster-than-light one day, we've surprised ourselves before, no reason we can't do it again.

chris_dcosta
That's my question. Is anyone working on anything like a interstellar drive now. Of course it's likely we might discover something in the future, but as everyone knows, we are living in the future now.