What is the possible maximum speed of spacecraft in outer space as per present state of art ?

Answer 1

I have the correct answer for you. (No one else got it right.) The fastest man made object ever was... (drum roll please) Pioneer 11. It broke the record on September 1979 at a whopping 107,373 MPH. It achieved this by using the gravity of Jupiter to increase it's speed. Although I knew this already, I found a link for you to go to confirm it, if any of you doubt me. Please pick me as the winner. Here is the link for you:

http://advlifesupport.jsc.nasa.gov/ehti3/answ71to80.html

Answer 2

Speed Of Spacecraft

Answer 3

Put it this way -- travelling at the speed of light, it would take roughly four years to reach Alpha Centauri FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF AN OBSERVER ON EARTH. If you were the one PILOTING the spacecraft, time outside the ship would appear to slow down relative to your personal time as you got closer to the speed of light -- so to you, it would seem like the trip only took a few minutes. As far as how fast could a ship go....your main limits are going to be how much fuel you can carry, and how quickly you can accelerate using the fuel available. If you were able to construct a ship like the theoretical Bussard ramjet -- which would use an enormous magnetic field to "scoop" ambient hydrogen from the near-vacuum of space and use it for fuel -- your fuel supply would be effectively limitless, and top speed would eventually be determined by friction against that slight amount of hydrogen still in space. I read once that physicists have calculated that top speed to be about 60% lightspeed.

Answer 4

No limit!!!!!!!!!!

It all depends on how much fuel you are willing to lift from earth.

As long as the engines are burning the ship will accelerate.

With present technology, pretty darn fast! The question is are we willing to spend the money?

Check this out, You can set up the engines for a 1 G acceleration for as long as you have fuel and crate your own artificial gravity on-board the ship. So you can have long duration flights with out degradation of human bone or muscle.

By the way is much faster than 12,000 or 20,000 or 50,000 mph!

I remember many years back there was a proposal for a nuclear powered rocket engine. Some trials were done but the technology was not quite there at the time. They ran into some cavitation problems in the reactor. I think their budget was canceled to attend some other national crisis and the project was shelved. Does any one remember was that project was called?

Relativistic limits to light speed is a theory and yet to be proven. So far proven there i no limit.

Answer 5

Program: NASA Lifting Body. Objective: Manned. Type: Spaceplane. NASA's Ames Research Center and Langley had promoted the idea of 'lifting bodies', rounded half-cones, for use as manned recoverable spacecraft. These provided lift for maneuver and recovery at an airfield after re-entry from orbit. The original M2-F1 was a plywood glider towed from pickup trucks and C-47 transports as part of an 'in house' NASA Edwards project in 1963. Results were encouraging, and NASA contracted Northrop to build, at cut-rate prices, two rocket-powered lifting bodies that would be air-dropped from a B-52 bomber to explore the handling qualities of the two competing configurations. The M2-F2 was a 'flying bathtub' with a rounded belly / flat top layout. The M2-F2 crashed on 10 May 1967, seriously injuring the test pilot (the footage became familiar to millions when it was used in the opening credits of the television series 'The Six Million Dollar Man'). The crashed M2-F2 was rebuilt as the M2-F3 with enlarged vertical stabilizers. Maximum speed achieved was Mach 1.6, top altitude 21,800 m. The final X-30 National Aerospace Plane configuration seemed to owe much to the M2.
The HL-10, with a flat bottom and rounded dorsal body, was the favored lifting body configuration of NASA Langley. It reached Mach 1.86 and 27,700 m during its flight test. This configuration was found to be the best of the lifting bodies, and it was used in several of the orbiter proposals in NASA's Phase A and Phase B shuttle design studies. It is also very similar to the winning X-33 configuration proposed by the Lockheed. Purportedly an unmanned test vehicle of this design was tested at orbital speeds by the US Air Force in a black Lockheed Skunk Work's project, possibly on two Titan 3B / Agena D launches in 1972.

http://www.astronautix.com/project/nasgbody.htm

Answer 6

The present day space crafts travel at a speed of 10 times the speed of the bullet traced from a gun. The maximum of 45000 miles per hour.

Answer 7

Not the speed of light, of course, nothing with mass can be accelerated to the speed of light. But, NASA with DS1 has tested the "constantly accelerating" ion propulsion drive system. Even though DS1 barely achieved speeds attained by conventional chemical rockets, an ion propulsion system has the potential to be like the Energizer Bunny: going and going. On extended missions, an ion propulsion system could be the Indy Car compared to the conventional chemical rocket's Ford Pinto.

Answer 8

There is no 'speed limit' in space, but velocities are limited in practise by the quantity of fuel available.

You see, in order to accelerate, most rockets need fuel and oxidizer. Since the fuel and oxidizer have mass, they reduce acceleration until they are burned.

There are ways around this: ion thrusters require no fuel, just electricity from solar panels or nuclear reactors; and gravitational slingshots don't consume fuel either. But ion thrusters have very low thrust, and gravitational slingshots require a planet to be in the correct location to use their gravitational field.

Another limitation to speed is relativistic effects, but these are not significant below very, VERY high speeds: millions of miles per hour.

The person who said 45,000 mph is the fastest we will EVER go, has no basis for that statement. Still, I can't see us exceeding that speed anytime soon.

Answer 9

Well there is no limit. It is up to Humans how fast an aircraft can go.If humans invent more better fuels it can go much more faster than it is now.
If Aliens Can cover more than 10 or 100 million light years or more and come to Earth(I have not met them in person but just heard a few cases about it) then why cant we. After all even we are Aliens to them.

Answer 10

Speed is relative in space.

If you stopped your space craft somewhere between the earth and the moon, opened the door and set an egg outside the craft , it would just sit there and float in space.
Accelerate as much as you can for 1 hour, then repeat the process, the second egg will also just sit there.

There is no speedometer on spacecrafts, it depends on the direction and speed of your destination.