what percent of the speed of light has our space ships acheived?

Question

I ask this cause if we plan on going to that new planet, i'd like to figure out how long it would take to get there at our current speed abilities.
it doesn't seem like we can make it in a human lifetime.
I think we've got a better shot at sending a probe there to get some better pictures.

lol thanks. i know what the speed of light is, and i know we can't touch it.
I don't know how fast we can go, most specifically, how fast have we gone so far.
i can figure out the rest with that information

Answer 1

The fastest probe yet was the Helios probe that reached 150,000 miles per hour. Light goes further than this in a second.

Answer 2

Abouty 40,000 mph for pioneer and voyager probes, versus the speed of light at 186,282 miles/second.
However, this was accomplished using a relatively short rocket-powered acceleration burn, and by use of gravitational sling-shot maneuvers. Most of its flight has thus been unpowered. We have since developed technologies theoretically capable of achieving much higher velocities, by virtue of a very long acceleration burn. NASA and ESA have already tested ion drives for example, which would be quite capable of continuous acceleration over a period of months or years to reach very high velocities.
You can get a good idea of how fast we could feasibly go, by reading up on the British Interplanetary Society's 'Daedalus' starship concept. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Daedalus

Answer 3

Less than 1%. A probe is not yet feasible, until much faster forms of travel have been created, by which time many better candidates for probes will have been identified.

Answer 4

at the moment it's true, the stars are out of reach......

however, in 1945 it was thought you could never fly faster than the speed of sound,,,,,,the sound barrier, you know....

in 1965 it was thought you couldnt fly to the moon without getting zapped by cosmic rays

up to 2000, it ws thought nothing could go faster than light........then those boys over at CERN threw that idea out the window........

in 1995, Stephen Hawking was touring the set of Star Trek: The Next Generation...he rolled up to the mock up of the warp drive engines and said:

" I'm working on it"

Hurry, Stephen, hurry

the rest of us are waiting........

Answer 5

The straightest answer I can give it this:

The fastest a man-made craft has ever acheived is 10.3 km/s relative to inertial space. (Deep Space One, fitted with a Xenon Ion thruster)

If you divide that into 3.0E8 m/s you get:

.00343 % of the speed of light...

Soooo, not really even close :).

Answer 6

The probe headed to Pluto is our fastest at .00006 times the speed of light.

Added ---40,000 mph

Answer 7

Speed of light is 3 x 10^8 m/s.
That's about 1 080 000 000 km/h, or 671 080 888 mi/h.

We can't touch that.