Light can streak from Los Angeles to New York in less than the blink of an eye.
This is more than 10,000 times faster than a commercial jet.
The fastest aircraft is NASAsX3 jet plane, with a top speed of 7,000 mph (11,200 kph).
That sounds impressive, but its still only 0.001% the speed of light.
The fastest human-made objects are spacecraft.
The spacecraft that is traveling the fastest is NASAsParker Solar Probe.
Thats blindingly fast yet only 0.05% of the speed of light.
Why even 1% of light speed is hard
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In a word, energy.
Any object thats moving has energy due to its motion.
Physicists call this kinetic energy.
To go faster, you’re gonna wanna increase kinetic energy.
The problem is that it takes a lot ofkinetic energyto 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.
Thats roughly the same amount of energy that 2 million people in the U.S. use in a day.
Could humans make something go even faster?
But engineers need to figure out new ways to make things move in space.
The problem is that burning fuel is very inefficient.
Scientists are researching many other ways to go fast evenwarp 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.
