Buckle your seatbelts.
We’re about to take a ride
on the cosmic superhighway.
I know what you’re thinking.
And no, we aren't talking about
laying down pavement
to build some kind of outer space freeway.
Though there is at least one Tesla
that would be happy about the idea.
The space pathways we’re talking about
are called space manifolds.
These are arch-like structures
that emerge from the complicated
gravitational pull
between the Sun, planets and their moons.
If you found yourself
on one of these many interplanetary jet streams,
could you effortlessly cruise our Solar System?
Or could one wrong turn
slam you headfirst into Jupiter?
We’ve built highways all over Earth.
And the only thing you need to get started on your journey
would be a road map.
When it comes to space, navigating would be a little more complicated.
But you could save a lot on fuel.
But it's not just about saving on fuel money.
We might be building highways in space,
but we aren't moving out of Earth just yet.
We need to keep our planet healthy.
You could do your part too, with Wren,
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Now, let's get back to our interplanetary highways.
Like I said, navigating these freeways would be a little complicated.
We'll, quite complicated, I should say.
That’s because you’d be utilizing the concept of gravity assist.
This is a reliable technique
that is already vital to space exploration.
If you were on a spacecraft using gravity assist,
you could travel much further than your launch vehicle could,
well, launch you.
Imagine using the Sun and planets like a slingshot
to propel yourself around the Solar System.
You’d add or subtract momentum
by increasing or decreasing the energy of your orbit.
These techniques have been applied on previous missions
like Voyager 2.
This outer planet probe was launched in 1977,
and got a trajectory boost from the gravitational pulls
of both Saturn and Uranus.
And now it's still speeding through interstellar space
after more than 40 years of service.
But navigating the cosmic superhighway system would be
a little more complicated than
using the gravity of just one planet.
These pathways are generated from the complex
gravitational interactions between all the planets,
their moons and the Sun.
And for starters, they're nearly invisible.
If you could spot them,
you'd be looking at a network of tubes
swirling along with the planets.
But just because they're hard to see
doesn’t mean you couldn’t try.
It would be important to familiarize yourself with
Lagrange points.
For any two-body system,
like the Earth and the Moon
or the Sun and Jupiter,
there are five locations in space
where the gravitational forces between the two
are in equilibrium.
Or simply balanced.
If you could place your spacecraft
on one of these points,
then you'd be able to remain in a stable orbit.
No need to worry about being pushed further into space
or being pulled in to crash.
And since all two-body systems
have these points,
that means our Solar System is full of them.
As planets orbit the Sun,
these points overlap and intersect.
So if you’re paying attention,
you could time things
just right to jump off to another planet’s orbit.
Hopping through space on these superhighways
would allow you to save a lot of money on fuel
while reaching the outermost parts of the Solar System
at breakneck speeds.
If you found yourself on the right route,
you could travel the 3.7 billion km (2.3 billion mi)
from Jupiter to Neptune in less than 10 years.
But I hope you’ve got a few years
or even decades
to spare just waiting for these points to overlap
in a good way.
And you’d still going to need a ship big enough
for all the cargo you’d be carrying.
NASA has estimated that crew of four
on a three-year mission
would need to take more than 10,800 kg (24,000 lb) of food.
But if you could use this cosmic highway,
trips that usually take hundreds of thousands of years
could be reduced to several decades.
Even though scientists have utilized
these manifolds on previous missions,
it’s unlikely they’ll be trying crewed missions
anytime soon.
To truly understand the complex map of connections,
we’d need to study many of the millions of objects
floating through space,
like comets and asteroids.
You wouldn't want to smash into the surface of Jupiter
if your calculations didn't add up.
And this kind of studying could help detect
potentially dangerous space objects
hurtling along the celestial autobahn
straight towards Earth.
You know, all this space travel makes me think.
Maybe instead of space shuttles or rockets,
we could build a tower
reaching all the way out into space.
I know, I know.
That's a story
for another What If.