The Millennium Falcon: the legend of Kessel
In the world of Star Wars, the Millennium Falcon is renowned for having produced the “Kessel raid in less than 12 parsecs” (a cult sentence …) but also a scientific puzzle. Because a parsec is a unit of distance, no time. What Han Solo actually means to say is that his vessel has found the shortest road through a deadly gravitational field, a feat of piloting and technology.
In terms of pure performance, the hawk is equipped with a Class 0.5 hyperpropulser, much faster than the imperial standard (class 1). On the scale of the Star Wars universe, this allows him to cross thousands of light years in a few hours. Suffice to say that in the real world, no spacecraft arrives at the ankle. But in reality, precisely, what can we compare this speed?
SpaceX starship: reality (a little) fiction catches up (a little)
Starship is the slightly crazy bet of Elon Musk: a 100 % reusable ship capable of transporting up to 100 people to the Moon, Mars … or even further. During his tests, the starship reaches speeds of around 27,000 km/h in terrestrial orbit, Mach 22, just that. Impressive ? Certainly. But on a cosmic scale, it is still very slow.
In comparison, the light travels at 300,000 km per second, or more than a billion km/h. In other words, the starship is only 0.0025 % of the speed of light, where the falcon, in fiction, crosses light years in a few moments. We clearly do not play in the same category.
Can we one day catch up with the hawk?
The answer is simple: not tomorrow. The speeds affected by science fiction vessels are based on still completely theoretical concepts, such as distortion engines, worm holes or space-time manipulation. Some researchers such as Miguel Alcubierre have proposed “warp” propulsion ideas, but the necessary energy still goes far beyond our capacities (it would be the equivalent of the mass of Jupiter to propel a single vessel).
But everything is not so desperate: we are already talking about solar sails, ionic propuls, even probable probes of reaching Centaur in a few decades. Science is progressing, even if it advances much more slowly than fiction.
The Millennium Falcon is therefore unsurprisingly the big winner of this match. Faster, more stylish, and more armed than any terrestrial prototype. But what he embodies above all is the human imagination pushed to the extreme, a fantasy of freedom and adventure that projects like the starship try, humbly, to concretize. So no, SpaceX will not yet cross the galaxy in 12 parsecs tomorrow morning!
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