How long would it take to reach the sun?
Well, the shuttle can’t leave orbit; but let’s go with the Orion space capsule, currently under development. It can reach the moon in 4 days, which is 1/4 million miles away. The sun is 93 million miles away, or about 372 *times* further – if the math is right, that means it’d be 1488 days… however, that’s not exactly true. The Apollo astronauts took 4 days to get to the moon, because when they left Earth, they were moving at 25,000 MPH – but the Earth’s gravity slowed them down until they entered the moon’s gravitational pull – and then they were only moving about 2,000 MPH. If we were to send people to the sun, after they left Earth they’d be accelerating all the way – I’d bet instead of 1488 days, it would be about 3 to 4 months – 90 to 120 days, because they’d be accelerating all the way there.
The amount of time it takes to “reach” the Sun depends on how fast you travel. Assuming that you don’t care about little details, like the motion of the Earth in its orbit, the tendency of things to vaporize before reaching the surface of the Sun, and other such piddling details–you just want to know how long it would take to go that far–then the math isn’t so bad. Let’s start with the distance from the Earth to the Sun: approximately 96 million miles. If we assume the Space Shuttle burns all its fuel to achieve escape velocity, it will be traveling about seven miles a second. 96 million miles, divided by 7 miles a second, works out to about 22 days and 16 hours. A -slightly- more detailed answer takes into account the gravity of the Sun! While the Shuttle would be traveling at 7 miles/second, it would also be -falling- into the Sun. With a gravitational force about 27.9 times that of Earth, it makes things fall very fast, indeed! After doing the math for a straight-line course, and
