interstellar_mission_planning

Some tools for planning interstellar missions

Example mission

The following shows an example mission from the solar system to Proxima Centauri (4.244 light-years). We begin with a 1kg payload and 1000kg of fuel. We assume the exhaust velocity is 500km/s, which is consistent with a fusion rocket. Burning 900kg of fuel accelerates us to a cruising speed of just under 0.4 percent the speed of light (i.e. 0.004c). The trip takes more than 1100 years.

Currently, we assume that fuel escaping the suns gravity is negligible and that the mission is non-relativistic.

Development Setup

This project uses uv for Python environment and package management.

Installation

If uv is not already installed on your system, install it via:

curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

Environment Setup

To create the virtual environment and install all dependencies (as locked in uv.lock):

uv sync

uv will automatically download and use the required Python version (Python 3.9) specified in .python-version.

Running Tests and Linters

Run the test suite:

uv run pytest

Run linters:

uv run pylint src tests
uv run flake8 --count --statistics

Jupyter Notebooks

To run the interactive notebooks:

uv run jupyter lab