Wrong on two counts.punipunipyo said:
Cutting our budget I imagine refers to the US budget. And the US has made huge cuts to the space program. We're scrapping our shuttles and relying on the Russians to transport our people to the orbiting stations. There has been no research into moving at lightspeed, as it looks pretty much impossible. Here is why:
There is resistance in space. Both from particulates and from gravitational influence. Not to mention that all matter has inertia. That being resistance to movement as a result of it's mass.
At the same time, dust from planetary formations, solar particles, asteroids, meteorites etc. Those are all over the place. And it would be impossible for all of them to be accounted for.
Space Shuttle speed: 672 km/s = 672000 m/s
Speed of Light: 299,792,458 metres per second
Count from 672000 to 299 million.
Speed of a Bullet: 1200?1500 m/s
Say we achieve lightspeed and run into a piece of dust. At 200,000 times the speed of a bullet. It would explode. Probably tear a hole in the hull until we find a way to make Adamantium [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adamantium].
Also, there are going to be stresses influencing your ship from the ship itself (the windows pressing against the walls, the panels and tiles rubbing together). The forces exerted would create friction or pressure on the parts of the ship. Which could make the ship explode.
Not to mention the issues involved with creating enough thrust to move anything at that speed in the first place. The heat from a shuttle launch is approximately 4500 degrees Fahrenheit, surface of the sun being 10000°F. That's what it takes to just get into orbit.
"Leaving the Earth's Gravity" is a misnomer. We've never done that (with humans on board anyway). People in orbit aren't in null gravity, they're just in orbit, they wouldn't be orbiting the Earth if they were outside the Earth's gravity now would they? Even on the Moon you're still on the outer edges of the Earth's major influence.
If it takes that much heat and energy to get basically a cosmic hair away from the Earth, imagine what it would take to get to lightspeed? That's like 500x the force? Do you know of anything that can put out more heat and energy that rocket fuel?
I'm probably taking a condescending tone. But lightspeed travel is definitely not something we'll achieve in the next hundred years.
TLDR:
Fuck no we haven't gone lightspeed.
PS: If we do go lightspeed it still takes five years to get to the nearest star. There are no planets around it either (to my knowledge).
