That will cover twice the stated range to the point of no return.
Ships have gone out and off and away and have never been heard of
again. It is possible that one or more of these have succeeded in
locating an Earth-like planet beyond the point of no return, but the
Earthmen at home will never know about it until the range is extended.
The possibility of such a planet favoring human life and ultimately
harboring a culture of technical competence enough to create and
maintain the power restoring equipment is extremely remote.
For spacecraft that carry women are few and far between.
And it takes more than one man's lifetime to make use of the know-how.
Junior Spaceman Howard Reed knew that away back in the Twentieth
Century, the average engineer could make a guess, count on his fingers,
and come up with a pretty shrewd estimate of the horsepower per cubic
inch that could be stored by the various ways and means available to
the age.
Removing the human pilot and his needs did give the droneship quite a
bit more space for cargo and power. But, as he looked at the droneship
standing there, it became plain to Junior Spaceman Howard Reed that
there was not room in that size of hull for both the necessary
powerbanks and the full year's store of supplies for one man.
Whereupon Junior Spaceman Howard Reed dropped his tools. He donned his
space suit and crossed the intervening space to the droneship.
He began to examine the ship's running gear with a critical and
suspicious eye.
He was examining hardware that was familiar to him. It took him no
more than two hours to determine beyond a shadow of a doubt that
the droneship's drive was built along the theories and mathematical
analysis that he had been told simply did not work!
Someone had reduced Hansen's Folly to practice!
* * * * *
He paused again. Hansen's Folly had been called a failure about two
hundred years ago, but what did that really mean? He considered his
history.
In 1724, Stephen Gray and Granville Wheeler made the proud announcement
that they had succeeded in transmitting an electrical phenomenon along
a wire for a distance of 682 feet. Two hundred years later the entire
Earth was girdled with telegraph, telephone and cable wires and linked
with the invisible bonds of radio waves.
In about 1904 the Wright Brothers made their first powered airplane
flight. Forty years later men were flying in airplanes that carried a
wingspread greater than the distance of the Wright's first flight.
Einstein's Barrier was accepted scientific dogma for a hundred years;
but he, Howard Reed, was now standing in a spacecraft that had crossed
the gulf between the stars at a speed that not only exceeded the
velocity of propagated light--but exceeded this speed by a few hundred
orders of magnitude.
So? So maybe they were right. Maybe Hansen's Folly was a failure.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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