The fastest object ever made by humankind is NASA's Parker Solar Probe, a spacecraft that cruised through the corona, the Sun's upper atmosphere, a mere 6.5 million kilometers (4 million miles) from its surface.
The current space speed record holder for fastest human-made object is NASA's uncrewed Parker Solar Probe. On 21 September 2023 – assisted by several fly-bys of Venus that allowed it to slingshot off the planet's gravity – Parker Solar Probe clocked up a speed of 635,266km/h (394,736mph). Now that's FAST!
The Parker Solar Probe is the fastest human-made object ever. If you could somehow hitch a ride on the NASA Parker Solar Probe, you could travel from Los Angeles to London in approximately 49 seconds.
Think again. For centuries, physicists thought there was no limit to how fast an object could travel. But Einstein showed that the universe does, in fact, have a speed limit: the speed of light in a vacuum (that is, empty space). Nothing can travel faster than 300,000 kilometers per second (186,000 miles per second).
The Space Shuttle has an orbital velocity of around 30,000km/h, but the crew of Apollo 10 hold the official record for the fasted manned vehicle when they reached 39,897km/h relative to the Earth on 26 May 1969 during their return from lunar orbit.
Surprisingly, speed – defined as a rate of motion – in of itself is not at all a problem for us physically, so long as it's relatively constant and in one direction. Therefore, humans should – in theory – be able to travel at rates just short of the “Universe's speed limit”: the speed of light.
Based on our current understanding of physics and the limits of the natural world, the answer, sadly, is no. According to Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity, summarized by the famous equation E=mc2, the speed of light (c) is something like a cosmic speed limit that cannot be surpassed.
In the context of talking about speeds, darkness is what you get after the light stops coming, and therefore travels at the speed of light. For instance, consider that you are in distant space, far from all light sources such as the sun, and you have a light bulb on the nose of your space ship.
In a vacuum, light travels approximately 186,000 miles per second (300,000 kilometers per second). Nothing in the universe that we know of can exceed this speed.
North American X-15: The X-15 holds the record for the fastest speed ever achieved by a manned, powered aircraft. It reached a top speed of Mach 6.72, or 4,520 miles per hour (7,274 kilometers per hour) during a flight in 1967.
Synopsis. NASA's Parker Solar Probe has set a new record as the fastest human-made object, reaching a staggering speed of 635,266 km per hour (394,736 miles per hour) on June 29.
Weyand's team calculated that humans could theoretically run as fast as 35 or 40 miles per hour, based on our gait and the maximum forces our muscles can generate.
The highest empirically recorded acceleration survived by a human was experienced by the test pilot John Stapp while strapped to a rocket sled that could produce just under 180 kN of thrust. He experienced a peak acceleration of 42.6 g and one second of acceleration at 25 g.
Changes in speed are expressed in multiples of gravitational acceleration, or 'G'. Most of us can withstand up to 4-6G. Fighter pilots can manage up to about 9G for a second or two. But sustained G-forces of even 6G would be fatal.
The physics of Star Trek describes infinite speed (expressed as "warp factor 10") as an impossibility; as such, even subspace communications which travel at speeds over Warp 9.9 may take hours or weeks to reach certain destinations.
While 1% of anything doesn't sound like much, with light, that's still really fast – close to 7 million miles per hour! At 1% the speed of light, it would take a little over a second to get from Los Angeles to New York. This is more than 10,000 times faster than a commercial jet.
Could a human survive traveling at the speed of light?
Despite what science fiction may suggest, humanity will never be able to travel at the speed of light. That said, we could theoretically get close. To cause the fewest problems for our human occupants, it would best to maintain the acceleration our body is familiar with: Earth's gravitational pull.
To date, the fastest a human has been recorded running is Usain Bolt's 2009 record-smashing 100-meter dash. There, he briefly reached a top running speed of 27.78 mph. Sha'Carri Richardson is officially the fastest woman in the world running the 100-meter dash in 10.65 seconds.
Therefore, objects with mass cannot ever reach the speed of light. If an object ever did reach the speed of light, its mass would become infinite. And as a result, the energy required to move the object would also become infinite: an impossibility.
