Fun networking measurement: they describe the antenna bandwidth as ~150 Mbit/week at 400 AU.
Fun networking measurement: they describe the antenna bandwidth as ~150 Mbit/week at 400 AU.
it does make you wonder whether in 30 years, we'll have the infrastructure (fusion, much larger LEO refueling capacity, etc) to put it there in 10 years instead.
The problem is the rocket equation is brutal. The more propulsion system you add to increase the speed, the more of it you have to accelerate up to the original speed before you start getting any improvement. We do have some nice advances like hall thrusters, but they don’t actually help much for heavy duty payloads like this, and there are no huge multi-order of magnitude engine efficiency breakthroughs on the horizon.
Maybe, maybe, maybe if you were able to refuel in orbit and strapped a ginormous multi-stage chemical rocket onto the thing in orbit. Maybe. But we're not going to be doing that in 30 years either.
* Higher velocities can mean shorter distances though, because your trajectory is less warped by the curvature of space. The biggest time saver would be avoiding time-consuming gravity assists, if there are any (I assume there are, but I didn't download the 500-page PDF).