Exoplanet Travel Planner - Trip Time and Life Support

An exoplanet travel planner is a trip-planning tool that turns a chosen destination and cruise velocity into ship-time proper time, Earth-frame time, age at arrival, food mass, and water volume. The default destination is LHS 475 b, the first exoplanet confirmed by the James Webb Space Telescope, and the default cruise is 0.99c, the standard near-light-speed assumption in published interstellar trip studies.

• • Plan a hypothetical interstellar trip: Pick a nearby confirmed exoplanet or deep-space target, set age and crew, then read trip time, Earth time, and life-support totals.
• • Compare nearby exoplanets side by side: Switch between LHS 475 b, K2-18 b, TOI-715 b, and Kepler-186f to see how distance and cruise speed change the trip.
• • Explore relativistic time dilation: Change cruise speed from 0.5c up to 0.9999c to watch the gap between ship and Earth time grow.
• • Plan supplies for a sci-fi story: Use the food and water outputs as realistic inputs for a science-fiction scenario or worldbuilding spreadsheet.

The exoplanet travel planner is meant for planning, not propulsion. It assumes the ship can reach the cruise velocity and ignores the engineering of getting there.

For the orbital mechanics behind which of those destinations sits inside a habitable zone, Exoplanet Calculator gives the equilibrium temperature and habitable-zone status you can pair with the trip planner.

The calculator multiplies and divides four quantities. Distance sets how far the ship travels, cruise velocity sets how fast it travels, the Lorentz factor shrinks Earth-frame time into ship-clock proper time, and per-person food and water rations turn ship-time days into a life-support total.

• d: One-way distance to the destination in light-years, auto-filled from the destination preset.
• v: Cruise velocity as a fraction of the speed of light. Default 0.99c is a standard sci-fi cruise.
• gamma: Lorentz factor gamma = 1 / sqrt(1 - v^2). At v = 0.99c, gamma is about 7.089.
• ship_time: Proper time on the ship, in years. Equal to d divided by v times gamma.
• earth_time: Time elapsed on Earth during the trip, in years. Equal to d divided by v.

Because the Lorentz factor grows fast as v approaches c, raising cruise speed from 0.99c to 0.999c drops the 40-ly ship time from 5.7 to 1.8 years while Earth-frame time only shrinks from 40.4 to 40.04 years. Most of the ship-time speedup comes from the larger gamma.

According to Wikipedia - Lorentz factor, the time-dilation factor for a craft moving at velocity v is gamma = 1 / sqrt(1 - v^2/c^2), so a clock on a near-light-speed ship ticks slower by that exact factor as seen from a stationary frame.

For a real exoplanet with a known orbital radius, the Orbital Period Calculator is the natural companion for the host-star mass and orbital-distance inputs that set how realistic the trip time is.

Four concepts make the outputs easier to read: the difference between ship and Earth time, the role of the Lorentz factor, the leverage of cruise velocity on life support, and the distance ladder from nearby exoplanets out to deep-space landmarks.

These four concepts are enough to interpret any combination of distance and cruise speed.

Because the trip planner uses special-relativistic time dilation while a real near-light-speed ship would also sit deep in a star's gravitational well, the Gravitational Time Dilation Calculator is the natural companion for the gravitational half of the time-dilation story.

Use the calculator as a structured trip planner: pick a destination, set cruise velocity, enter age and crew, then read ship time, Earth time, age at arrival, food mass, and water volume.

1. 1 Pick a destination preset: Start with LHS 475 b or switch to K2-18 b, Kepler-186f, or the Galactic Center for a longer trip.
2. 2 Confirm the distance: The distance field auto-fills with the curated light-year value. Edit it directly for a custom point in the Milky Way.
3. 3 Set the cruise speed: Use 0.99c for a standard sci-fi cruise, or lower it to see how the trip changes at sub-light speeds.
4. 4 Enter age and crew size: Age at start feeds the age-at-arrival output; crew size scales the food and water totals for the whole ship.
5. 5 Adjust food and water rations: Use 0.83 kg/day and 30 L/day for NASA long-duration values, or 1 kg/day and 100 L/day for a generous sci-fi estimate.
6. 6 Read ship time, Earth time, and life support: Ship time is the years you age on board, Earth time is the years that pass on Earth, and the food and water outputs are total supplies.

Starting from LHS 475 b at 0.99c with a 30-year-old solo traveler, the planner reports ship 5.70 years, Earth 40.40 years, age at arrival 35.70, 2,082 kg of food, and 208,181 L of water.

When a student wants to see how cruise velocity and distance interact, the Time Dilation Calculator is the natural companion for working out the gamma factor without the trip-planning overhead.

The planner turns a curated list of nearby confirmed exoplanets and deep-space landmarks, a cruise velocity, and a few human inputs into a single trip plan with relativistic outputs and life-support totals.

• • Curated nearby exoplanet and deep-space list: Eight preset destinations from LHS 475 b out to NGC 6822 cover the realistic nearby-to-deep-space range.
• • Side-by-side ship and Earth time: Showing both ship time and Earth time makes the relativistic time-dilation effect visible without computing gamma by hand.
• • Age at arrival as a personal anchor: Adding ship time to the user's age captures the personal cost of an interstellar trip in years of life.
• • Life-support totals scaled by crew size: Food and water multiply by crew size so the planner works for a single traveler, a small crew, or a large colonization ship.
• • Adjustable cruise velocity: Cruise speed is editable between 0.5c and 0.9999c, so the planner supports both conservative probes and fast-cruise mission profiles.

Pairing the relativistic outputs with the life-support totals lets the same run answer both how long until arrival and how much to pack for the crew.

Five factors move the planner output most: distance, cruise velocity, the Lorentz factor from that velocity, per-person food and water rations, and the crew size that scales them.

• • The calculator assumes the ship can reach the cruise velocity and ignores fuel, mass, and engineering limits of a real interstellar drive. Trip-time outputs are a relativistic ideal.
• • Life-support totals use a flat per-person daily ration and do not model closed-loop water recycling, food growing, or waste recycling. NASA long-duration missions use about 30 L per person per day with full recycling, while this planner defaults to 100 L per person per day as a generous sci-fi estimate.

Treat the planner as a thinking tool for trip-time relativity and life-support planning.

According to NASA Exoplanet Archive, the curated host-star distances for nearby confirmed exoplanets include LHS 475 b at about 40 light-years, 51 Eridani b at 30 light-years, K2-18 b at 124 light-years, TOI-715 b at 137 light-years, Kepler-186f at 582 light-years, and WASP-39 b at 700 light-years, which sets the realistic exoplanet half of the destination preset list.

According to Wikipedia - ISS ECLSS, the International Space Station's Water Recovery System processes urine and atmospheric humidity back into potable water and supports roughly 30 liters of water per person per day when the closed-loop system is running at full recycling efficiency.

Because the destination preset list spans nearby confirmed exoplanets and well-known deep-space landmarks, the Drake Equation Calculator is the natural companion for the habitability question of how many of those worlds might actually host life.