How long would it take to “drive” to the sun?

By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi,

16 November 2025

I came across this question on the internet recently: How long would it take to drive from Earth to the Sun? It may sound unusual, but I suspect that the person asking was trying to get a feel of the vast distance. Think about this: it is about 1,200km from Moyale at the Kenya-Ethiopia border to Lunga-Lunga – the southern-most tip of our country.

If it was possible to maintain a constant speed of, say, 100km/h, this journey would last about 12 hours. In reality, however, it can take about 20 hours because of various obstacles and rest stops along the road.

If there was a road connecting the earth to the sun, how long would the journey take travelling at 100km/h? Well, the distance is about 150 million km and, when we divide this by the speed, we get 1.5 million hours. Now, one year has 8,760 hours (365 days times 24h each), thus, such a journey would last about 171 years. In short, no human being would be able to make that journey!

Of course, building a road to the sun would not only be akin to replicating the biblical Tower of Babel but also a waste of time and materials. There are easier ways of making the journey. Several spacecrafts have been sent to the vicinity of the sun in the last five decades. The latest one being the Parker Solar Probe which was launched in 2018.

This spacecraft took just three months to make its first close encounter with the sun and then went into a very long but tight orbit which saw it set the record for the fastest man-made object. It reached 690,000 km/h in December last year (2024).

To be clear, this spacecraft cannot sustain such a speed for more than a few seconds since this is attained as a result of the gravitational attraction of the sun. It is allowed to fall towards the sun but its trajectory is adjusted to make sure that it misses the target! But to get a feel of the magnitude of that speed, it would cut the travel time from Earth to the sun from 171 years to just 9 days.

But we shouldn’t get excited: distances in outer space are extremely large. The nearest star to our sun is 40 trillion km away. At the speed of 690,000km/h, it would take over 6,600 years to get there!