Space is big. Really big. You’ve heard that before, but you don't actually feel it until you look at the odometers on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. These two probes have been screaming away from Earth since the disco era, and honestly, the answer to how fast is Voyager isn't just a single number you can memorize. It changes. It depends on who is asking and where you’re standing. If you're standing on Earth, the speed looks one way. If you’re looking at it relative to the Sun, it’s another story entirely.
Right now, Voyager 1 is hauling through the void at roughly 38,000 miles per hour.
Think about that for a second. That is about 17 kilometers per second. If you could drive your car that fast, you could cross the United States from New York to Los Angeles in about four minutes. You’d be a smear of atoms before you hit the Jersey border, but you get the point. Voyager 2 is a bit of a "slowpoke" by comparison, trailing at around 34,390 miles per hour. But why the difference? It isn't because one had a better engine. In fact, these things don’t even have "engines" in the way we think about them anymore. They are essentially cosmic pinballs, gainfully employed by gravity.
The Slingshot Effect: How Voyager Got Its Kick
To understand the speed, you have to look back at the 1970s. NASA didn't just point a rocket at the stars and hope for the best. They took advantage of a rare "Grand Tour" alignment of the outer planets that happens only once every 176 years. By flying close to Jupiter and Saturn, the probes used a "gravity assist." Imagine a professional athlete spinning a hammer throw; the planet's gravity grabs the probe, swings it around, and flings it out the other side with way more kinetic energy than it started with.
Voyager 1 got a massive boost from Saturn’s moon Titan. It was a trade-off, though. To get a close look at Titan, NASA had to sacrifice a path that would have taken it to Pluto. They chose the moon, and the resulting trajectory tilted Voyager 1 "up" out of the solar system's plane. That kick is exactly why Voyager 1 is currently the fastest-moving man-made object leaving our neighborhood, even though it wasn't always the fastest thing ever launched.
Actually, the record for the fastest human-made object doesn't belong to Voyager anymore. The Parker Solar Probe holds that crown now, hitting speeds of over 300,000 mph as it dives toward the Sun. But Parker is staying in the neighborhood. When people ask how fast is Voyager, they usually want to know how fast we can run away from home.
Velocity is Relative (and Kinda Weird)
Here is where it gets technical. When NASA engineers talk about speed, they usually mean "heliocentric velocity." That’s speed relative to the Sun. But we live on a rock that is also moving. Earth orbits the Sun at about 67,000 mph. Depending on where Earth is in its orbit, we are either chasing Voyager or running away from it. This means the speed at which we receive its radio signals actually shifts because of the Doppler effect, much like a siren changing pitch as a police car drives past you.
- Voyager 1 Speed: ~17 km/s (relative to the Sun)
- Distance covered per year: About 325 million miles
- Current Location: Over 15 billion miles from Earth
It's basically covers the distance of Earth to the Sun every three years. That sounds fast, right? But in the context of the galaxy, Voyager is a snail. A very dedicated, very lonely snail.
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Why Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 Have Different Top Speeds
You might wonder why Voyager 2 is slower. It visited more planets! It saw Uranus and Neptune! Surely that gave it more "kicks," right? Well, sort of. Every time you fly past a planet, you can use its gravity to speed up, slow down, or change direction. Voyager 2’s path was more of a scenic route. By the time it finished its encounter with Neptune in 1989, its trajectory was steered "downward" relative to the ecliptic plane.
The physics of these encounters is a zero-sum game. You steal a tiny, tiny bit of the planet's orbital momentum to increase your own. The planet slows down by a fraction of a millimeter over billions of years, and the probe zooms off. Because Voyager 1 took a more direct "exit" path after Saturn, it maintained a higher exit velocity from the solar system.
The Problem of Friction (or Lack Thereof)
There is no air in space. This is obvious, but the implications for speed are huge. Once Voyager hit its max speed after its last planetary flyby, there was nothing to slow it down except the Sun's gravity pulling back on it. For decades, the Sun has been trying to reel these probes back in. As they get further away, that gravitational pull weakens.
We are now at a point where Voyager has reached "escape velocity." It is officially moving fast enough that the Sun can never pull it back. It’s gone. It’s a permanent resident of the Milky Way now, not just the solar system.
Crossing the Heliosphere: Does the Speed Change in Interstellar Space?
In 2012, Voyager 1 did something no human object had ever done. It crossed the Heliopause. This is the "border" where the solar wind—the stream of charged particles from the Sun—is pushed back by the plasma of interstellar space.
People expected something dramatic to happen to the speed. It didn't.
However, the environment changed drastically. Suddenly, the probe was swimming through much denser plasma. Imagine running through air and then suddenly hitting a wall of fog. It doesn't necessarily stop you, but the physics of how you move through that medium changes. Scientists like Dr. Ed Stone, who served as the project scientist for decades, spent years analyzing the data to confirm this transition. The speed remained relatively constant, but the "wind" hitting the spacecraft was no longer coming from our Sun. It was coming from the explosions of distant stars from millions of years ago.
Comparing Voyager to New Horizons
Is Voyager the fastest thing we’ve ever sent out? It’s a common misconception. When the New Horizons mission launched toward Pluto in 2006, it actually left Earth faster than Voyager did. It was a speed demon right out of the gate. But New Horizons didn’t get the same massive gravity assists that the Voyagers got.
So, while New Horizons started the race faster, Voyager 1 is still winning the long-distance sprint. By the time New Horizons reaches the same distance Voyager 1 is at now, it will actually be moving slower. Voyager 1 remains the king of interstellar speed.
The Silent Slowdown
Technically, the Voyagers are slowing down, but by such a minuscule amount it's almost hard to measure. The Sun's gravity is still there, whispering at them to come home. Every second, they lose a tiny, tiny fraction of their speed. But because the distance is so vast, the Sun's grip is pathetic.
The real "slowdown" isn't the speed of the craft; it's the speed of the data.
Because the probes are moving away so fast, the distance for radio signals is staggering. Right now, if you sent a "ping" to Voyager 1, it would take about 23 hours for that signal to reach the craft traveling at the speed of light. Then you have to wait another 23 hours for the "pong" to come back. We are effectively talking to the past. When we see data from Voyager, we are seeing what happened on the craft a day ago.
What Happens When the Power Runs Out?
This is the sad part of the Voyager story. The speed isn't the problem; the heat is. Voyager is powered by Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTGs). Basically, they use the heat from decaying plutonium-238 to make electricity. This "nuclear battery" loses about 4 watts of power every year.
Because of this, NASA has had to turn off heaters and scientific instruments one by one. Eventually, the probes will become "dark." They will still be moving at 38,000 mph, but they won't be talking. They will be silent, ghost ships moving through the dark.
How fast will they be moving then? Roughly the same. In 40,000 years, Voyager 1 will pass within 1.6 light-years of the star AC+79 3888 in the constellation Camelopardalis. It’s not "aimed" at any star in particular, but it’s moving fast enough to make the trip across the cosmic void.
The Golden Record: Speeding Message in a Bottle
Inside each probe is a gold-plated copper disk. It contains sounds of Earth, greetings in 55 languages, and music ranging from Bach to Chuck Berry. If an alien civilization ever finds it, they’ll see a map of where we are and a "needle" to play the record.
But here is the kicker: because of how fast Voyager is, it’s still going to take tens of thousands of years to get anywhere interesting. Space is just that empty. The speed that seems so fast to us—38,000 mph—is basically a crawl on a galactic scale. To reach Proxima Centauri, the nearest star, at its current speed, it would take Voyager about 73,000 years. And it's not even headed toward Proxima Centauri.
Real-World Context: Making Sense of 17 Kilometers Per Second
To truly wrap your head around the speed, you have to compare it to things we know.
- A Bullet: A high-powered rifle bullet travels at about 2,500 mph. Voyager is 15 times faster.
- The International Space Station: The ISS orbits Earth at 17,500 mph. Voyager is moving more than twice as fast as the astronauts above your head.
- A Commercial Jet: A Boeing 747 cruises at about 575 mph. Voyager is roughly 66 times faster than a jumbo jet.
If you were on board (ignoring the fact that there's no air, it's freezing, and there's no bathroom), you wouldn't feel the speed. There’s no wind resistance in a vacuum. You would just see the stars, seemingly frozen in place, as you drifted through the most profound silence imaginable.
The Misconception of "Acceleration"
Many people think Voyager is still accelerating. It isn't. Aside from tiny thruster bursts used to keep its antenna pointed at Earth, there is no propulsion. It is coasting on the momentum it gained decades ago. It’s the ultimate example of Newton’s First Law: an object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by an external force. In the vacuum of the interstellar medium, there are almost no external forces.
The only thing that really changes its speed now is the extremely faint pull of distant stars and the lingering, dying gasp of the Sun’s gravity.
Practical Next Steps for Space Enthusiasts
If you're fascinated by the speed and trajectory of these cosmic travelers, you don't have to just read about it. You can actually track them in real-time. NASA provides a live dashboard called "Eyes on the Solar System" where you can see exactly how far the Voyagers are from Earth and their current velocity down to the decimal point.
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Keep an eye on the mission status updates from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). As of 2024 and 2025, Voyager 1 has been having some computer "glitches" due to its age and the intense radiation it has endured. Engineers are literally performing long-distance forensics on 50-year-old code to keep the fastest-moving object in history alive.
Check out the "Deep Space Network" (DSN) Now website. It shows you which giant satellite dishes on Earth are currently talking to which spacecraft. Frequently, you’ll see "VGR1" or "VGR2" on the list, meaning a massive 70-meter dish in Canberra, Madrid, or Goldstone is currently catching a whisper from the fastest machines we’ve ever built.
The Voyagers aren't just numbers on a page. They are the furthest reach of human curiosity, moving at a clip that defies our everyday experience, carrying our history into a future where we might not even exist. Every second you spent reading this, Voyager 1 moved another 10 miles further away.
Actionable Insight: To get the most accurate, up-to-the-second speed of Voyager 1 and 2, visit the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Voyager Mission Status page. It features a real-time odometer that accounts for Earth's rotation and orbital speed, giving you the most precise answer to how fast the probes are moving relative to your current position on Earth.