lasting around 57 years (over 5 million years on Earth clocks). Unfortunately, sustaining 1-gee acceleration for years is easier said than done, as illustrated by the maximum payload to launch mass ratios shown in the figure at right.

In curved spacetime

In the language of general relativity, the components of an object's acceleration four-vector A (whose magnitude is proper acceleration) are related to elements of the four-velocity via a covariant derivative

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