How long would it take to get to Uranus?
326 yearsby jet, without stopping
Uranus comes within 2,570 million km of Earth at closest approach. In a straight line at airliner speed that's 326 years of continuous flight. The fastest spacecraft ever launched would need 5.0 years.
▶ See how far Uranus really is
The honest timetable
Family car (100 km/h)
2,932 years
Jet airliner (900 km/h)
326 years
New Horizons — fastest launch ever (58,500 km/h)
5.0 years
Light (299,792 km/s)
2.4 hours
Those are straight-line times at the moment of closest approach — the absolute best case. Real spacecraft can't fly straight there: they follow long curved transfer orbits, sling around planets for free speed, and have to slow down at the other end. Voyager 2 — still the only spacecraft to visit — took 8½ years to fly past in January 1986.
Its 98° axial tilt means each pole spends ~42 years in continuous sunlight, then 42 years in darkness.
See the gap for yourself: open Uranus in the interactive view, switch to 1:1 scale, and try to find Earth from there.
Keep going
✓ Facts verified July 2026
Every figure on this page is a real, rounded value checked against primary sources. Found something out of date? See how we keep it accurate.