Interplanetary transportation of passengers and freight is primarily done by teleportation. A lossless method of copying data was invented in the late 21st century, which lead to the invention of a prototype large-scale teleportation device a decade later. Early teleportation was limited in scope and expensive in terms of power consumption. An number of advancements in those fields revolutionized the science, and teleportation stations shifted into the mainstream in the late 2160s. Today, teleportation is a safe*, efficient, and low-cost way to get around the solar system.
Scientifically speaking, teleportation works by scanning a specific object or person, creating an identical data copy of that object or person, and sending it at the speed of light to the target destination. As beaming the data is limited to the speed of light, interplanetary teleportation times vary based on the distance between the start point and the destination. As planets in the solar system are constantly moving and the distance between them is constantly fluctuating, teleportation times are constantly changing. For example, a trip from Mars to Earth, or vice versa, takes an average of fifteen minutes. The longest recorded time for the same trip sits at just over twenty-two minutes, and the minimum recorded time is at just under four minutes.
Objects, animals, food, vehicles, and anything else one could imagine can be teleported the same way as a person, though standard teleportation stations are not large enough for transporting big items or significant amounts of supplies. Thus, there are industrial teleporters meant for such large-scale teleportation. These industrial-sized teleporters are typically unavailable to the public, however, due to the expenses required to make and maintain them, and are usually only created and used by corporations with a need for them.
Teleportation stations are always created and established as pairs, and only teleport objects to their paired station. One cannot step onto a teleportation station with a destination of Saturn and end up on Mars, or enter a station paired with one on Earth and be sent out of the solar system.
Personal teleportation and personal teleportation devices are beyond the scope of current technology; attempts have been made to make teleportation stations more portable and energy efficient, but none have been terribly successful. As for privately owned teleportation stations, licenses for them have been granted to a number of corporations and occasionally individuals, but they are extremely expensive to both build and maintain, and their power requirements are exorbitant.
More traditional transport using spaceships is still available, of course, though trips in this fashion are significantly longer than teleportation. Depending on the start point and the destination, conventional space travel can take anywhere from a month to a year. The last official public spaceship line was decommissioned in 2176, and many of the options available in the current year are specialized cruises or gimmicky tours of the solar system for the casual space enthusiast.
* Studies have shown that 99.92% of teleportation trips are successful. Margin of error is 0.5%. Potential side effects include but are not limited to nausea, vomiting, erroneous limb generation, creation of multiple copies of teleported items, and death.
