Verified answer

No, not unless we can find some way around that pesky old Einstein and his Theory of Special Relativity. Something about matter can NEVER reach or exceed the speed of light. This is not a technology problem that can be solved by 20 or 100 or 1000 years of creative engineering development, it is a basic physics problem, and physical laws are REALLY hard to break!

Oh, and the space program has NOT been halted, the International Space Station is still operating, the worst problem at the moment is we have to pay the Russians to get us there and back. The Orion program is underdevelopment, and someday when we have a real president again we might be able to use it to take us back to the moon and beyond. And of course the unmanned program continues, the Curiosity Rover has just begun its exploration of Mars, the Juno probe is on its way to Jupiter, New Horizons is heading for Pluto, and the Dawn spacecraft has left Vesta on its way to Ceres. Also, the James Webb Space Telescope is under construction. Sounds like a pretty active program to me!

The space program has not been halted. Have you not noticed that $2.5 billion robot roaming the surface of Mars the past few months?

Interstellar travel can someday certainly be possible. However, traveling to even the nearest stars within a human life time is not. At least not with current technology. Even if we could get to the nearest star, which is a little more than four light years away, why should we? There aren't any planets that can harbor life, so why spend hundreds of billions of dollars to go there? There are several planets about 20 light years away that could possibly harbor life, but it is a real long shot. Besides, even if a spacecraft was capable of traveling at the speed of light, it would still take 20 years to get there. Even accelerating to the speed of light is impossible. So interstellar travel in the next fifty years? Not a chance.

Of course. Voyager 1 will be in Interstellar Space in about 100 years. If you mean those describes in the movies or the practical use of interstellar space, then not until the next century at least.

If we could shrink our technology down to the size of a dust particle then it might be possible.

You can probably prove that an object with a mass of a milligram would "only" require the energy of about a hundred tons of TNT to move at around 99.9% of light speed. This calculation includes the relativistic correction (and I hope I calculated correctly, I'll check when im not so busy).

Hence it is theoretically and practically possible to thrust such a microprobe into interstellar space to arrive at the nearest stars in a few decades.

Clearly this is the direction that future technology should take.

As physicist Richard Feynman said: "There's plenty of room at the bottom".

Cheers!

no, maybe after a hundred years with probes