A starship, starcraft, or interstellar spacecraft is a theoretical spacecraft designed for traveling between planetary systems. The term is mostly found in science fiction. Reference to a "star-ship" appears as early as 1882 in Oahspe: A New Bible.
Artistic depiction of a fictional starship
Artist's conception of British Interplanetary Society's Project Daedalus (1978), a fusion powered interstellar probe
Interstellar travel is the hypothetical travel of spacecraft from one star system, solitary star, or planetary system to another. Interstellar travel is expected to prove much more difficult than interplanetary spaceflight due to the vast difference in the scale of the involved distances. Whereas the distance between any two planets in the Solar System is less than 55 astronomical units (AU), stars are typically separated by hundreds of thousands of AU, causing these distances to typically be expressed instead in light-years. Because of the vastness of these distances, non-generational interstellar travel based on known physics would need to occur at a high percentage of the speed of light; even so, travel times would be long, at least decades and perhaps millennia or longer.
A Bussard ramjet, one of many possible methods that could serve to propel spacecraft
Modern Pulsed Fission Propulsion Concept
Artist's depiction of a hypothetical Wormhole Induction Propelled Spacecraft, based loosely on the 1994 "warp drive" paper of Miguel Alcubierre