Starfield player spends seven hours flying to the surface of Pluto, it doesn't work

The author Alanah Pearce from Sony Santa Monica set out to answer a question that many have been asking since getting their hands on Starfield - can you fly to the surface of a planet? After seven hours of venturing towards Pluto, she found out that the answer is a clear "No."

Pearce set the flight path, went to sleep, and let the stream continue so that everyone could follow her experiment. The idea was to find out if you could seamlessly reach the surface without using fast travel or if it was truly mandatory. Obviously, Bethesda does not want you to manually land, as it takes seven hours, but even if you endure this long wait, you find nothing. Pearce simply passed through Pluto and landed... inside it? And in classic Bethesda style, the entire planet disappeared.

"Am I meeting God here? Do you believe He is on the other side?" Pearce said as she approached the destination. "We simply passed through! But it still reads zero (km), am I inside Pluto? What happens if I turn around from here? It still reads zero... in front of me [...] But it's simply invisible from the inside [...] I expected there to be something inside. How long does it take to get out of Pluto?"

While the stream was running, Pearce went to sleep, but she set a timer to wake her up every 30 minutes to readjust the spacecraft's flight path so she wouldn't veer off course. This is because Starfield simulates planetary orbits. As she flew towards it for seven hours, it was moving away from her, and she had to compensate to ensure the entire experiment didn't fail.

This puts a few things into perspective. Firstly, fast travel is necessary for landing, even if you have the fastest ship with the best propulsion. It simply takes too long to get close enough, and even if you do, there is nothing there.

Secondly, flying between systems could be theoretically possible since there seems to be no boundaries, but if it already takes seven hours to reach the surface of Pluto, it would likely take hundreds of hours to traverse the galaxy.

So, if you've had enough of the many loading screens during space travel, I'm sorry to burst the illusion - there is no other way to move around.