How long is the crew "frozen" during the trip in "Aliens"?

Question

At the start of Aliens (1986), we learn that Ripley has been frozen for 57 years after the events of the first film. When Ripley is asked to accompany the Colonial Marines after contact with colonists on LV-426 is lost, the crew is frozen for the journey.

I assume the purpose of freezing the crew is because it's a long journey (years?), so that would make perfect sense. Before they leave, we also learn that there have been colonists on LV-426 for 20 years. If contact was lost, how long would it take Colonial Marines to reach the colonists?

Answer 1

The script for Aliens prefixes the scene with the marine crew waking from hypersleep with:

EXT. DEEP SPACE - THREE WEEKS LATER

So the short answer to the question is three weeks.

So you might ask, why the huge difference (almost 1000x different duration). The difference between the 3 weeks and the 57 years might be explained through multiple reasons:

• The escape craft that Ripley takes at the end of Alien may not have anything like the speed of the military ship, especially after 57 years of further development. The Nostromo itself was only a few more months away from Earth when it stopped at LV-426. So even a 'slow tanker' craft was capable of making that journey in less than a year.

• However Ripley is surprised how long she's been asleep, so it can't all be relative speed of the vehicles. The main factor is that the escape craft almost drifts undetected through known space before it is picked up and Ripley taken to Earth.

BURKE

You'd drifted right through the core systems. It's blind luck that deep-salvage team caught you when they...are you all right?

Answer 2

As we learn from the conversation of the two Weyland-Yutani Corporation officers in Hadley's Hope on LV-426, it takes 2 weeks to get and answer from Earth:

Assuming that the headquarters on Earth replies instantly, we can conclude that the distance is 1 light-week (as the communication signal would be travelling at the speed of light).

1 light-week is roughly 181 billion kilometers.

The fastest spacecraft ever built by humans as of now is the Parker Solar Probe which travels at 194 km per second. At this speed, it would take roughly 30 years to reach LV-426 from Earth.

Therefore, it would be pretty safe to conclude that the answer to the "how long" question is a few years the very least, depending on how fast that particular spacecraft of the future travels, and how long it takes the Earth headquarters to come up with the answer "don't ask" (that said, if they don't reply instantly, the distance will be shorter).

A period of a few years is also corroborated by the state in which the crew finds Hadley's Hope: the survivors would have been studying the aliens in the lab for several months the very least — after losing contact with Earth and apparently barricading themselves within the complex. It would then take some extra months/years for them to be killed.

The "three weeks" from the script would neither be possible (it would require the spaceship to travel at 100,000 km per second, which is 1/3 of the speed of light), nor would it make any sense to put the crew in deep frozen sleep for such a short period.

On the other hand, Rebecca "Newt" didn't age at all from the moment her parents found the trouble that killed the whole colony until she was found by the crew. Plot hole.