Space travel involves entering space beyond Earth’s atmosphere, with humans launching manned spacecraft in the 20th century for research purposes. Private companies now offer commercial flights for tourism and exploration, with potential for further space exploration and discovery of life beyond Earth.
Space travel is a form of travel in which passengers enter space, the vast region outside the protective envelope of the Earth’s atmosphere. Space begins 62 miles (100 kilometers) above the Earth’s crust, at a point called the Karman Line, and continues for a distance that seems infinite, periodically interrupted by celestial bodies such as stars, planets, and so on. Humans have long had romantic associations with space travel, with people considering space “the final frontier,” as they say in Star Trek.
Humans have been intrigued by the night sky for centuries, following the movements of stars, planets, comets, and other sky features, and pondering the mysteries of the heavens. In the 20th century, fascination with space took on a whole new level of excitement when humans successfully launched manned spacecraft out of the Earth’s atmosphere, taking astronauts into space and onto the Moon. With evidence that manned spaceflight was possible, the concept of space travel began to seem less like a pipe dream and more like a reality, and private companies began entering the field, developing space planes and offering commercial flights.
In the 20th century, space travel was limited to astronauts working for various governments and was mostly done for research purposes. It has allowed people to collect samples from the Moon, maintain space telescopes like the Hubble Telescope, and ultimately perform research on the International Space Station, a facility that orbits the Earth and houses astronauts from different nations at any given time.
While space travel for research is certainly admirable and important, many people are more interested in the potential as a form of recreation, tourism or exploration. Civilians began buying tickets for space sightseeing flights in the early 2000s, sometimes making short suborbital flights where they barely entered space, and sometimes spending several days in space, exploring the International Space Station and enjoying the experience of be in space.
The potential for space travel is infinite, just like the universe, limited only by human technology. Many people hope that science fiction dreams, such as huge ships that can travel between galaxies, will one day come true. People could explore the rest of the solar system and galaxy, learning more about the nature of the universe and potentially leading to the discovery of life beyond the borders of the Earth.
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