Look up. Just 62 miles above us lies the border of space. About an hour’s drive if you were to make the journey by car. Or three minutes if you take the trip in a rocket ship.
“Space travel, in three words, is ‘you go fast,’ ” says William Shatner in a documentary about the space flight he took last October. The Star Trek actor flew 347,539 feet aboveground in a four-person spacecraft built by Jeff Bezos’s rocket company, Blue Origin. “I’m overwhelmed,” Shatner exclaimed upon returning to Earth. “Everybody in the world needs to do this.”
Yet until about 60 years ago, such a high-speed journey was the stuff of science fiction. Then came the launch of Sputnik, the Apollo missions, space shuttles, and Dennis Tito, who, in 2001, bought a ticket to ride on a Russian rocket and showed the world that private citizens could boldly go into space. Since then, more than 600 people have made the voyage, and countless uncrewed craft and satellites have traveled even farther.
Not only do these flights challenge the notion of space as a place far, far away; they’re also transforming the way we
