Space Travel

The most important space agencies in the world are NASA (in the USA), ESA (in Europe), and the Russian, Chinese, and Indian space programmes. They build rockets and teach astronauts how to fly them. Rockets take a long time to build and cost a lot of money, so they’re too expensive to use as normal transport.

A new space programme called Artemis is planning different kinds of missions which will help us to explore space. Some of these missions will take people to the moon and to Mars. The astronauts on these missions live on a giant space station called the Gateway, which will stay in space for more than ten years. On the Gateway, astronauts make and recycle air and water so they can live in space for a long time.

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Some businessmen are helping space agencies to build better and cheaper rockets because they are interested in space travel, and they want to send tourists into space and to the moon. Space tourists are people who are not astronauts, but want to visit space. It’s a very expensive adventure! In 2021, a Japanese billionaire businessman paid nearly $35 million to stay on the International Space Station for 12 days. He is called an ‘orbital space tourist’ because he travelled around the Earth.

‘Sub-orbital space tourists’ can go to see Earth from above, but they don’t orbit it. They fly higher than 100 km above Earth, which is where space starts, and for about five minutes they float inside the spaceship. One day, ‘lunar tourists’ will travel outside Earth’s orbit. They'll travel to the moon, and in the future they'll be able to go to Mars, too.