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What is Space Travel?
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 starts 62 miles (100 kilometers) above the Earth's crust, at a point called the Karman Line, and it continues for a distance that appears to be infinite, interrupted periodically by celestial bodies such as stars, planets, and so forth. Humans have long had romantic associations with traveling in space, with people considering space “the final frontier,” as they famously say on Star Trek.
Humans have been intrigued by the night sky for centuries, tracking the movements of stars, planets, comets, and other features in the sky and pondering the mysteries of the heavens. In the 20th century, the fascination with space took on a whole new level of excitement when humans successfully launched manned spacecraft out of the Earth's atmosphere, putting astronauts in space and on the Moon. With the proof 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 to enter the field, developing space planes and offering commercial flights.
In the 20th century, travel in space was restricted to astronauts who worked for various governments, and it was primarily performed for research purposes. It allowed people to collect samples from the Moon, maintain space telescopes such as the Hubble Telescope, and eventually to perform research on the International Space Station, a structure that orbits the Earth and houses astronauts from several nations at any given time.
While space travel for research is certainly admirable and important, many people are more interested in the potential for it as a form of recreation, tourism, or exploration. Civilians began purchasing tickets for tourist flights into space in the early 2000s, sometimes going on brief suborbital flights in which they barely entered space, and sometimes spending several days in space, exploring the International Space Station and enjoying the experience of being in space.
The potential for space travel is infinite, just like the universe, bounded only by human technology. Many people hope that the dreams of science fiction, such as massive ships which can travel between galaxies, will someday be realized. People might explore the rest of the solar system and galaxy, learning more about the nature of the universe and potentially leading to a discovery of life beyond the boundaries of Earth.
Discussion Comments
Thank you for helping my friends and I with our project.
@Qohe1et: Well yeah, but who knows? Maybe in the future we might get to this spiritual world, but who knows? It might be very soon, and it might be a very long time.
@ShadowGenius
Sounds like a spiritual realm to me. I'm just saying it, I know everybody else is thinking it. I know that doesn't sound too "academic," but I'm sure it will be common knowledge in the near future. We now know for sure that science as we know it can only go so far.
@Leonidas226
New innovations and theories are being presented which build off of the intuitive approach fostered by Einstein, Cantor, and other great thinkers like them. These models think outside of the box. If there are other distant worlds beyond our own space-time continuum, they probably wouldn't exist "physically" beyond our universe, but would envelop and transcend our universe in ways that we really can't understand, except by analogy.
How could we ever know that space is the final frontier? From quantum physics and cosmology we have already gathered that rules change depending on where you are in space, and that our theories of particles are not consistent. It seems to be the case that we are simply trapped inside a projected dimension. There are other dimensions which we don't even know how to reach, and it is likely that they exist everywhere, beyond our perception. It could also be that they are beyond our universe in a physical sense.
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