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Everything you need to know about space travel (almost)

We're a long way from home...

Paul Parsons

When did we first start exploring space?

The first human-made object to go into space was a German V2 missile , launched on a test flight in 1942. Although uncrewed, it reached an altitude of 189km (117 miles).

Former Nazi rocket scientists were later recruited by both America and Russia (often at gunpoint in the latter case), where they were instrumental in developing Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) – rockets capable of carrying nuclear weapons from one side of the planet to the other.

It was these super-missiles that formed the basis for the space programmes of both post-war superpowers. As it happened, Russia was the first to reach Earth orbit, when it launched the uncrewed Sputnik 1 in October 1957, followed a month later by Sputnik 2, carrying the dog Laika – the first live animal in space.

The USA sent its first uncrewed satellite, Explorer 1, into orbit soon after, in January 1958. A slew of robotic spaceflights followed, from both sides of the Atlantic, before Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin piloted Vostok 1 into orbit on 12 April 1961, to become the first human being in space . And from there the space race proper began, culminating in Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin becoming the first people to walk on the Moon as part of NASA's Apollo programme .

Why is space travel important?

Space exploration is the future. It satisfies the human urge to explore and to travel, and in the years and decades to come it could even provide our species with new places to call home – especially relevant now, as Earth becomes increasingly crowded .

Extending our reach into space is also necessary for the advancement of science. Space telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope and probes to the distant worlds of the Solar System are continually updating, and occasionally revolutionising, our understanding of astronomy and physics.

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But there are also some very practical reasons, such as mining asteroids for materials that are extremely rare here on Earth.

One example is the huge reserve of the chemical isotope helium-3 thought to be locked away in the soil on the surface of the Moon . This isotope is a potential fuel for future nuclear fusion reactors – power stations that tap into the same source of energy as the Sun. Unlike other fusion fuels, helium-3 gives off no hard-to-contain and deadly neutron radiation.

However, for this to happen the first challenge to overcome is how to build a base on the Moon. In 2019, China's Chang’e 4 mission marked the beginning of a new space race to conquer the Moon, signalling their intent to build a permanent lunar base , while the NASA Artemis mission plans to build a space station, called Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway , providing a platform to ferry astronauts to the Moon's surface.

Could humans travel into interstellar space and how would we get there?

It’s entirely feasible that human explorers will visit the furthest reaches of our Solar System. The stars, however, are another matter. Interstellar space is so vast that it takes light – the fastest thing we know of in the Universe – years, centuries and millennia to traverse it. Faster-than-light travel may be possible one day, but is unlikely to become a reality in our lifetimes.

It’s not impossible that humans might one day cross this cosmic gulf, though it won’t be easy. The combustion-powered rocket engines of today certainly aren’t up to the job – they just don’t use fuel efficiently enough. Instead, interstellar spacecraft may create a rocket-like propulsion jet using electric and magnetic fields. This so-called ‘ ion drive ’ technology has already been tested aboard uncrewed Solar System probes.

Another possibility is to push spacecraft off towards the stars using the light from a high-powered laser . A consortium of scientists calling themselves Breakthrough Starshot is already planning to send a flotilla of tiny robotic probes to our nearest star, Proxima Centauri, using just this method.

Though whether human astronauts could survive such punishing acceleration, or the decades-long journey through deep space, remains to be seen.

How do we benefit from space exploration?

Pushing forward the frontiers of science is the stated goal of many space missions . But even the development of space travel technology itself can lead to unintended yet beneficial ‘spin-off’ technologies with some very down-to-earth applications.

Notable spin-offs from the US space programme, NASA, include memory foam mattresses, artificial hearts, and the lubricant spray WD-40. Doubtless, there are many more to come.

Read more about space exploration:

• The next giant leaps: The UK missions getting us to the Moon
• Move over, Mars: why we should look further afield for future human colonies
• Everything you need to know about the Voyager mission
• 6 out-of-this-world experiments recreating space on Earth

Space exploration also instils a sense of wonder, it reminds us that there are issues beyond our humdrum planet and its petty squabbles, and without doubt it helps to inspire each new generation of young scientists. It’s also an insurance policy. We’re now all too aware that global calamities can and do happen – for instance, climate change and the giant asteroid that smashed into the Earth 65 million years ago, leading to the total extinction of the dinosaurs .

The lesson for the human species is that we keep all our eggs in one basket at our peril. On the other hand, a healthy space programme, and the means to travel to other worlds, gives us an out.

Is space travel dangerous?

In short, yes – very. Reaching orbit means accelerating up to around 28,000kph (17,000mph, or 22 times the speed of sound ). If anything goes wrong at that speed, it’s seldom good news.

Then there’s the growing cloud of space junk to contend with in Earth's orbit – defunct satellites, discarded rocket stages and other detritus – all moving just as fast. A five-gram bolt hitting at orbital speed packs as much energy as a 200kg weight dropped from the top of an 18-storey building.

And getting to space is just the start of the danger. The principal hazard once there is cancer-producing radiation – the typical dose from one day in space is equivalent to what you’d receive over an entire year back on Earth, thanks to the planet’s atmosphere and protective magnetic field.

Add to that the icy cold airless vacuum , the need to bring all your own food and water, plus the effects of long-duration weightlessness on bone density, the brain and muscular condition – including that of the heart – and it soon becomes clear that venturing into space really isn’t for the faint-hearted.

When will space travel be available to everyone?

It’s already happening – that is, assuming your pockets are deep enough. The first self-funded ‘space tourist’ was US businessman Dennis Tito, who in 2001 spent a week aboard the International Space Station (ISS) for the cool sum of $20m (£15m).

Virgin Galactic has long been promising to take customers on short sub-orbital hops into space – where passengers get to experience rocket propulsion and several minutes of weightlessness, before gliding back to a runway landing on Earth, all for $250k (£190k). In late July 2020, the company unveiled the finished cabin in its SpaceShipTwo vehicle, suggesting that commercial spaceflights may begin shortly.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s SpaceX , which in May 2020 became the first private company to launch a human crew to Earth orbit aboard the Crew Dragon , plans to offer stays on the ISS for $35k (£27k) per night. SpaceX is now prototyping its huge Starship vehicle , which is designed to take 100 passengers from Earth to as far afield as Mars for around $20k (£15k) per head. Musk stated in January that he hoped to be operating 1,000 Starships by 2050.

10 Short Lessons in Space Travel by Paul Parsons is out now (£9.99, Michael O'Mara)

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Ramin Skibba

Here’s a Sneak Peek at the Far-Out Future of Space Travel

From Star Trek–like medical scanners to concepts for off-planet agriculture like in The Expanse , science fiction has often inspired actual research at NASA and other space agencies. This week, researchers are meeting at a virtual conference for the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program to brainstorm and investigate sci-fi-like ideas, some of which may very well shape the missions of the next 20 years.

A drone helicopter hopping about a Martian crater or a lunar rover that maps moon ice might have seemed far-fetched a decade ago, but the copter actually flew earlier this year, and the rover is in the planning stages. Now the conference organizers have solicited proposals for more exploratory projects, a few of which the agency might eventually fund. “We invest in long-term, far-out technologies, and most of them probably won’t work. The ones that do might change everything. It’s high risk, high payoff, almost like a venture capital investment portfolio,” says Jason Derleth, the NIAC program executive.

The program isn’t focused on incremental developments but instead seeks game-changing technologies, ones that are 10 times better than the state of the art, Derleth says. He likens it to the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which also explores extremely speculative concepts but developed the precursor to the modern internet, among other innovations.

The annual conference , which continues through Thursday, September 23, is publicly viewable on NIAC’s livestream . Some of the proposals discussed so far—such as for new ways to launch foldable space stations or astronaut habitats, or to extract resources from other worlds—revolve around the understanding that, for lengthy space voyages, you have to make the most of every rocket launch.

The next generation of space travelers will need resources for survival, for protective structures, and to fuel the journey further or return home. “This leaves us with two options: Take everything with us, like if you were going on a hiking trip in the desert. Or find new and creative ways to use whatever is already there,” says Amelia Greig, an aerospace engineer at University of Texas at El Paso, who presented at the conference on Tuesday.

To aid creative reuse of lunar resources, Greig and her colleagues propose a technology called ablative arc mining, which would slurp up water ice and the kinds of metals that could be used as building materials. “It’s like using controlled lightning bolts to mine the moon,” she said during her presentation. Her concept describes a van-sized moon crawler—named after the Jawa sandcrawlers of Star Wars —that picks a spot, and then places a ringed device that it carries on its front end parallel to the ground. Electric arcs zap across the ring, which can be made as large as a meter in diameter, ripping particles from the moon’s surface. Those particles, now charged, can then be moved and sorted by the machine’s electromagnetic fields. That way, rather than scoping just one resource, a single piece of equipment could fill one container with water, another with oxygen attached to other elements, and others with silicon, aluminum, or other metal particles.

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An artistic representation of the ablative arc mining system deployed into a crater near the lunar south pole.

But, like all early concepts, it faces practical challenges that would have to be overcome: In this case, the moon’s dusty environment could cause problems by getting stuck in the machinery, which would have to be made dust-proof. To hunt for water ice, the crawlers also will have to trundle into permanently shadowed craters, which contain water at about 6 percent by mass but are extremely cold and dark. The crawlers’ electronics would have to be designed to operate in those rugged conditions and with a non-solar power source. It also would be tough for any astronaut to oversee them, though they could monitor the mining from the crater’s rim. NASA estimates that permanent lunar settlements will need around 10,000 kilograms of water per year. That would require at least 20 of these kinds of crawlers roving about, gradually collecting those supplies, unless this technology was supplemented with something else. For now, Greig just hopes to test a smaller demonstration version of the crawler in a few years.

Space mining projects have also prompted ethical questions. For example, scientists and others have raised concerns about lunar mining permanently changing the look of the moon in the night sky. But Greig points out that ablative arc mining wouldn’t look like the environmentally harmful pit mines on Earth; the mining region could be spread out, making some craters only slightly deeper. And as for sustainability issues, she says, “there’s enough water to last human settlements hundreds of years.”

Stop-motion representation of the arc mining process on the lunar surface.

As a potential launching point for moon-goers and expeditions to deep space, NASA has proposed a space station orbiting the moon called the Lunar Gateway . But Zachary Manchester, a roboticist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, argues that the limited size of rockets allows few options for launching large structures for a lunar station. “If you want something that’s bigger than a rocket fairing, which is at most a few meters, it has to get launched in multiple rockets and assembled in orbit, like the International Space Station . Or it has to somehow get scrunched up into that rocket and then somehow expand out,” Manchester says.

At a session Wednesday, he and Jeffrey Lipton, a mechanical engineer at the University of Washington, proposed a space station that would fit into that confined space. Then, once deployed, it would unfold autonomously, like origami, into a full-sized structure, some 150 times bigger than its folded size. Preliminary designs involve a many-jointed structure made of titanium, aluminum, or another metal.

Since future astronauts will likely be on-station for a while, it would need to rotate to generate artificial gravity to avoid the deleterious health effects of prolonged periods in zero-G. But humans are sensitive to spinning; no one wants to live on a merry-go-round. “If you try to build a rotating space habitat, the only way to do it without making people motion-sick is to spin at up to two revolutions per minute,” Manchester says. To produce Earth-like gravity, such a space station needs to be a kilometer across, he argues. Yet squishing such a massive structure into a tiny space until it’s deployed poses a significant engineering challenge. In addition, to make their idea a reality, Manchester and Lipton ultimately need to figure out how to make the unfolding process not get jammed, despite the structure’s thousands of links and joints.

An artist's illustration of the Lunar Gateway in orbit around the moon.

Like packing for the biggest road trip ever, NASA will face similar challenges when fitting everything needed for moon or Mars structures onto rockets. To lighten the load, some scientists have suggested using Martian rocks as material for 3D-printing parts of structures. (A simulated lunar regolith is currently being test-printed aboard the International Space Station.) But Lynn Rothschild, an astrobiologist at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, has a completely different idea: making structures out of mushrooms—or “mycotecture,” as she calls it. “The humble mushroom can provide an unbelievable building material. It’s completely natural, compostable, and the ultimate green building,” Rothschild says.

Although fungi could be used to grow the material for actual bricks and mortar that astronauts could use for construction, the best kind of space habitat would be assembled before they even arrive. Her team’s proposal involves launching a lander that would include plastic scaffolding and fungal mycelia, white filaments that make the root structure of fungi. (Like yeasts, mycelia can survive for a while without being fed.) The scaffolding would be a lattice of square hollow plastic cells, stitched into layers to make the shape of the final structure. On Mars, it would inflate to perhaps the size of a garage. Using water and oxygen—at least some of which would likely have been sourced or generated on Mars—the fungi would grow along those stitches and fill the cells, eventually turning a tent-like structure into a full-fledged building.

For strength and protection from space radiation, Rothschild thinks some kind of dark fungi could do the trick. “Black fungi—they make you say ‘Blecch,’ they look kind of disgusting. But the black pigment tends to protect from radiation, protecting the fungi and the people inside the habitat,” Rothschild says. She hopes to send a prototype to the International Space Station in the next few years.

Unlike the moon, Mars was once friendly to life . So Rothschild is designing the scaffolding to prevent any chance of renegade fungi escaping beyond the astronauts’ structures. (The last thing NASA wants is for a search for life on other worlds to turn up something that actually came from Earth .) In her team’s design, the fungi are essentially “double-bagged,” with an extra layer in the plastic lattice to ensure they all stay in.

To address those issues, space agencies have “planetary protection” experts like Moogega Cooper, supervisor of the Biotechnology and Planetary Protection Group at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who spoke at the NIAC conference. “Anywhere you are possibly interacting with liquid water that is inherent to the place, your exploring would definitely catch our attention. Where you find water you may find life,” she says. The United States is one of the original signatories of the Outer Space Treaty, which requires that every space agency or company that wants to send a mission to an alien world make sure the spacecraft and all the equipment aboard are sterilized.

While the NIAC program has a budget of just $8.5 million per year, it supports many exploratory projects. A few of the ideas presented at this week’s conference could go on to the next level, or could get picked up by other agencies or private companies, as in the case of an earlier proposal to propel a smartphone-sized spacecraft to another stellar system with lasers, which inspired Breakthrough Starshot, a privately funded enterprise. Among a few of the topics on the menu for the rest of Wednesday and Thursday: multiple presentations about moon-based radio telescopes , as well as one about personal rovers for astronauts (since Artemis astronauts will be carrying 220-pound packs) and one about planting mushrooms in space regolith to make a more Earth-like growing soil.

“All of the concepts that are awarded are pushing the edge of our understanding, and they really allow us to take science fiction and make it science fact,” Cooper says.

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The future of spaceflight—from orbital vacations to humans on Mars

NASA aims to travel to the moon again—and beyond. Here’s a look at the 21st-century race to send humans into space.

Welcome to the 21st-century space race, one that could potentially lead to 10-minute space vacations, orbiting space hotels , and humans on Mars. Now, instead of warring superpowers battling for dominance in orbit, private companies are competing to make space travel easier and more affordable. This year, SpaceX achieved a major milestone— launching humans to the International Space Station (ISS) from the United States —but additional goalposts are on the star-studded horizon.

Private spaceflight

Private spaceflight is not a new concept . In the United States, commercial companies played a role in the aerospace industry right from the start: Since the 1960s, NASA has relied on private contractors to build spacecraft for every major human spaceflight program, starting with Project Mercury and continuing until the present.

Today, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program is expanding on the agency’s relationship with private companies. Through it, NASA is relying on SpaceX and Boeing to build spacecraft capable of carrying humans into orbit. Once those vehicles are built, both companies retain ownership and control of the craft, and NASA can send astronauts into space for a fraction of the cost of a seat on Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft.

SpaceX, which established a new paradigm by developing reusable rockets , has been running regular cargo resupply missions to the International Space Station since 2012. And in May 2020, the company’s Crew Dragon spacecraft carried NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the ISS , becoming the first crewed mission to launch from the United States in nearly a decade. The mission, called Demo-2, is scheduled to return to Earth in August. Boeing is currently developing its Starliner spacecraft and hopes to begin carrying astronauts to the ISS in 2021.

Other companies, such as Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic , are specializing in sub-orbital space tourism. Test launch video from inside the cabin of Blue Origin’s New Shepard shows off breathtaking views of our planet and a relatively calm journey for its first passenger, a test dummy cleverly dubbed “Mannequin Skywalker.” Virgin Galactic is running test flights on its sub-orbital spaceplane , which will offer paying customers roughly six minutes of weightlessness during its journey through Earth’s atmosphere.

With these and other spacecraft in the pipeline, countless dreams of zero-gravity somersaults could soon become a reality—at least for passengers able to pay the hefty sums for the experience.

Early U.S. Spaceflight

Looking to the moon

Moon missions are essential to the exploration of more distant worlds. After a long hiatus from the lunar neighborhood, NASA is again setting its sights on Earth’s nearest celestial neighbor with an ambitious plan to place a space station in lunar orbit sometime in the next decade. Sooner, though, the agency’s Artemis program , a sister to the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s, is aiming to put the first woman (and the next man) on the lunar surface by 2024.

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Extended lunar stays build the experience and expertise needed for the long-term space missions required to visit other planets. As well, the moon may also be used as a forward base of operations from which humans learn how to replenish essential supplies, such as rocket fuel and oxygen, by creating them from local material.

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Such skills are crucial for the future expansion of human presence into deeper space, which demands more independence from Earth-based resources. And although humans have visited the moon before, the cratered sphere still harbors its own scientific mysteries to be explored—including the presence and extent of water ice near the moon's south pole, which is one of the top target destinations for space exploration .

NASA is also enlisting the private sector to help it reach the moon. It has awarded three contracts to private companies working on developing human-rated lunar landers—including both Blue Origin and SpaceX. But the backbone of the Artemis program relies on a brand new, state-of-the-art spacecraft called Orion .

Archival Photos of Spaceflight

Currently being built and tested, Orion—like Crew Dragon and Starliner—is a space capsule similar to the spacecraft of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, as well as Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft. But the Orion capsule is larger and can accommodate a four-person crew. And even though it has a somewhat retro design, the capsule concept is considered to be safer and more reliable than NASA’s space shuttle—a revolutionary vehicle for its time, but one that couldn’t fly beyond Earth’s orbit and suffered catastrophic failures.

Capsules, on the other hand, offer launch-abort capabilities that can protect astronauts in case of a rocket malfunction. And, their weight and design mean they can also travel beyond Earth’s immediate neighborhood, potentially ferrying humans to the moon, Mars, and beyond.

A new era in spaceflight

By moving into orbit with its Commercial Crew Program and partnering with private companies to reach the lunar surface, NASA hopes to change the economics of spaceflight by increasing competition and driving down costs. If space travel truly does become cheaper and more accessible, it’s possible that private citizens will routinely visit space and gaze upon our blue, watery home world—either from space capsules, space stations, or even space hotels like the inflatable habitats Bigelow Aerospace intends to build .

The United States isn’t the only country with its eyes on the sky. Russia regularly launches humans to the International Space Station aboard its Soyuz spacecraft. China is planning a large, multi-module space station capable of housing three taikonauts, and has already launched two orbiting test vehicles—Tiangong-1 and Tiangong-2, both of which safely burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere after several years in space.

Now, more than a dozen countries have the ability to launch rockets into Earth orbit. A half-dozen space agencies have designed spacecraft that shed the shackles of Earth’s gravity and traveled to the moon or Mars. And if all goes well, the United Arab Emirates will join that list in the summer of 2020 when its Hope spacecraft heads to the red planet . While there are no plans yet to send humans to Mars, these missions—and the discoveries that will come out of them—may help pave the way.

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The Past, Present, and Future of Space Tourism

It’s been more than 20 years since the first space tourist took flight, but there’s a lot more to come in the emerging industry of space tourism..

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Are space vacations in our near future?

Illustration by Delcan & Co.

When Austrian journalist Gerhard Pistor requested to book a trip to the moon in 1964, his travel agency forwarded his query to Pan American World Airways—Pan Am. The now-defunct airline accepted the reservation and noted that the first flights to the moon would take off in the year 2000. So began a years-long space-tourism marketing stunt in which some 93,000 people joined Pan Am’s First Moon Flights Club, a waiting list for the first civilian trips to the moon.

That, of course, never happened. But as the Space Age advanced, space tourism did, too. In 2001, American entrepreneur Dennis Tito became the first true space tourist, launching aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft and spending more than a week aboard the International Space Station (ISS)—reportedly spending $20 million to do so.

Today, we’re in a new era of space tourism, with growing numbers of civilians leaving Earth for brief moments through private enterprises focusing on such endeavors. And in the coming decades, we may even see the dawn of regular long-duration space vacations.

The Birth of Space Tourism

After the Apollo era, companies investigated opportunities to send civilians rather than government professionals—that is, NASA astronauts—into space. In the 1970s, manufacturing conglomerate Rockwell International, a contractor for NASA’s Space Shuttle program, researched the possibility of passenger modules that could fit into the payload bay of the Space Shuttle, with similar concepts developed by other companies over the subsequent decade. None came to fruition.

NASA did open up its spaceflights to nongovernment professionals, though, primarily as payload specialists, who were tasked to complete specific in-flight projects by companies outside of NASA. NASA also developed the Teacher in Space and Journalist in Space programs to open up spaceflight to several civilians annually. But the programs were ended after the Challenger disaster in 1986, which killed the first Teacher in Space participant, Christa McAuliffe, along with her six crew members. The program was considered for a revival, but that, too, was ended after a Space Shuttle failure—this one, the fatal Columbia disaster in 2003.

Space tourism finally became successful in 2001 with Tito’s launch to the ISS. That trip was organized by a company called Space Adventures, which ultimately saw eight other space tourists take trips to the ISS through 2009, each launched on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. But these tourist flights ended after the retirement of NASA’s Space Shuttle program in 2011. Because the only spacecraft capable of human spaceflight at that time was the Soyuz , every seat on every launch was needed for professional astronauts from around the world, and tourism was put on the back burner.

Space Tourism Today

For the past decade, private space tourism companies have been developing spacecraft to take passengers on suborbital flights, which bring them to the edge of space and back down to Earth in relatively short “hops” lasting anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours. By comparison, the first nine Space Adventure clients flew orbital missions that encircled the planet for days.

The method of flight varies by company. Blue Origin , for instance, launches vertically like most rockets, whereas Virgin Galactic flies a rocket-powered space plane that is launched from the belly of a carrier aircraft. While these two companies are the only suborbital companies cleared by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for launches—both have already carried passengers to space—other companies are preparing for liftoff. That includes space-balloon companies Space Perspective and World View , which offer a far more leisurely journey than rocket-powered ascents, gently lifting passengers to high altitudes in a high-tech version of a hot air balloon. Across all suborbital space tourism companies, prices range from approximately $50,000 to $450,000 per seat.

Orbital tourism has also made a comeback, though at far higher prices: tens of millions of dollars per seat. SpaceX , which is contracted by NASA to launch astronauts to the ISS, is also available for private charters. In 2021, entrepreneur Jared Isaacman organized the Inspiration4 mission, the world’s first all-civilian mission, during which he and three crewmates orbited the Earth in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule as a fundraiser for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. In 2022, SpaceX provided the launch vehicle for the Axiom mission 1 (Ax-1), the world’s first all-civilian mission to the ISS, during which four crew members spent eight days onboard the orbiting research facility.

Space Adventures is also back in business; it organized a flight to the ISS for Japanese entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa, who traveled to space in December 2021. Maezawa intends to charter SpaceX’s under-development Starship spacecraft for a moon mission called the dearMoon project, taking with him eight civilians on the journey.

What’s Next for Space Tourism

Space tourism remains in its nascent phase, with plenty of work to be done. Existing suborbital companies are still tweaking launch vehicles and increasing launch cadence to approach regularity, while upcoming ones are waiting for FAA approval to begin their operations. And, hopefully, the space tourism companies will eventually be able to reduce the cost of flights, too.

But many enterprises are already eyeing the future when it comes to space tourism—a future in low-Earth orbit (LEO). NASA itself is investing in that future through the Commercial LEO Development Program, through which it is funding the development of private space stations. As NASA and its international partners move toward retiring the ISS in the next decade or so, the agency hopes to rent facilities from private stations that will be able to host not only its professional astronauts but also commercial visitors.

Four projects have received funding from NASA’s Commercial LEO Development Program, including Axiom Space, the company that launched the Ax-1 mission. Axiom has partnered with avant-garde interior designer Philippe Starck to work on its Axiom Station. Another funded project, Starlab by Voyager Space and its subsidiary Nanoracks, has partnered with Hilton to develop astronaut accommodations.

Three of the four companies are expecting to launch their space stations by the end of the decade, but as space programs go, delays are highly likely. (NASA’s current Artemis program, for instance, was hoping to land humans on the moon in 2024, but that deadline has been pushed back to at least 2025.) Still, the future is bright for space tourism and certainly within the realm of reality—all we have to do is wait. And for travelers who have always wished to be among the stars, that wait will be worth it.

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Mariel Borowitz , Georgia Institute of Technology and Teasel Muir-Harmony , Georgetown University

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Matthew Finch , University of Oxford

Virgin Orbit bankruptcy: why the UK’s spaceport industry may still have a bright future

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Lenore Newman , University of The Fraser Valley and Evan Fraser , University of Guelph

This course takes college students out of this world – and teaches them what it takes to become space pioneers

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The world finally has its first ‘parastronaut’. Can we expect anyone to be able to go to space one day?

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Curious Kids: what would happen if someone moved at twice the speed of light?

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Christopher Newman , Northumbria University, Newcastle and Nick Caplan , Northumbria University, Newcastle

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History of Space Travel

Learn about the history of humans traveling into space.

The first earthling to orbit our planet was just two years old, plucked from the streets of Moscow barely more than a week before her historic launch. Her name was Laika. She was a terrier mutt and by all accounts a good dog. Her 1957 flight paved the way for space exploration back when scientists didn’t know if spaceflight was lethal for living things.

Humans are explorers. Since before the dawn of civilization, we’ve been lured over the horizon to find food or more space, to make a profit, or just to see what’s beyond those trees or mountains or oceans. Our ability to explore reached new heights—literally—in the last hundred years. Airplanes shortened distances, simplified travel, and showed us Earth from a new perspective. By the middle of the last century, we aimed even higher.

Our first steps into space began as a race between the United States and the former Soviet Union, rivals in a global struggle for power. Laika was followed into orbit four years later by the first human, Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri A. Gagarin. With Earth orbit achieved, we turned our sights on the moon. The United States landed two astronauts on its stark surface in 1969, and five more manned missions followed. The U.S.’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) launched probes to study the solar system. Manned space stations began glittering in the sky. NASA developed reusable spacecraft—space shuttle orbiters—to ferry astronauts and satellites to orbit. Space-travel technology had advanced light-years in just three decades. Gagarin had to parachute from his spaceship after reentry from orbit. The space shuttle leaves orbit at 16,465 miles an hour (26,498 kilometers an hour) and glides to a stop on a runway without using an engine.

Space travel is nothing like in the movies. Getting from A to B requires complex calculations involving inertia and gravity—literally, rocket science—to "slingshot" from planet to planet (or moon) across the solar system. The Voyager mission of the 1970s took advantage of a rare alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune to shave off nearly 20 years of travel time. Space is also dangerous. More than 20 astronauts have died doing their job.

That hasn’t stopped people from signing up and blasting off. NASA’s shuttle program has ended, but private companies are readying their own space programs. A company called Planetary Resources plans to send robot astronauts to the Asteroid Belt to mine for precious metals. Another company named SpaceX is hoping to land civilian astronauts on Mars—the next human step into the solar system—in 20 years. NASA and other civilian companies are planning their own Mars missions. Maybe you’ll be a member of one? Don’t forget to bring your dog.

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Putting our minds to space travel

By sarah wells | january 2021, virgin galactic is getting ready to send its first paying customers to the fringes of space. nasa and european space leaders are talking about establishing a moon village for scientists, miners and tourists. elon musk famously wants to establish colonies on mars. what kind of psychological training will people need for these and other bold endeavors sarah wells spoke to psychologists and a space travel veteran to find out..

As the rockets underneath the Soyuz TMA-9 capsule began to warm and hum in anticipation of liftoff, Anousheh Ansari remembers feeling eerily calm. It wasn’t until the capsule had torn through Earth’s atmosphere and reached orbit that Ansari began to cry.

“It was overwhelming and a rush of emotions — excitement, extreme joy and wonder took over — and I went from crying to laughing to crying to laughing.”

Unlike the cosmonaut crewmates grasping her hands during liftoff, Ansari, who is now the CEO of X-Prize Foundation, had not spent years training for her flight. She made the journey to the International Space Station in 2006 after just six months of training and securing a $20 million ticket. She was the world’s fourth “space tourist.”

At the time, Ansari’s and other missions in the early 2000s looked like the start of a bright future for space tourism, but 14 years later that dream has yet to come to fruition, due in part to technical setbacks.

Now, suborbital flight companies Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are closing in on sending the first paying customers on jaunts to the fringes of space, developments that could serve as a springboard to even bolder space tourism endeavors, such as the orbital tourism plans of SpaceX and Axiom Space.

Courage and money alone are not all that these pioneering space tourists will need for these first flights and the journeys to orbit and deep space that could follow. They’ll need varying degrees of psychological preparation not only for safety but to get the most out of the hundreds of thousands of dollars they’ll spend on the experience.

“Psychological adjustment in many ways is harder to identify and can be something that people try to keep to themselves,” says space psychologist Raphael Rose, associate director of the Anxiety and Depression Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. For space travel, “psychological and physical preparedness are equally important,” he says.

With the chance to visit space — or even just graze the top of Earth’s atmosphere — comes an opportunity many wait a lifetime for, though the experience won’t be without its mental challenges.

For professional astronauts, such as the astronaut corps of NASA and the European Space Agency, tension can spring from the pressure to complete mission tasks as well as the reality of being confined in a cramped space with others for extended periods.

Astronauts sometimes release tension in the form of terse exchanges with ground control as a tactic to avert tension with fellow crew members during missions that can run days, weeks or months, says psychiatrist Nick Kanas, who has spent decades studying the impacts of spaceflight for NASA, and is now an emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco.

For tourists on suborbital flights, Kanas expects that kind of tension to be minimal to nonexistent, given the brevity of the experiences. Blue Origin’s proposed time in the capsule will clock in at 41 minutes, including 30 minutes of boarding time and four minutes of weightlessness, while Virgin Galactic’s is approximately 1.5 hours with a similar amount of weightless time. At its worst, customers might feel like they are stuck in an elevator with work colleagues for an hour. This is a discomfort that Kanas suggests could be easily tolerated.

That said, with customers paying up to $250,000 for the experience of weightlessness and the view of Earth from an altitude of about 100 kilometers, a wild card remains the reactions of those customers should a mission not unfold exactly as planned. For example, last month’s Virgin Galactic suborbital test flight was cut short moments after the release of the VSS Unity spaceplane from the WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft, when Unity’s flight computer lost its data connection to its hybrid rocket motor, prompting the computer to end the ignition sequence. The two pilots maneuvered Unity for a glided landing at Spaceport America in New Mexico.

Ideally, customers would be prepared enough through their training programs to adapt to any changing circumstances, but Kanas says that there’s always a risk — albeit rare — in space travel of having a negative reaction.

“You’re worried about somebody reacting with maybe palpitations or heart pressures, a heart attack of some kind or stroke [or] becoming acutely psychotic,” says Kanas. However, these are concerns associated more with orbital flights, which are further from reality, and are conditions that would hopefully be discovered by a psychological screening before the customer ever left Earth.

Also, tourists won’t have the stress of operating the vehicle. Rather, they’ll have to be comfortable trusting their fates to automated software. Unlike Ansari, who was involved in the ascent and descent procedure of her flight and completed science experiments on the ISS, suborbital tourists will just be along for the ride. Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital rocket and capsule would complete flights autonomously, and instead of pilots onboard with passengers, ground controllers would intervene should the need arise. For a slightly more human touch, Virgin Galactic’s Unity will be operated by two professional pilots.

Orbital experiences would be a different matter. Such flights would not necessarily take tourists much higher than suborbital flights, but by going faster, 28,000 kilometers per hour versus 6,000 kph for suborbital flights, orbit could be maintained for days or weeks. Customers on those flights may include academics or visiting scientists who, like Ansari, would have a little more work to do when they’ve reached their final destination, such as Axiom Space’s proposed space station.

Kanas is still not too concerned about the mental impact of these longer flights, but he does stress that mental preparation — in addition to physical preparation — will be even more important during such flights to ensure tourists remain calm for the duration.

Mentally training

As far as I could learn, orbital tourism companies do not yet have concrete training plans, although Space Adventures, the spaceflight company that will run SpaceX’s orbital tourism programs, does say its training will likely be a few weeks long, and Axiom Space estimates its at 15 weeks. Kanas speculates that these programs may be scaled back versions of what NASA astronauts experience before flying to the ISS.

Tom Jones, a former NASA astronaut who spent a total of 53 days in space, tells me that when he was training for his space shuttle flights in the mid-1990s the crew spent extensive time training together in stress-inducing scenarios, like wilderness exploration, in order to learn how to work together in trying times.

“If you find out somebody has the personality where they become self-centered or withdrawn, it’s important to find that out back here on Earth in an analog situation so that you don’t send the person up to space for six months where they make life miserable for everybody else,” says Jones.

This preparation is why in the past 20 years of sending astronauts to ISS, the number of times an astronaut has exhibited such behavior can be counted on one hand.

A modified version of this NASA training might last a matter of weeks, just as Space Adventures and Axiom are planning. Training for suborbital flights would be much shorter. Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin have both clocked their training programs between two and three days. The exact preparation of each program varies but generally includes physical training in the form of zero-gravity experiences and familiarization with the cabin and automated procedures.

Virgin Galactic also plans to give its customers comprehensive medical evaluations to identify vulnerabilities that might put them or others at risk during the flight, which may include conditions like claustrophobia or poor stress management. But whether these conditions would ultimately disqualify tourists from flying is not yet certain.

Kanas speculates that space tourism companies will have softer guidelines when it comes to psychological screening than do government space programs. Instead of potentially grounding someone with bipolar disorder because they may have had a manic episode in the past, Kanas suggests that participants with otherwise disqualifying psychological disorders could be given care plans to follow that would ensure their safety and that of others on the excursion.

As a result, Kanas believes the risk of seriously causing harm to fellow tourists out of ignorance of zero-gravity procedures or poor stress management is unlikely for short suborbital flights.

If a passenger were to go rogue and attempt to, for example, pry open the spacecraft door, those actions still won’t put other tourists in harm’s way. Virgin Galactic tells me that because of pressure created against the spacecraft’s plug door, the term also applied to the doors on commercial airliners, it isn’t possible to open the spacecraft midflight.

Beyond orbital flight

Space tourists in the next five to 10 years will not be straying too far from home, but if the plans of government leaders and entrepreneurs come to fruition over the next 20, 50 or 100 years, the space tourism playground would expand far beyond Earth’s orbit. Both ESA and NASA have announced their concepts for establishing a Moon Village in the next decade that would function as a mining base and potential tourist destination, and — who knows? — maybe 200 years from now as a retirement destination for those who want to try low-gravity golf. In the far term, Elon Musk tweets regularly about establishing colonies on Mars with transportation provided by his Starship spacecraft, versions of which SpaceX engineers are building and flying at the company’s test site in Boca Chica, Texas.

And while today’s space tourists are unlikely to experience much psychological distress on their short trips, with longer flights such as a seven-month journey to Mars comes the heightened risk for negative psychological effects, such as depression, as a result of extended social isolation and loneliness, explains space psychologist Rose. For the past 12 years, Rose has conducted research with NASA on stress, resilience and behavioral health and is principal investigator on two ongoing NASA projects, one titled “Asynchronous Behavioral Health Treatment Techniques.”

Developing a therapeutic plan that can work even with the communications latency of deep space will be crucial for the well-being of these explorers, says Rose.

“We developed a stress management resilience training program that autonomously trains people to develop a tool set of skills they can use to deal with stressful situations,” explains Rose. He defines resilience as “a rebound and recovery” from stress, “not an elimination of stress.”

During these longer trips, Rose says individuals must be provided with tactics for managing their own stress when professional counselors can’t be on hand to help. Crew bonding activities will help, but connections must somehow be maintained with family and friends, perhaps through memories, when communications with Earth become intermittent.

“Thinking about their family or other things in their community that provide meaning to them can help them feel more connected,” Rose says.

Rose imagines that someday artificial intelligence and virtual reality software might simulate a traveler’s home and generate realistic and interactive projections of loved ones that they could communicate with. Solutions like this won’t eradicate the potential stress of the situation, but they can provide a better way to cope with it.

“Stressful reactions to stressful situations is expected,” says Rose. “There isn’t a magical way to do something that’s challenging and not feel stress — that’s not a bad sign. It’s more about how you cope with these situations that make a difference.”

Positive effects of space travel

Space tourists who have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for a once-in-a-lifetime experience will likely want to maximize the positive psychological effects of this foray to space. In fact, Loretta Whitesides, the wife of Virgin Galactic Chief Space Officer George T. Whitesides and author of the book “The New Right Stuff: Using Space to Bring out the Best in You,” believes that someone who pays to go to space can return a new person. Whitesides herself is a “founder astronaut” at Virgin Galactic, meaning she will be one of the first several participants to ride in Unity when commercial service begins.

In her space training and consultation program, SpaceKind, Whitesides coaches space industry professionals about how to embrace vulnerability, humility and integrity in order to bring their best selves to their future space travels. Whitesides believes that leaving your personal baggage at home is crucial to fully experiencing the beauty of space and the fragility of Earth. Astronauts have widely described looking down on Earth as a spiritual and unique experience that transformed them into more charitable versions of themselves upon return.

This “overview effect” is something that Ansari and Jones both say they experienced during their travels.

“Being in space has made me feel the interconnectedness of us human beings with each other and our planet,” says Ansari. “As the world shrunk in front of my eyes in my ascent to orbit, so did the problems of the world. This new perspective has made me more hopeful than ever that we can solve the problems that seem so big and overwhelming.”

In the future, Kanas muses that the overview effect may even be prescribed as a form of treatment for Earthly ennui, similar to a therapeutic retreat today.

Whitesides believes that creating the right mindset for space travelers to receive this experience can enable space tourists, professional astronauts and everyone in between to return home with a new mission to be more generous on both a personal and community level.

SpaceKind is not likely to be mandatory for space tourists, says Whitesides, but she believes that programs like these could be offered as a la carte options that tourists can choose to take for their own benefit.

“Most of them are so passionate about space — like a lot of my fellow ‘future astronauts’ at Virgin Galactic [who do extra training] because that’s what we like to do,” says Whitesides. “I’m counting on the customers to go even beyond what’s required.”

Where we are now

When it comes to preparing future space tourists for the mental and physical rigor of spaceflight, Kanas and Rose say that the No. 1 mindset that must be imparted on trainees is a sense of familiarity with the spacecraft and mission plan, as well as assurance of its safety.

This is something that Virgin Galactic is focusing on heavily in its Astronaut Readiness Program in which its ticketed future astronauts will gain detailed information about Unity, even down to its sounds and smells. Separate from SpaceKind, this three-day program was announced in 2019 and is led by former NASA engineer Beth Moses.

The company also announced a contract with NASA last year to develop a separate “private orbital astronaut readiness program” to help NASA meet its goal of increasing commercial use of the ISS by finding and training private spaceflight participants.

Ultimately, says Kanas, regardless of what these training programs entail, this industry is going to continue expanding. Where space travel exists, there will never be a shortage of space tourists.

“There’s always some population that’s willing to do anything, so I don’t think that’s going to slow down things,” says Kanas. He says it is more a question of “the technology of getting this thing up safely and get it back down again.”

Staff reporter Cat Hofacker contributed to this report.

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About Sarah Wells

Sarah is a science and technology journalist based in Boston interested in how innovation and research intersect with our daily lives. She has written for a number of national publications and covers innovation news at Inverse.

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What’s next in space

The moon, private space travel, and the wider solar system will all have major missions over the next 12 months.

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We’re going back to the moon—again—in 2023. Multiple uncrewed landings are planned for the next 12 months, spurred on by a renewed effort in the US to return humans to the lunar surface later this decade. Both private space companies and national agencies are set to make the 240,000-mile trek to our celestial neighbor, where they will test landing capabilities, look for usable water ice , and more.

Previous years were “all about Mars,” says Jill Stuart, a space policy expert from the London School of Economics in the UK. “Now we’ve shifted back to the moon.”

That is not all 2023 has in store. We’re also likely to see significant strides made in private human spaceflight, including the first-ever commercial spacewalk, compelling missions heading out into—or back from—other solar system destinations, and new rockets set to take flight.

Here’s what the next year has lined up for space.

Moon landings

A lunar lander will already be on its way when 2023 begins. Launched in December on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, the private spacecraft Hakuto-R, developed by Japanese firm ispace , is on a four-month journey to reach the moon , where it will deploy rovers built by the space agencies of Japan and the United Arab Emirates, among other goals. If successful, Hakuto-R could become the first private mission to land on the moon in March.

We say “could” because two private landers from the US—one from the firm Astrobotic and the other from Intuitive Machines, called Peregrine and Nova-C, respectively—are also set to reach the moon around the same time. Both are NASA-backed missions with various instruments on board to study the lunar environment, part of the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payloads Services program, which aims to spur commercial interest in the moon ahead of human missions planned for later this decade under its Artemis program.

The first part of that program, Artemis I, saw an uncrewed Orion spacecraft launch to the moon on NASA’s giant new Space Launch System rocket in November 2022. While the next Artemis mission, a crewed flight around the moon, is not planned until 2024, these next 12 months will lay important groundwork for Artemis by studying the moon’s surface and even looking for water ice that could be a potential target for future human missions, among other goals. “The moon is getting a lot more attention than it has done for many years,” says Jon Cowart, a former NASA human spaceflight manager now at the Aerospace Corporation in the US.

Intuitive Machines has a second lunar landing planned in 2023. Also on the books are landings from the space agencies of India and Japan, with Chandrayaan-3 and SLIM (Smart Lander for Investigating Moon) , respectively. India hopes to launch in August 2023. It will be the country’s second attempt—the first crash-landed on the moon in 2019. A date for SLIM, which will test precision landing on the moon, has not yet been set. Russia reportedly has plans for the moon in 2023 too with its Luna-25 lander, but the status of the mission is unclear.

Private space travel

Since May 2020, SpaceX has been using its Crew Dragon spacecraft to ferry astronauts to space, some to the International Space Station (ISS) under contract with NASA and others on private missions. But SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission , currently slated for March 2023, will be a big new step.

Four commercial astronauts, including billionaire Jared Isaacman, who is paying for the flight and also funded SpaceX’s first all-private human spaceflight in 2021, will target a maximum orbit of 1,200 kilometers, higher than any human spacecraft since the Apollo missions. And in a first for commercial human spaceflight, the crew will don spacesuits and venture outside the spacecraft.

“Polaris Dawn is really exciting,” says Laura Forczyk from the space consulting firm Astralytical. “My understanding is that the entire vehicle will be evacuated. Everybody is going to at least stick their heads out.”

The mission may help NASA decide whether a future Crew Dragon mission could be used to service the Hubble Space Telescope, a capability that the agency has been investigating with SpaceX. “We’ll have some idea whether it’s feasible,” says Forczyk.

Two more private missions using Crew Dragon—Axiom-2 and Axiom-3—are planned to head for the ISS in 2023, as well as two NASA flights using Crew Dragon. A competing vehicle from the US firm Boeing is also set to launch with crew for the first time in April 2023, following multiple delays .

Meanwhile, we wait to see if Jeff Bezos’s company Blue Origin will be allowed to launch with humans again. The company has been grounded following an uncrewed launch failure in September 2022. Another private spaceflight pioneer, Virgin Galactic, has been relatively quiet since it launched its founder Sir Richard Branson into space in July 2021. 

All these developments in commercial human spaceflight may be overshadowed by the first orbital flight attempt of SpaceX’s massive and reusable Starship rocket, which was undergoing launchpad tests earlier this month and should launch in 2023, if not by the end of 2022.

If successful, the rocket, which would surpass NASA’s Space Launch System as the largest rocket to make it to orbit, could transform our exploration of space . “The ability to take more mass up opens up new opportunities,” says Uma Bruegman, an expert in space strategies at the Aerospace Corporation. That could include, one day, human missions to Mars—or beyond. But there’s a long way to go yet. “It’s definitely an important year [for Starship],” says Cowart. “They’ve got a lot to do.” One of its nearer-term goals will be preparing for the moon—NASA chose Starship’s upper stage as the initial lunar lander for the Artemis program.

Into the solar system

Moons of the solar system’s biggest planet are also on the agenda next year. April 2023 will see a gripping new mission launch from the European Space Agency (ESA) called JUICE, for “Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer.” Scheduled to arrive in orbit at Jupiter in 2031, the spacecraft will perform detailed studies of the Jovian moons Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa, all of which are thought to harbor oceans that could contain life beneath their icy surfaces.

“It’s the first mission that’s fundamentally focused on the icy moons,” says Mark McCaughrean, senior advisor for science and exploration at ESA. “We now know these icy moons have very deep water oceans, and they could have the conditions for life to have developed.”

JUICE will map these oceans with radar instruments, but McCaughrean says it will also be able to look for possible biosignatures on the surface of Europa’s ice, which could rain down from plumes ejected into space from its subsurface ocean.

Later in 2023, ESA is scheduled to see another major mission launch: its Euclid telescope, which was switched from a Russian rocket to a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The telescope will probe the “dark universe,” observing billions of galaxies over a third of the sky to better understand dark matter and dark energy in the cosmos.

In October, NASA should launch a significant science mission of its own when Psyche takes flight following a delay from 2022. The spacecraft will head to 16 Psyche, an unusual metal-rich asteroid that has never been seen up close.

A number of other intriguing developments are expected in 2023. NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission is scheduled to return to Earth in September with pieces of an asteroid called Bennu, which could offer new insight into the structure and formation of the solar system. Amazon aims to send up the first satellites for Project Kuiper in early 2023, the start of a 3,000-satellite orbiting communications network it hopes will rival SpaceX’s Starlink constellation. And several new rockets are set to launch, including the United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket (it will carry Astrobotic’s moon lander and some of Amazon's satellites) and possibly Blue Origin’s large New Glenn rocket. Both are heavy-lift rockets that could take many satellites into space.

“There’s a huge swathe of activity,” says Cowart. “I’m very excited about this year.”

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• Stand Up for Free Enterprise

The Economic Potential of Space Travel for Businesses

The growth in space exploration and the private aerospace business opens up a host of economic possibilities, from new markets for businesses to job opportunities for people.

September 15, 2021

Key takeaways

• The commercialization of space travel creates a host of new growth opportunities for businesses.
• The global space industry could generate revenue of $1 trillion or more by 2040.
• The growth in space travel is leading to calls from private and public sector leaders to create regulations around etiquette and future settlement in space.

Private sector business leaders have transformed what was once merely a dream of travel among the stars into a multibillion dollar industry--forming private aerospace companies, launching rockets and satellites, and even creating opportunities for space travel.

Coupled with the decreasing cost of access to low-Earth orbit, this growth in space commerce is enabling new opportunities for business innovation, from manufacturing, to technological advancements, to potential new markets. It is also creating new job opportunities and strengthening our commercial ties with international partners both public and private. There are new opportunities for commercial space travel and private aerospace too.

Below is a guide to what businesses need to know about the current state of space exploration and business, including a primer on the Artemis program, the impact of space travel on the economy, and the regulatory landscape around the private aerospace industry.

The Artemis program

Built on the Apollo program that put the first man on the moon in 1969, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration ( NASA ) is making strides to send the first woman and first person of color, among others, to the lunar surface with the Artemis program .

Among the ambitious goals of this international collaboration is to safely land on the moon’s south pole, an area that has been completely unexplored by humans. Once there, the team will use technological innovations and specialized spacesuits to explore the moon more thoroughly than the previous landing. Things astronauts will search for include signs of water and instances where humans could live or work on the moon. According to NASA , industry experts, astronauts, and scientists see the moon as a test site, using the findings and techniques to inform a potential future journey to Mars.

The team of scientists and astronauts behind the Artemis program are partnering with commercial businesses, government agencies, and other international organizations for the mission. Businesses and contractors will be tasked with developing critical technologies to make the moon landing safe, informational, and beneficial to all parties involved. This need for technology will create additional jobs and provide businesses with growth opportunities .

Space exploration’s impact on the global economy

As humans venture to the moon and beyond with the Artemis program, businesses will have more revenue opportunities. It is estimated that the global space industry could generate revenue of $1 trillion or more by 2040. It also has the ability to bring nations together through the creation of new shared markets .

Already, business leaders and investors have created new private aerospace companies, paving the way for the commercialization of space exploration. Many of these entrepreneurs’ intentions are to secure spaceflight for not only astronauts but also ordinary people to visit (and possibly live) in space. If successful, such space travel will open up opportunities for businesses to provide future space tourists a variety of space-related goods and services.

Relatedly, another area of economic growth is in the space-for-Earth market, which centers on goods or services that are created in space for human use on Earth. These projects include furthering the internet, satellite, observatory, and telecommunication capabilities on Earth from the unique perspective of space exploration. Space-for-Earth is seen as a profitable and growing new market that can contribute to the growth of businesses.

How smart regulation can support innovation

The volume of countries and businesses with space programs and aeronautical capabilities has led to a call from industry experts to create regulations for space travel . This includes proper space etiquette and outlining expectations for those seeking future settlement in space.

The United Nations set initial space regulation standards in 1967 with the signing of the “ Outer Space Treaty ,” more formally known as the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies. The treaty outlines that each nation is responsible for its own citizens who venture into space. The United States, for example, is responsible for not only the humans it sends into space but also the satellites. Estimates from the Satellite Industry Association predict as many as 110,000 new satellites will be sent into orbit by 2030.

The business community is partnering closely with the government agencies tasked with establishing regulations that set the “rules of the road” for these new ventures in space. Space Policy Directives 2 and 3, for example, institute standards for Space Situational Awareness and Space Traffic Management. They also draw on NOAA’s tools and resources to create a new open architecture data repository that allows SSA and STM data to be shared internationally, ensuring that companies doing business in space can avoid costly and dangerous collisions.

The Artemis Accords, signed in 2020 by the U.S. and international partners, outlines another important framework for guiding future space exploration. Using the Outer Space Treaty, the Registration Convention, and the Agreement On The Rescue of Astronauts, industry experts outlined a multilateral partnership based on shared principles and values. These agreements provide specific guidelines on emergency assistance, registration of space objects, protecting space resources, and interoperability.

The monumental task of regulating entities venturing into space travel and exploration will continue to necessitate both the private and public sectors working together. The U.S. Chamber is front-and-center in this effort, actively working with government on behalf of business to shape and inform the regulatory process in a way that ensures businesses will thrive and remain competitive in this emerging sector. Through this advocacy and through additional public-private partnerships, we ensure that the future growth of the space industry for economies around the world remains truly limitless.

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The emergency exit slide fell off a Delta Airlines jet after taking off from New York en route to Los Angeles on Friday, Delta said.

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The European Union criticised Russia on Saturday for putting subsidiaries of one Italian and one German company under the "temporary external management" of a Gazprom entity, saying the move underscored Moscow's disregard for international norms.

Astronauts arrive in T-38 Talon jet planes to prepare for NASA's first crewed Starliner launch: See the best pictures

Posted: April 27, 2024 | Last updated: April 27, 2024

Two veteran NASA astronauts are preparing for a thrilling new first in space travel.

In the coming days, the much-delayed Boeing Starliner spacecraft will launch with humans on board for the first time: Commander Butch Wilmore and Pilot Suni Williams. The capsule will travel to the International Space Station atop an Atlas V rocket that's set to blast off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station's Space Launch Complex 41 on May 6.

Join us as we look at the best photos of the astronauts arriving to prepare for thie history-making launch, and see what the new Starliner capsule looks like...

NASA's Boeing Crew Flight Test Commander Butch Wilmore and Pilot Suni Williams arrived at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, in a T-38 jet on April 25, 2024. They flew in for a mission aboard the Boeing Starliner that will take them to the International Space Station. That launch is set to depart from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on May 6, 2024.

Keep reading to see more great photos...

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Boeing's CST-100 Starliner spacecraft rolls out of the Commercial Crew and Cargo Processing Facility at the Kennedy Space Center to be transported to pad 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on April 16, 2024.

Starliner is scheduled for its first crewed launch to the International Space Station on a ULA Atlas V rocket with NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore on May 6, 2024.

MORE:  NASA unveils new supersonic aircraft: All the best pictures

NASA's Boeing Crew Flight Test Commander Butch Wilmore and Pilot Suni Williams prepared to address the media after arriving at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, in a T-38 jet on April 25, 2024.

They flew in for a mission aboard the Boeing Starliner that will take them to the International Space Station.

That launch is set to depart from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on May 6, 2024.

MORE:  SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket cargo arrives at International Space Station: All the best launch pictures

Boeing's CST-100 Starliner spacecraft was rolled out of the Commercial Crew and Cargo Processing Facility at the Kennedy Space Center to be transported to pad 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on April 16, 2024.

A Boeing CST-100 Starliner spacecraft was rolled out from Boeing's Commercial Cargo and Processing Facility in the pre-dawn hours of April 16, 2024, past the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

NASA is targeting a May 2024 launch for the Crew Flight Test-1 (CFT-1) mission to the International Space Station with astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams.

A United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas 5 rocket will ferry the Boeing capsule on its historic first flight of the new, crewed spacecraft.

NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore arrived at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on April 25, 2024, aboard a T-38 Talon jet for their next mission: A United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket will ferry them in a Boeing CST-100 Starliner capsule on its historic first crewed flight of the new spacecraft on May 6.

Williams and Wilmore will also be the first humans launched into space aboard an Atlas V rocket.

NASA's Boeing Crew Flight Test Commander Butch Wilmore and Pilot Suni Williams posed to a photo while greeting the media following their arrival at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, in a T-38 jet on April 25, 2024.

NASA's Boeing Crew Flight Test Commander Butch Wilmore and Pilot Suni Williams arrived at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, in a T-38 jet on April 25, 2024.

NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore flew in the lead jet -- a T-38 Talon -- and landed at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on April 25, 2024, ahead of their next mission: A United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket will ferry the Boeing CST-100 Starliner capsule on its historic first crewed flight of the new spacecraft on May 6.

NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams spoke to the media at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on April 25, 2024, after arriving via T-38 jets.

The pair will fly on the Crew Flight Test-1 (CFT-1) mission to the International Space Station, set for May 6, 2024.

A United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket will ferry the Boeing CST-100 Starliner capsule on its historic first crewed flight of the new spacecraft.

Wilmore and Williams will also be the first humans launched into space aboard an Atlas V rocket.

NASA astronaut Suni Williams flew herself in a T-38 Talon jet to the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on April 25, 2024.

She's there to next fly on the Crew Flight Test-1 (CFT-1) mission to the International Space Station, set for May 6.

Williams will also be one of the first humans launched into space aboard an Atlas V rocket.

NASA astronaut Suni Williams arrived at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on April 25, 2024, in a T-38 Talon jet she piloted.

She's there for a mission aboard a Boeing Starliner that's headed to the International Space Station and set to launch on May 6, 2024.

The Boeing CST-100 Starliner capsule launched atop a rocket at dusk from the United Launch Alliance complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on May 19, 2022. This mission was unmanned.

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Airline industry expected to soar with record summer travel.

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The airline industry is gearing up for what could be a record-breaking summer travel season, if forecasts turn out to be correct. Despite challenges such as the Boeing 737 MAX 9 grounding and aircraft delivery delays, airlines are reporting strong demand and growth, particularly in international markets. For investors, this could be a unique opportunity to gain exposure to a sector that’s poised for takeoff.

Not every carrier has reported results for the March quarter yet, but what I’ve seen has been encouraging. Delta Air Lines reported record quarterly revenue and expects continued strong momentum, targeting earnings of $6 to $7 per share and free cash flow of $3 to $4 billion for the full year. United Airlines, despite a pre-tax loss that’s largely attributed to the MAX 9 grounding, saw a $92 million improvement over the same quarter last year.

“Demand continued to be strong, and we see a record spring and summer travel season with our 11 highest sales says in our history all occurring this calendar year,” Delta CEO Ed Bastian said during the company’s earnings call.

Passenger Figures Off To A Record Start

The big takeaway is that the U.S. economy and air travel remain healthy, with airlines experiencing record numbers of travelers. Checkpoint volumes provided by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) are off to a record start in 2024, with carriers in the U.S. handling an average of 2.26 million passengers each day, a 5.6% increase over the same period in 2019.

Air passenger volumes exceeded pre-pandemic levels in the first quarter

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This bodes well for the industry, as higher passenger volumes translate to increased revenue and potentially better margins.

International Travel Boom Despite Supply Constraints

International travel is driving the recovery, with U.S.-international air travel rising 15% year-over-year in the first three months of 2024, according to Airlines for America (A4A). This trend is also reflected in the latest data from Airports Council International (ACI), which shows that while domestic airport markets grew over 20% in 2023, international markets drove the recovery with a 36.5% growth rate.

The airline industry is not without its challenges. The global airline industry is facing a summer squeeze as travel demand is expected to surpass pre-pandemic levels while aircraft deliveries drop sharply due to production problems at Boeing and Airbus. Airlines are spending billions on repairs to keep flying older, less fuel-efficient jets and paying a premium to secure aircraft from lessors. This has led to increased costs and could potentially impact margins in the short term.

Why Airline Stocks Could Soar In The Coming Years

Nevertheless, I believe the long-term outlook for the airline industry remains positive. The shift toward hybrid work has created a new segment of travelers who have the time and money to spend on air travel. This trend, coupled with the pent-up demand for leisure travel, should help support the industry’s growth in the coming years.

Additionally, airlines have prioritized debt reduction, which should help improve their balance sheets and credit ratings over time. At the end of 2023, the domestic industry reported a collective $143 billion in debt, an approximately 15% decrease from 2021 levels.

U.S. airlines have prioritized debt reduction

As we head into the summer travel season, I believe now may be the time for investors to consider adding exposure to this sector. With a long-term outlook and a diversified approach, investors can potentially benefit from the industry’s recovery and growth in the coming years.

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Banned From Russian Airspace, U.S. Airlines Look to Restrict Competitors

Because of the war in Ukraine, U.S. carriers have to take the long way on flights to and from Asia, giving an advantage to foreign rivals flying the same routes.

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By Kate Kelly and Mark Walker

WASHINGTON — Unable to fly through Russian airspace because of the war in Ukraine, U.S. airlines are stepping up a lobbying campaign on Capitol Hill and at the White House to address what they say is a growing problem: They are losing business to foreign competitors who can take passengers between the United States and Asia faster and more cheaply.

Effectively banned from the polar routes that save time and fuel between the United States and an array of destinations on the other side of the world, U.S. carriers say they are being forced into an aeronautical version of Twister to get passengers where they want to go without taking undue risks.

They have altered trans-Pacific flight plans to ensure they would have somewhere to land in an emergency, reduced passenger and cargo loads to hold down costs as they fly longer distances, and put on hold more than a dozen planned new routes to Mumbai, Tokyo, Seoul and other cities.

On its route from New Delhi to New York City, American Airlines has been forced to stop flights in Bangor, Maine — an hour and a half short of the mark — on 19 occasions, a person familiar with the recent history said. Those stops, which were typically caused by unfavorable winds or weather that depleted the jet fuel supply and ran out the flight crew’s duty hours, delayed passengers and forced a swap-out of 14 pilots and flight attendants.

Those flights were already operating with dozens of the seats deliberately left unfilled, the person added, because less weight on board was required to make the fuel last as long as possible.

Yet many foreign airlines are not banned from flying over Russia, U.S. airlines and their lobbyists say — and are winning more passengers on routes to and from the United States as a result. Continued access to the shorter and more fuel-efficient routes that Russian airspace provides is giving carriers like Air India, Emirates and China Eastern Airlines an unfair advantage, the industry lobbying group Airlines for America said in a recent presentation on Capitol Hill.

Airlines for America estimated the lost annual market share of U.S. carriers at a collective $2 billion per year.

“Foreign airlines using Russian airspace on flights to and from the U.S. are gaining a significant competitive advantage over U.S. carriers in major markets, including China and India,” the presentation, dated February, said. “This situation is directly to the benefit of foreign airlines and at the expense of the United States as a whole, with fewer connections to key markets, fewer high paying airline jobs” and a dent in the overall economy.

U.S. airlines for years had access to Russian airspace through a series of agreements with Moscow. In exchange for that access, they — and other foreign airlines — paid fees to the Russian government for air traffic control support that amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars per year, according to an airline official and an industry advocate.

But after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year prompted government officials in the United States, Britain, Canada and Europe to ban Russian aircraft from flying over their airspace, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia immediately prohibited the United States and other supporters of Ukraine, including Canada and much of Europe, from flying through his skies.

Now airlines are pressing the White House and Congress to fix the problem by subjecting foreign carriers from nations not already banned from Russian airspace to the same restrictions applied to U.S. airlines, effectively forcing them to fly the same routes as their American competitors.

The Biden administration should “take action to ensure that foreign carriers overflying Russia do not depart, land or transit through U.S. airports,” said Marli Collier, an Airlines for America spokeswoman.

The proposal appears to have gained traction with the Transportation Department, which recently drafted an order that would ban Chinese carriers that fly passengers to the United States from flying through Russian airspace, according to three people who were briefed on the order. The order was presented to a group of Biden administration officials, including members of the national security team, on Monday, two of those people said, and has been under consideration this week along with other proposed policy measures.

Transportation Department officials declined to comment. But national security officials are mindful of the potential diplomatic consequences of steps aimed at a longtime ally like India, or of adding further tension to the already strained relationship with China.

A spokesperson at the State Department, which is involved in an interagency government review of the airspace issues, said the department was aware of the concerns and regards the safety of U.S. citizens on foreign soil as a top priority.

“It’s just unfortunate for our air carriers that this has been a collateral issue,” said Manisha Singh, a former assistant secretary for the bureau of economic and business affairs at the State Department who now runs a consulting firm in Washington. “I think we should do anything we can,” she added, noting that the United States should “be careful” before taking steps that might offend foreign countries and affect U.S. tourism and commerce as a result.

Representatives for Delta, American, and United Airlines, the domestic carriers most involved in the lobbying effort, referred questions to Airlines for America, which praised a recent letter by Senate Foreign Relations Committee members to Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg echoing the group’s talking points.

“When foreign airlines overfly Russian territory, even if they do not expect to land on Russian soil, they run the risk of unplanned diversions in Russia for safety, medical, mechanical or more nefarious reasons,” wrote Senator Bob Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, the panel’s chairman, and Senator Jim Risch of Idaho, its senior Republican. The State and Transportation Departments have not yet responded to the letter, according to someone who has been briefed on the exchange.

Representatives for Air India declined to comment, and representatives for Emirates and China Eastern did not respond to requests for comment.

Arjun Garg, a former chief counsel and acting deputy administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, said the Biden administration has the legal authority to remedy the complaints from U.S. carriers.

Mr. Garg said both the safety concerns the airlines have flagged and the way in which the current regulations have disadvantaged them are serious dilemmas.

“The foreign air carriers get the benefit of shorter flight times, lower costs, less fuel consumption, all those kinds of advantages that are shut off for U.S. carriers by order of the U.S. government,” Mr. Garg said.

At a time when U.S. fliers are already fed up with fundamental issues like cramped seats, flight cancellations and a cascade of service fees, access to Russian airspace may not be the most pressing worry. Depending on winds, air traffic and other factors on any given day, on a 14-hour flight, avoiding Russian airspace can mean less than an hour of extra flying time in some cases. But it can also mean more than two hours.

But the cost differential is notable. As of Wednesday, the outbound leg of an April round-trip journey from New York’s Kennedy Airport to New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi Airport cost about $1,500 and was estimated at 13 hours and 40 minutes on Air India, according to Travelocity. The most comparable flight on a U.S. carrier: a $1,740 American Airlines trip with estimated flying time of 14 hours and 55 minutes.

But Airlines for America and the major carriers it represents are also highlighting security concerns for Americans who fly over Russia, even on foreign airlines. And history suggests there is cause for anxiety.

In 2014, a Malaysia Airlines flight was shot down over Ukraine , killing 298 people. A Dutch court later convicted, in absentia, two Russian separatists and a pro-Russia Ukrainian with murder.

In 2021, a Ryanair flight from Greece to Lithuania was diverted to Belarus , a close Kremlin ally, after officials in that country alerted air traffic controllers to a supposed bomb threat on the plane. Their true purpose, U.S. prosecutors said , was to arrest a dissident journalist who was a passenger by inventing a false safety issue. (The journalist, Roman Protasevich, was recently put on trial in Belarus, and the officials who the Justice Department says organized the diversion have been indicted in the United States and charged with conspiracy to commit airline piracy.)

Last year, the American basketball star Brittney Griner was detained at an airport near Moscow and later sentenced to nine years in a penal colony for carrying vape cartridges of hashish oil in her luggage. She was freed in December .

There are also operational challenges stemming from the longer routes being flown by U.S. carriers.

Delta Air Lines has redrawn trans-Pacific flight maps repeatedly to comply with both U.S. regulations and the Russian overflight ban, according to internal documents and two people familiar with the changes.

F.A.A. rules require that for long flights, commercial planes must always be within 180 minutes of a suitable airport in case an emergency landing is needed (with certain aircraft, which Delta flies, it can stretch to 207 minutes).

But without access to Russia as an emergency stop, Delta’s Detroit-to-Shanghai flights are now being forced to fly near obscure Pacific landmasses like Shemya Island southwest of Alaska. And if the tiny Shemya airport is too full to handle an emergency landing, Delta pilots must divert to an even farther-flung airport like the one on Midway Atoll in the middle of the Pacific, these people said — adding up to an hour and 40 minutes and more than 3,000 gallons of fuel to the journey when the closer stops are not available.

“You can sometimes think of it as a little bit of an obstacle course,” said Jim Higgins, an aviation professor at the University of North Dakota who flew as a commercial pilot for seven years. Federal regulation around emergency landings, while well-intentioned, he added, “does increase the operational complexity.”

Hari Kumar contributed reporting from New Delhi, and Keith Bradsher from Beijing. Li You contributed research.

Kate Kelly covers money, influence, and policy as a correspondent in the Washington bureau of the Times. Before that, she spent twenty years covering Wall Street deals, key players and their intersection with politics. She is the author of three books, including "The Education of Brett Kavanaugh." More about Kate Kelly

Mark Walker is an investigative reporter in the Washington bureau. He was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of Covid-19 in 2020. He grew up in Savannah, Ga., and graduated from Fort Valley State University. More about Mark Walker

Space Debris and Space Traffic Management

The launch of Sputnik on Oct. 4, 1957, marked the beginning of an intense space race that led to decades of rocket and satellite launches, which eventually resulted in a large amount of space debris. Space debris is anything in orbit that is man-made and is no longer in use. It consists of old, inactive satellites; rocket stages; and other discarded hardware.  Smaller pieces of space debris include fragments of vehicles that exploded or collided and bits of insulation and paint that have come off of space vehicles. Generally, the smaller the debris, the more there is of it. This abundance of debris created the need for a military space surveillance to maintain a catalog of all Earth-orbiting objects — active payloads, satellites and debris — along with detailed information about trajectory and point of origin.

This “space object catalog” or Satellite Catalog (SATCAT) is maintained by   Joint Combined Space Operations Center (CSpOC) at Vandenberg Air Force Base, part of U.S. Strategic Command. One of the missions of CSpOC is to detect, track and identify all objects in Earth orbit in addition to monitoring the International Space Station (ISS) and other NASA satellites for collisions. Also located at Vandenberg Air Force Base is the The U.S. Air Force’s 18th Space Control Squadron, which operates the Space Surveillance Network (SSN), which oversees radar and optical sensors at various sites around the world. These sensors observe and track objects that are larger than a softball in low Earth orbit (LEO) and basketball-sized objects or larger, in higher, geosynchronous orbits. The sensors can determine which orbit the objects are in, and that information is used to predict close approaches, reentries and the probability of a collision.  

As a world leader in space debris research, The Aerospace Corporation (Aerospace) has supported the Space Surveillance Network for nearly 60 years. Aerospace helps the U.S. government estimate the amount of debris created in a collision or explosion, assists with reentry predictions and reentry casualty expectation and is renowned in space traffic management research. 

The Problem of Space Debris

Space debris affects everyone especially since almost everything we do in our modern way of life uses satellite technology. Space debris adds to the cost of operating satellites because if debris destroys a satellite, it may take years and hundreds of millions of dollars to restore that satellite's service. Even tiny debris objects can inflict grave harm to critical sensors and spacecraft components. A one-centimeter-sized object is considered lethal if it hits a satellite and an object down to one millimeter can critically damage a satellite if it hits a critical component.  In addition, the growth in space debris will make orbit operations and space flight more hazardous, difficult and more costly if frequent maneuvers are required to avoid debris. A satellite would have to carry extra fuel for these extra maneuvers and would likely need to shield critical areas from collisions with small debris.  

The U.S. military is currently tracking about 20,000 objects and has cataloged more than 40,000 objects over the years. Space debris numbers are estimated to rise to over 100,000 objects in the coming years. Most space debris objects are too small to be tracked but large enough to damage spacecraft. It is estimated that there are hundreds of thousands of objects that could be fatal or catastrophic to a space mission and millions of objects that are capable of causing damage.

Complications of Space Debris Removal

Unfortunately, we can’t just vacuum or sweep up space debris into a space garbage truck. To remove space debris, particularly the large and more dangerous objects, we have to get close to it and maintain the same speed as each object. We then must somehow attach to it, and move it into a lower orbit or reenter it directly into the atmosphere, where it will burn up upon reentry. If the object is a rocket stage with propellant still on board, there is an explosion risk, which is why astronauts never perform this task.

There is also the issue of property rights; you can’t grab a satellite or rocket that belongs to another country without their permission. There is no easy way to control the small-but-dangerous objects that are not well tracked or not tracked at all. They have more kinetic energy than bullets, and they are moving ten times faster. It is hard to catch a bullet, especially if you don’t want to create more junk while doing it.

Increased space debris traffic also equals increased collision risk for launch vehicles and satellites on orbit. If the SSN predicts a collision between a cataloged object and a known operational satellite, they usually attempt to notify the owner/operator. Debris can’t be moved, but if the other object is a maneuverable satellite, the object may be able to move out of the way in time to avoid a collision. Most satellite operators require hours or days to plan and execute a collision avoidance maneuver. Other nations use CSpOC data as well as their own tracking data to protect their satellites. Therefore, high-accuracy assessment and prediction tools are essential for reducing risk to current systems and future launches.

CORDS Leads Space Traffic Management

Aerospace’s Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies (CORDS) is addressing the issue of space debris and space traffic management by developing tools and techniques that will analyze potential collision scenarios, study reentry breakups of upper stages and spacecraft and model debris objects in space. These efforts are critical given the predicted population growth in launch efforts and LEO satellite constellations.

CORDS-developed tools encompass a vast array of operations, from predicting possible collisions during launch and on orbit, to predicting hazards to spacecraft after collisions in space, simulating the breakup of reentering debris, estimating the survivability of satellite components reentering Earth’s atmosphere and determining risk to life and property. CORDS provides information on when a reentry might occur, and Aerospace collects and analyses material that survived reentry. This expertise has been used to support the needs of Air Force, NRO, NASA , NOAA, FAA and other customers.  

Reentry Breakup Recorder Records Reentry Data

To measure the effects of atmospheric reentry on space objects, CORDS developed the Reentry Breakup Recorder (REBR)—a small, lightweight, self-contained, autonomous, survivable and locatable data-recording device. Attached to a host vehicle, which is generally a spacecraft, this device “sleeps” until the point of atmospheric reentry, when it wakes up to record temperature, acceleration, rotational rate, and other data, including the subsequent breakup of the space hardware due to atmospheric drag, aerodynamic heating, and loads. REBR is released during breakup and protected by its heat shield, survives reentry and “phones home” recorded data via the Iridium system. Five REBR devices have been launched to date, providing innumerable insights into the atmospheric reentry and breakup of spacecraft.

Space Traffic Management Vital for Collision Avoidance 

The single most important contribution to managing space debris is to avoid making more debris. Nowadays, satellite operators try to reduce space debris from recently launched satellites and rocket bodies by carefully designing them to prevent explosions, reentering them, or moving them to disposal orbits — essentially a space junkyard — when their mission is over. Another way of preventing space debris is to predict and help prevent catastrophic collisions between existing objects. For nearly two decades, CORDS has pioneered new techniques and processes to provide probability-based analysis for mission assurance launch collision avoidance for all national security space launches. The CORDS team has worked to improve the accuracy of the space object catalog and how to apply this knowledge to achieve effective collision avoidance. Aerospace’s Debris Analysis Response Team provides realtime debris risk assessment for on-orbit collisions and breakups. 

The Importance of Space Debris Management

In their efforts to get to the moon, the first space pioneers probably never imagined that space debris and protecting our space environment would ever be an issue.  Nevertheless, this is the situation in which space operators today live.  There are international guidelines for getting rid of old satellites and rockets from the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC). The problem is that it can be difficult and expensive to eliminate old spacecraft, especially if the satellite or rocket was not designed for disposal. Furthermore, having satellites and rockets dispose of themselves will not work for objects that are already in orbit and are uncontrollable. Therefore, the work of CORDS, along with a robust Space Surveillance Network and the space situational awareness that it enables, are the cornerstones to ensuring a safe operational space environment for future generations.  

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15 Fantastic and Easy Day Trips From Moscow

Is the hustle and bustle of Moscow starting to wear you down? No worries. There are multiple great day trips from Moscow that will let you see a different side of Russia that you won’t find in the metropolitan area. Each day trip I’ve listed below can easily be done by train from Moscow, and there are trains every day of the week.

The area surrounding Moscow is rich in cultural attractions and natural beauty. By traveling only a short distance, one feels far away from the crowds, and lines of the sprawling Russian capital. Since Russia is undoubtedly an expansive country it may take from half an hour to two hours to reach some of the landmarks on this list (by train or car) from the Moscow city center.

You can escape to the picturesque Russian countryside, visit war memorials, battlefields, admire onion-domed churches, and get insight into the local way of life. Easy day trips from Moscow include the incomparable white-stone Trinity Cathedral in Sergiyev Posad, the spectacular Cathedral of the Assumption in Dmitrov, and the Russian military aircraft in Monino. For those who love rural tranquility, Suzdal and Vladimir are a must-see. History buffs will appreciate the Patriotic War of 1812 reenactment that took place in Borodino on the first weekend of September.

Without further ado, here are 15 best day trips from Moscow that are well worth your attention.

The Best Day Trips from Moscow

There’s a reason Moscow is one of Europe’s most enigmatic destinations. It’s got culture, class, food, history, and more, but even better, is that it is the country’s main transport hub with so many attractions within a day trip from Moscow. While you can definitely spend days or even weeks in Moscow, it can, of course, be done in just one week. What can you do in Moscow in seven days ? Well, you can do a lot if you know how to plan a trip to a place you know so little about.

If you’re ready to get out of the city a bit and soak up the culture, fresh air, and enchanting architecture, I’ve rounded up my favorite day trips outside of Moscow. I often get asked: What are the best cities to visit in Russia? And these are places that I’ve been and loved.

My Favorite Easy Day Trips from Moscow:

Dmitrov Kolomna Zvenigorod Sergiyev Posad Yaroslavl Arkhangelskoye Estate Vladimir Suzdal Korolev Borodino Patriot Park in Kubinka Melikhovo Gorki Leninskie Kaluga Monino

1. Day Trip to Dmitrov from Moscow

Dmitrov may not be as popular as other cities in Russia, but the fact that the city was founded only 7 years earlier than Moscow makes for a great day trip. This small city some 90 kilometers from Moscow is particularly beautiful in the summer. As you walk the streets you can see sparkling fountains, charming centuries-old buildings, yachts and boats transiting through the canal and, of course, the Museum-Reserve Dmitrov Kremlin.

The Kremlin (castle) is the city’s main draw. The 10m high and about 1km long earthen rampart remained behind the wooden wall and gives an idea of how the castle looked like 400 years ago. The oldest surviving building on the Kremlin grounds is the 16th-century Assumption Cathedral with a unique five-tier iconostasis.

Not far from the Kremlin there is a compact 15th-century Borisoglebsky convent. Its main building – the 16th-century Cathedral of Sts. Boris and Gleb is open to the visitors only for services of worship. In the 1930s in the convent housed a labor camp, which contained the builders of the Canal named after Moscow.

Getting There: Dmitrov sits an easy hour and sixteen minutes by train from Savyelovskiy Rail Terminal. This cheap day trip from Moscow is a great chance to soak up the historic charm to be found in Moscow Oblast.

2. Day Trip to Kolomna from Moscow

Situated to the south-east of Moscow, Kolomna is a beautiful port city on the Oka River. This is one of the oldest Russian cities in the region. So you can discover the old history in museums and monasteries. Interestingly, the city was a site for important weapon factories under the Soviet Union. Although it was opened up in 1994 Kolomna is not as popular as other day-trip destinations in the region.

Nevertheless, it is a great place to visit with friends and family where you can explore the 15th-century Kremlin made of red brick, try incredibly sweet traditional pastila (marshmallow), and visit some of the cute little churches and 19th-century mansions.

Getting There: Take the express train (commuter line train) from the Kazansky rail terminal to Golutvin station. The trip lasts one hour and forty minutes.

3. Day Trip to Zvenigorod from Moscow

This one is usually a given due to its proximity to and ease of transport from Moscow. It’s one of the easiest day trips from Moscow by train. You can easily hop on the train from the city and land right in the town of Zvenigorod where you can visit the 14th-century Savvino-Storozhevsky Monastery and sample the sparkly and refreshing kvass, a Russian specialty beverage that’s enjoyed in the summer months.

Zvenigorod is an adorable little town just under an hour away from the Moscow city and is an amazing place to visit as it will give a relaxing break from the hectic life of Moscow. Check this day trip if you don’t feel like planning.

If you have a sweet tooth, spend some time in the quirky Museum of Russian Desserts, where you can indulge in uniquely delicious treats and explore the intersection of food and culture.

Then you may want to pay the Zvenigorod Museum of History, Architecture, and Art a visit. The museum’s exposition is located on the territory of the Savvino-Storozhevsky monastery, or rather, in the 17th-century Tsaritsyny chambers, built for the wife of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich. Stroll through the museum halls to view the permanent exhibitions, which offer insights into various aspects of Russian history. The intricate museum’s building is adorned with a decorative porch, complex patterned elements, and looks very impressive in general.

4. Day Trip to Sergiyev Posad from Moscow

If you’re looking for cheap day trips from Moscow, Sergiyev Posad is a good choice at just a few dollar train ride away. Known as a major center of pilgrimage and home to one of the largest Russian Orthodox Monastery which has been here for hundreds of years, Sergiyev Posad is a fun day trip from Moscow and can be combined with Abramtsevo Museum Estate. As the only town in Moscow Region which is included in the Golden Ring of Russian cities, Sergiyev Posad is an incredible destination for a day trip from Moscow that packs UNESCO-protected Trinity Sergius Lavra, great museums, and gorgeous architecture into one day.

Make sure you see the six-pillared Assumption Cathedral that was commissioned by Ivan the Terrible in mid-16th-century and go inside to marvel at the impressive iconostasis that features Simon Ushakov’s masterpiece, the icon of Last Supper. Enjoy a delicious lamb steak with wheat kasha, Ukha fish soup, or hand-made dumplings as you learn a lot about religious and cultural history.

Getting There: Known for its small-town charm and welcoming feel, you can get to Sergiyev Posad by train, by bus, or by car. Trains depart from Yaroslavsky Rail Terminal every thirty minutes, and the trip lasts about an hour and a half. Alternatively, you can hop on a bus at the ‘VDNKh’ metro station. A bus trip to Sergiyev Posad takes two hours on average but can be reached in 90 minutes depending on traffic. If you go by car expect to spend about an hour and a half attempting to traverse the congested Yaroslavskoye highway.

5. Day Trip to Yaroslavl from Moscow

Going from Moscow to Yaroslavl may seem like a really long day trip, but honestly, if you take the comfortable train, it only takes about four hours to reach the city, so making a Yaroslavl day trip is totally doable. Although I do recommend much more than one day in Yaroslavl, especially if it’s your first time.

Cultural tourists visiting Yaroslavl should start their exploration by strolling the historic city center, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. A spacious 100-hectare area enclosed by Sobinova and Republican streets is home to most popular attractions – the 17th-century Church of Elijah the Prophet that survived almost exactly in its original form, and in contrast to it, the white stone Assumption Cathedral, restored in the 2000s.

If you walk a bit further passing the Holy Trinity sculpture and city’s foundation stone, you will find yourself at Strelka, a park on the cape, which offers panoramic views of the spot at the confluence of Volga and Kotorosl rivers. On the way back, there is a pleasant walk along the picturesque Volga embankment to the Governor’s Garden with shadowy alleys and an open-air Sculpture museum.

Getting There: Yaroslavl is about 280 km (173 miles) northeast of Moscow, so the best way to get there is to take a morning train from Yaroslavskiy Rail Terminal. A tour is also a great way to see the Yaroslavl without having to worry about driving or searching for trains. You can book a tour here.

6. Day Trip to Arkhangelskoye Estate from Moscow

Situated on the outskirts of Moscow and dates back to the late 18th-century, Arkhangelskoye Estate was the domain of the nobility for over a century until the Russian Revolution swept people who owned the estate out of the country. The estate was turned into a museum, which it remains today.

The Arkhangelskoye Estate Museum holds the largest rare-book collection. The exhibition also includes old manuscripts, historical documents, photos from the past, a vast collection of sculpture, paintings, engravings, and exceptional examples of decorative art. These art objects once belonged to Prince Nikolai Yusupov, the former owner of the estate.

Arkhangelskoye Estate is often referred to as the Russian version of Versailles because of the intricately manicured garden and beautiful 18th-century park. Famous Russian writers and poets such as Pushkin, Herzen, Mayakovsky loved to spend their free time here making long excursions in the surrounding area. Arkhangelskoye is a perfect place to appreciate the terraces decorated by delightful statues, exquisite vases, and busts.

Visitors can take tours, which introduce them to vibrant examples of Russian art and culture.

Getting There: To reach the estate it’s best to take a bus or a privately-owned minibus that departs from Tushinskaya metro station.

7. Day Trip to Vladimir from Moscow

Situated only two hours east of Moscow, Vladimir is absolutely one of the best places to visit near Moscow for a day trip. This splendid city dates back to the 12th century and has a very rich history. If magnificent Orthodox cathedrals and traditional white-stone architecture entice you, then this place is perfect for a day trip with your significant other.

First things first, you need to see the Golden Gate, which indicates the entrance into the old town. This 12th-century medieval masterpiece of military architecture is associated not only with Vladimir but with the Golden Ring tourist route itself. At the top of the gate, where once was the Church of the Deposition of the Robe, there is the Museum of Weapons. Great looking arrowheads and spear points date back to the Grand Principality of Vladimir, while the exhibition in an impressively majestic setting features a number of Batu-Khan related artifacts.

There’s a variety of attractions to put on your must-see list: the Old Believers Trinity Church right behind it, the Cathedral of St Demetrius, and Dormition (Uspensky) Cathedral. If you plan on shopping for souvenirs like birch-bark masterpieces of Kunov’s masters, drawings, carving, embossing, figures of people and animals, stop by the Lacquer Miniature, the Museum of Crystal, and the Gingerbread Museum. Many of the local attractions were added to UNESCO’s list of World Heritage sites.

Getting There: The best way to visit this area is to catch an early train from Moscow and book a full-day tour of Vladimir in advance. This one includes the town of Suzdal as well.

8. Day Trip to Suzdal from Moscow

This gem of a little medieval town perched on a hill just a 30-minute ride from Vladimir is one of those places I’ve visited and could move there permanently and be happy! It’s a charming little piece of history that also has a Kremlin and visiting it feels like stepping back in time. if you’re a culture enthusiast you’ll be glad to know there are numerous churches, five monasteries, including Spaso-Yevfimiev Monastery in Suzdal. Check them out if you want to get a real taste of the country!

pend some time shopping at the Torgovaya ploshchad (Market Square), where you can buy baskets made of birch bark, ceramic handmade plates, honey or souvenirs and, of course, grab some afternoon tea!

Getting There: Trains leave regularly from Moscow’s Kurskiy Rail Terminal to Vladimir where you can hop on a bus to Suzdal. You can also take a bus from Moscow. In this case, it might take longer and you’ll probably encounter infamous traffic jams. If you go by express train the trip takes about 1 hour and 40 minutes. There are slower trains of course, but I’d recommend going with the fast one and save a lot of time!

9. Day Trip to Korolev from Moscow

Located some 30 kilometers northeast of Moscow, Korolev has become arguably the most important space research center with skilled workers from across the Soviet Union who came here to expand the space program.

It became a leading institute dedicated to aerospace research in the country. Today, that tendency can still be clearly seen on the streets and in the buildings. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the city retained its status as the headquarters of Russia’s space surveillance network and now it hosts the Russian Mission Control Center, an analogue of the American Mission Control Center at NASA’s Space Center in Houston.

If you want to learn more about Mission Control Center and the former Russian Mir space station, book a tour with a knowledgeable guide who can clearly tell the history of this place.

If you’re not into space exploration there is also a Memorial Apartment Museum of Marina Tsvetaeva in Bolshevo. With a picturesque park next to the museum, it’s a great place for walking in the fresh air. The highlight of the park is memorial stones with quotes from Tsvetaeva’s poems.

Getting There: I’d recommend going by train. Catch one at Yaroslavskiy Rail Terminal that departs every 30 minutes to reach Bolshevo station.

10. Day Trip to Borodino from Moscow

The historic Battle of Borodino on September 7, 1812, took place just outside the small village of Borodino, about 140 km west of Moscow, and about 15 km from the nearest town of Mozhaysk. Although the French won the Battle of Borodino and went to capture Moscow, it was one of the bloodiest battles of the pre-twentieth-century that is also predetermined Napoleon’s defeat.

While it was a battlefield back then, not much remains today. It’s mostly a green and grassy field now with a few monuments of military honor, architectural objects dated back to 19th and 20th century, and fortification facilities scattered throughout the area. The largest of these is the 27-meter high obelisk located right at the heart of the former battlefield.

Every year the military and patriotic festival and theatrical performance take place in Borodino. Early September is considered to be the best for visiting. But if you just want to feel the spirit of the battle, it’s better to go at any other time of the year.

Getting there: Hop on a train from the Belorussky rail terminal, disembark in Mozhaysk, and then take a bus to the museum. The whole travel time is about 2 hours.

11. Day Trip to Patriot Park in Kubinka from Moscow

Once a Red Army tank training ground, now it’s a military Disneyland with history, structure, guns, and armored vehicles! The tank museum originally housed one of the world’s largest and rarest collections of tanks. In 2016 they combined the training grounds with the newly-created Patriot Park. Since then, some of the notable and rare items have been moved to the Patriot Park site, so you may want to combine both sites into one tour (only about 20 minutes apart).

The exhibition grounds include some very rare specimens that are must-see for any military enthusiasts out there. The staff is friendly, helpful and kind, while the museum has a small shop. As this site is part of an operating military base, they may ask you to show your passport, or provide them with a photocopy of the front pages. There are vending machines for snacks and drinks, and there are bathroom facilities. There’s plenty to see, so I recommend setting aside an entire day!

Getting there: Situated halfway between Borodino and Moscow, the best way to reach Patriot Park in Kubinka is by car. Alternatively, if you don’t want to rent one, consider car-sharing apps like Gett or UBER. The price of ride-sharing services is cheap enough to make them a viable proposition for choosing them.

12. Day Trip to Melikhovo from Moscow

Located some 80 km from Moscow, Melikhovo is one of the most important museums dedicated to Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. This renowned Russian writer and playwright acquired Melikhovo in 1892. He lived there with his parents and close relatives for 7 years before moving to the Crimea in 1899. Melikhovo is where he wrote his plays “The Man in the Case” and “The Seagull”.

The estate faded into oblivion right after the Revolution but in 1939 Anton Chekhov’s sister Maria and his nephew established a museum based on Chekhov’s place of living. The museum opened its doors to the public in 1941.

Today museum’s exhibition reveals the legacy of a celebrated writer and shows his path not only as a writer but as a doctor and public figure as well. The collection also features some of the best-known paintings by famous artists like Isaac Levitan and Vasily Polenov, who were Chekhov’s friends. When it comes to fun and educational day trips from Moscow, Melikhovo is a nice place for learning more about Chekov’s life and work.

Getting There: You can reach Melikhovo by train from Kurskiy rail Terminal. Disembark in the town of Chekhov and hop on a minibus that will get to the estate. Alternatively, hop on a bus that departs from the Yuzhnaya metro station.

13. Day Trip to Gorki Leninskie from Moscow

Once the realm of Russian nobles, Gorki Leninskie was turned into Lenin’s museum some 25 years after his death. The estate sits some 30-minute bus ride from the Domodedovskaya metro station and houses Soviet-era memorabilia and Lenin’s memorial flat recently transferred from the Kremlin, as well as his vintage Rolls-Royce.

Most people only associate this place with the name of the first communist leader. In fact, the name of the estate was first mentioned in documents dating back to the 16th-century. Throughout its history, the estate was owned by a number of prominent figures. It’s in fact one of the best museums that holds the country’s finest collection 19th-century furnishings and a unique collection of domestic items owned by nobles. Plus, ancient Vyatichi native tribe or East Slavs who inhabited a part of the Oka basin’s burial mounds and a few notable sculptures are hidden behind the avenues of lime trees in the park.

Getting There: You could, of course, hop on a bus from Domodedovskaya metro station. But it would be much easier just to use UBER or Gett. The estate isn’t that far from the Moscow Circle Road but going there by bus may involve some navigating.

14. Day Trip to Kaluga from Moscow

If you’re looking for an educational day trip from Moscow, look no farther than Kaluga! This beautiful city could really entertain you for more than just a day, but to get a taste of science, be sure to visit the Tsiolkovsky State Museum of the History of Cosmonautics. Or in other words, the Space Museum.

Visitors to the museum will learn more about the history of space exploration. In fact, this is one of the largest Space Museums in Russia, which opened its doors in Kaluga in 1967. Here you can see a prototype of the iconic MIR space station and a duplicate of the Voskhod rocket. The very same rocket that took the first man to space. There’s also a planetarium, which from the outside resembles a spaceship.

Kaluga is a totally walkable city. Make sure to spend some time strolling Teatralnaya street with the authentic 19th-century pavement that now marks the Kilometer Zero. Then walk across the 18th-century Kamenniy Most (the Stone Bridge) that somewhat resembles a Roman aqueduct. If you’re an architecture buff marvel at the Church of St. Cosmas and Damian.

It is assumed that the church was erected by one of the followers of Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli in 1794. The church resembles the Smolny Convent in St. Petersburg. With five church towers directed upward and six tiers of oblong windows give the exterior a sense of lightness and airiness.

Getting There: Trains from Kiyevsky Rail Terminal to Kaluga leave every 90 minutes. The trip takes about 2 hours and 35 minutes.

15. Day Trip to Monino from Moscow

Are you looking for great family & kid-friendly day trips from Moscow? If so, consider visiting the Central Museum of the Air Forces at Monino. This unique military open-air museum is home to over 180 Russian aircraft and 100 aircraft engines and the perfect place to go when your crowd is looking for a break from hectic city life. Check this tour if you don’t feel like planning.

This site was formerly an operational airbase from 1932 till 1956 and many of the Russian aviation Design bureaus have made a contribution to the operation and maintenance of the museum. Along with aircraft from the Second World War, there are the TU-95 Bear four-engine turboprop-powered strategic bomber and the TU-144 Charger a Soviet supersonic passenger airliner (which resembled the Concorde). The museum also has exhibits related to military aviation history such as the uniform of captured U2 pilot Gary Powers.

Getting There: This museum is located at Monino Town, about 30 km from Moscow. It is open on all days from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, except Mondays and Tuesdays. To get there take a train departing from Yaroslavskiy Rail Terminal and disembark at Monino station. Alternatively, hop on a bus from Schelkovskaya or Partizanskaya metro station.

Final Thoughts on the Best Day Trips from Moscow

I hope this post has helped you discover some amazing day trips from Moscow. From imposing cathedrals, mighty fortresses and monasteries, there are a lot of incredible places to visit the Russian capital, and the best part is that getting there is always ways to get around on the cheap.

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Great article for visitors in Moscow , thanks for sharing

Marie Hernandez

I hadn’t considered traveling to Moscow until NOW! Fantastic post and ideas for visitors! Thanks!

Graham Marsden

Nice to see so many options outside of Moscow, but I have to say I wish this list had a recommendation for a hike or a beautiful natural areas or national parks. Maybe the next list!

I have to admit that I knew nothing about the area surrounding Moscow. This is definitely an inspiring list of places to go.

When I read this article about Moscow. I wanted to pack my bags and get there sooner. thank you for the great write up.

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Top Aerospace companies In Moscow City

Moscow City is home to several prominent aerospace companies, including Tupolev, Sukhoi, and Ilyushin. These companies specialize in designing and producing military and civilian aircraft, such as fighter jets, military transport planes, and commercial airliners. They also develop advanced aerospace technologies, such as avionics, engines, and flight control systems. These companies have a long history of innovation and excellence in the aerospace industry, and continue to be major players in the global market.

Below are the 36 Top Aerospace companies In Moscow City and their top employee and management contact details:

Dauria Aerospace

United aircraft, gk launch services, s7 airlines, state research institute of aviation systems (gos niias), jet 2000 business jets, ilyushin finance, reynolds gas turbines, npo nauka pao.

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Extensions & Add Ons

10 Best Vacuum Storage Bags of 2024

Our top picks will increase your closet and suitcase space in minutes.

We've been independently researching and testing products for over 120 years. If you buy through our links, we may earn a commission. Learn more about our review process.

Our top picks:

Best Overall

Spacesaver vacuum storage bags.

GONGSHI Vacuum Storage Bags

Best for Travel

Ziploc space bag.

Top-Seller on Amazon

Cozy essential vacuum storage bags.

Best Variety Pack

Hibag vacuum storage bags.

Best for Bedding

Hefty shrink-pak vacuum storage bags.

Best for Stacking

Storage master jumbo vacuum storage bags.

Best Extra-Large

Vacwel vacuum storage bags.

Best Hanging

Taili hanging vacuum storage bags.

The best vacuum storage bags make the most of your space by removing the air inside and sealing it tight. Many use a vacuum or hand pump to suck out all the air, while some travel-friendly space bags can actually be hand-pressed shut. Because of this, they're great for packing out-of-season clothes, bedding and more into small spaces like under your bed or inside your suitcase .

After consulting our in-house experts and scouring online reviews, we've rounded up the best vacuum storage bags to shop on Amazon, starting at just $8 (with fast, free shipping to boot!).

The original Spacesaver vacuum storage bags are our top pick for heavy-duty storage needs where damage protection is imperative, like cross-country moves and travel. You can use either the included hand pump or your vacuum to reduce volume by up to 80%, according to the brand. Choose from small to jumbo sizes and variety packs for all your storage needs.

Reviewers appreciate its ease of use and sturdy plastic . "I'm moving all the way across the country and was stressed out wondering how much of my clothing I could actually take with me. These Space Saver bags are a life saver!" wrote one five-star reviewer . "They are so easy to pack, zip and vacuum out the air. One of my best purchases ever here on Amazon (and I've made thousands)."

Stow bulky bedding, sweaters, pillows and more with these space-saving storage bags. You can either use the included hand pump or a standard vacuum cleaner to compress each bag and reduce volume by up to 80%, according to the brand. For under $20, this pack comes with four bag sizes to store different items: the smallest size fits six to eight sweaters while the largest fits a queen-sized bedding set.

The triple-sealed valve is designed to keep bags airtight so your items stay condensed, and the double-layered material is designed to be puncture- and scratch-resistant, making it more durable against damage. "They're strong and sturdy," one Amazon reviewer said . "They have great sizes and storage space, and they hold the seal (some for a year now)."

Skip the checked luggage line at the airport with these travel-friendly storage bags. Forté named the Ziploc Space Bag a long-standing Lab favorite. There's no need for a pump or a vacuum to take the air out — simply fill each with up to five pounds of clothing or bedding, seal it with the Ziploc slider and fold to press out the air. It also costs under $10 for a pack of two.

Since they don't require any bulky equipment, these bags are a great option for users on the go. The brand claims the bags reduce the volume of clothing and bedding by up to 75%. They're also waterproof and airtight per the brand, meaning they should help protect your items from damage caused by travel and storage.

Boasting more than 38,000 five-star reviews and counting, Amazon's #1 best-selling space saver bags claim to shrink the size of your items by up to 80%. This variety pack includes 20 bags, making them great for anyone moving houses or with lots of vacuum storage needs. The pack includes standard vacuum-sealable bags as well as travel bags that can be rolled to press out air — no pump required.

Waterproof and reusable (purported by the brand), the bags' valves and seals are designed to prevent expansion and keep moisture and debris out. "The quality of these bags is outstanding," one online shopper wrote . "I feel confident storing my clothing, bedding and other textiles knowing they are safe and well-preserved."

Whether you need to increase your under-bed storage space or condense your clothes on the go, this pack offers the most variety with six different-sized bags for all your needs . The standard bags range from pouch-sized bags for lingerie and T-shirts to extra-large bags for bedding sets and pillows . Each waterproof bag has a handy line to show you where to stop filling them, making it more intuitive to pack than other options on our list.

While it can be sealed with the included hand pump or a vacuum, we love that the travel bags can be rolled to seal out excess air sans tool if needed. "These were a game changer during our move," an Amazon reviewer wrote . "The sizes vary drastically, accommodating many different types of items from quilts to pillows as well as clothes."

Hefty is known for its durable garbage bags and freezer bags, but the brand also has a line of high-rated vacuum storage bags. Including three large and three extra-large sizes, Hefty's Shrink-Pak bags claim to be waterproof and reusable season after season, so you don't have to worry about moisture, dust or bugs ruining your items. Plus, you can simply press the air out with your hands and seal.

We love how the extra large bags have a zipper on the long side rather than the shorter top, making it easier to pack bedding supplies like pillows and comforters. Shoppers agreed, with one writing : "We just went through a very long, drawn-out move and the shrink bags have been a true lifesaver! We were able to put lots of our clothes, towels and blankets in storage while we shopped for a new house. When we finally started unpacking, everything looked exactly the way it did when it was packed!"

Outfitted with a stylish plaid print, we wouldn't mind keeping these space bags out in plain sight. And it's not just for aesthetics. Their unique woven texture provides a bit of grip to their exterior, helping them to stay in place better while stacked. The bags come in four sizes and packs of six to 26, making them great for small organization projects and large undertakings.

Plus, they compress with a vacuum or its included pump. Reviewers appreciate the variety of sizes and ease of use, too. "I love these sealable storage bags!" one shopper wrote . "The quality is fantastic, very well-made and sturdy. I really like the assortment of colors and sizes, too, so much so that I ordered a second box!"

If you need to store cumbersome items like king-sized duvets, foam cushions or dog beds , Vacwel's XXL bags offer an impressive storage capacity of 47 by 35 inches . Featuring a nylon lining for extra durability, the brand claims these bags are waterproof and protect against dirt, bugs and dust. They even come with sticker labels to easily identify stored items.

"These bags are durable and got the job done," an Amazon shopper added . "I was able to vacuum seal large comforters and sheets! Very surprised at how many bedding items that I was able to put in the bags." Note that a pump is not included, so you'll need a vacuum handy to seal these bags.

Protect your out-of-season garments and make room for new pieces with these clever hanging storage bags on Amazon. You can stash up to five pieces of clothing inside each, including coats, jackets and suits . Just place one included hanger on each rotating ring, zip it up and vacuum all the air out. The vertical storage design keeps your clothes clean and organized until you're ready to wear them again.

"I get immense joy out of packing away my winter clothes in the Taili hanging bags," an Amazon reviewer said . "[It] shrink wraps everything into compact boards ... It was very easy and effective to use."

How we chose the best vacuum storage bags

With so many different options on the market, it can be difficult to determine which vacuum storage bags are worth buying. To help you find the right pick for your needs, we consulted our experts in the GH Institute Cleaning Lab and vetted customer reviews to bring you a range of vacuum storage bags that suit a variety of purposes.

How do you choose the best vacuum storage bags?

Choosing the best vacuum storage bags depends on your individual needs — do you just need to store a few seasonal sweaters, or pack up your whole house for a move? According to, the size and dimensions can help you figure out which options are right for you.

" They should be large enough to hold multiple items and be durable enough to use from year to year ," Forté says. For those who don't own a vacuum (or have one readily accessible), opt for a bag that can be rolled to compress or can be hand pumped.

What do you put in a space bag?

While you might want to use your vacuum storage bag to compress bulky items like winter coats and duvets, Forté warns against vacuum-sealing down-filled items . Instead, she recommends only compressing them halfway.

"Otherwise, you risk crushing and breaking the down feathers and they may then not be as lofty or insulate as well," Forté says. Additionally, be sure not to store wet items, or you risk creating mold and causing long-term damage.

How long can you store items in a vacuum storage bag?

Forté recommends using storage bags for short-term and seasonal storage . "Keep items in them too long, and you risk permanently setting creases or crushing and flattening items that are supposed to be lofty and puffy," Forte says. For best results, be sure to check the recommended storage time on your bag's instructions.

Why trust Good Housekeeping?

Associate Commerce Editor Lauren Gruber put together this list of the best vacuum storage bag picks, based on insights and recommendations from Carolyn Forté .

Forté brings more than 40 years of experience as a consumer products expert to her role as executive director of the Good Housekeeping Institute 's Home Care and Cleaning Lab. Using deep analytical testing and writing expertise in appliances, cleaning, textiles and organizational products, she oversees all of GH's cleaning and home care product testing.

Lauren is a Brooklyn-based journalist and Associate Editor at Hearst. You can find her previous work at Entertainment Tonight , Shop TODAY , USA Today , Self Magazine , L’Officiel USA , V Magazine, and Modern Luxury Media . 

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Travel | April 26, 2024

Marvel at These Bold, Beautiful Bridges

See 15 superbly suspended structures from the Smithsonian Magazine Photo Contest

Text by Tracy Scott Forson

Photographs selected by Jeff Campagna

Bridges have been helping connect us for centuries. Whether they’re natural phenomena or enduring feats of architecture, our lives wouldn’t be the same without them. As  the recent collapse of Baltimore’s majestic Francis Scott Key Bridge  reminded us, these iconic spans are not just beautiful to look at, they represent the lifeblood of our communities and economies.

Spanning waterways and canyons, supporting pedestrians and locomotives, bridges are everywhere, used by just about every civilization in the modern world to bring people together. With these 15  Smithsonian  Magazine Photo Contest images, we bring a few to you. Take a look.

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Tracy Scott Forson | READ MORE

Tracy Scott Forson is a senior editor at Smithsonian magazine.

Jeff Campagna | | READ MORE

Jeff Campagna is a photo editor at Smithsonian magazine. You can follow him on Instagram at @jeffcampagna .