Scienceville
Space Smarts
Space is just an hour's drive away (straight up!), astronauts grow taller, and a spacecraft carries a golden record. Let's blast off into new space discoveries!
Did you know?
Space is closer than you think! The edge of space is often set at the Kármán line, 100 km above sea level. If a car could drive straight up at 100 km/h, it would reach space in about an hour!
Astronauts can grow about 2.5 cm taller within a month in space! Without gravity pulling down, their skeleton stretches out fully. Their faces also look puffy, because body fluids drift up towards the head.
Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is the farthest human-made object from Earth. It carries a golden record with sounds, music, pictures and greetings in 55 languages, in case anyone out there ever finds it!
Try this: Earth and Moon to Scale
Use a football about 22 cm wide as the Earth. The Moon is about a quarter as wide as Earth, so find a ball about 6 cm wide, such as a tennis ball. Now guess: how far apart should you place them? Walk it out, then measure.
Show answer
about 6.6 metres, because the Moon is roughly 30 Earth-widths away!
Go further: The Very First Space Travellers
Long before people went to space, animals went first. On 20 February 1947, a rocket carried fruit flies about 109 km high, above the Kármán line. They became the first animals in space, and they were recovered alive! Scientists wanted to learn how radiation high above the Earth affects living things. Later, in September 1968, two tortoises on the Soviet spacecraft Zond 5 became the first animals to travel around the Moon.