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Going there

How people and machines leave the Earth, where they have been so far, and what it is like to live off the planet.

8 lessons in 3 parts. Every one can be read again at a deeper level.

A photograph. The Earth setting behind the far side of the Moon, photographed by the crew of Artemis II on 6 April 2026. Credit: NASA.

Part 1

Getting off the ground

What a rocket does, what an orbit is, and how a spacecraft finds its way to another world.

1
How a rocket works
A rocket moves by throwing hot gas out of its back. Reaching orbit takes so much speed that nine tenths of a big rocket is fuel, and most of it is dropped on the way.
With moving pictures and photographs
2
What an orbit is
An orbit is a fall that never reaches the ground. Newton's cannonball shows how.
With moving pictures and photographs
3
Leaving and arriving: how spacecraft get about
Getting into space is about speed, not height. After that a spacecraft mostly coasts, and borrows speed from planets on the way.

Part 2

People as far as the Moon, machines to every planet and beyond, and telescopes above the air.

4
The first journeys: Sputnik, Gagarin and the Moon
From a beeping metal ball in 1957 to twelve people on the Moon took fifteen years. Then nobody left Earth orbit for more than half a century, until 2026.
With moving pictures and photographs
5
The Moon
Our nearest neighbour: a quarter as wide as the Earth, made from the wreckage of a collision, and the only other world people have stood on.
With moving pictures and photographs
6
Robot explorers
No person has been further than the Moon. Everything known from close up about the planets, their moons, comets and asteroids was found by machines sent in our place.
With moving pictures and photographs
7
Telescopes in space
The air blocks most kinds of light and blurs the rest. Lifting a telescope above it costs a fortune, and has changed what is known about almost everything.
With moving pictures and photographs

Part 3

Life aboard the Space Station, and what the body makes of it.

8
Living in space
People have lived aboard the International Space Station without a break since November 2000. Floating is fun, but the human body was built for the ground.
With moving pictures and photographs

This pack is not finished. These lessons are planned and will be added to it: Going back to the Moon, and on to Mars.

Fly round the planets in 3D
Every world the robot explorers have visited, where it is today.
The atlas
Maps made from what the spacecraft sent back.