• Question: how far do spaceships travel into the sky because when i'm on an airplane i'm pretty sure all i see are clouds not the earth, jupiter and saturn??:0

    Asked by 755grak26 to Ry, Hannah, Daniel on 13 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Ry Cutter

      Ry Cutter answered on 13 Nov 2017:

      Planes usually fly about 10 kilometers high. To be considered a spaceship you have to fly 10 times higher than that. If you fly over 100 kilometers you can qualify for official astronaut status!
      If there were no clouds you would be able to see whatever you were flying over.
      It’d be much harder to take off on Jupiter or Saturn. Their gravity pulls you down by a lot more and you definitely wouldn’t be able to see the ground with all that gas!
      Great question,
      Ryan

    • Photo: Hannah Middleton

      Hannah Middleton answered on 13 Nov 2017:

      A typical passenger airplane will fly at around 39000 feet (or about 11 kilometers). At this height, you are above the cloud level – so if it is cloudy and you look down you see the top of the clouds. But you are still inside the atmosphere of the Earth, which extends to about 100 kilometers above the Earth’s surface.

      A satellite like the International Space Station (ISS) is orbiting the Earth at a height of 408 kilometers, so that is in space. You can actually see the ISS on some nights from Earth if you are lucky with the weather and go to this website to find out when it is passing over where you are!
      http://www.isstracker.com/

      Jupiter and Saturn are much much further away – millions of kilometers away in fact! You can actually see them from the surface of the Earth at some times of the year, but they will look like points of light. If you want to find them on a particular night, there is some free computer software called Stellarium that you can use:
      http://www.stellarium.org/en_GB/

      A space probe called Cassini visited Saturn and it took about 7 years to get there!

      Hope that answers your question 🙂

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