This Is How Long It Would Take To Drive To Space

Driving to space itself would be almost trivial and would barely qualify as an afternoon trip. As astronomer Fred Hoyle explained via Best Life, the boundary between the Earth's atmosphere and space is an arbitrary one, but is generally considered to be about 60 miles up. From there, the math is easy: driving at 60

Driving to space itself would be almost trivial and would barely qualify as an afternoon trip. As astronomer Fred Hoyle explained via Best Life, the boundary between the Earth's atmosphere and space is an arbitrary one, but is generally considered to be about 60 miles up. From there, the math is easy: driving at 60 miles per hour, you could drive to space in one hour.

Getting to the nearest space "landmark," so to speak, is going to require a bit more effort. The Moon, according to Science Focus, is roughly 250,000 miles away. That means the trip would take 4,166 hours, or nearly 174 days of driving without stopping.

And finally, and strictly for the sake of reference, there's Earth's celestial neighbor to which we've been sending spacecraft for decades, with a view toward one day sending a manned mission up there: Mars. The Red Planet is 218.7 million miles away, according to NASA. Driving there at 60 miles per hour, it would take over 3.6 million hours to reach Mars. That's 151,875 days, or 415 years.

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