PLACES WE LOVE
UTAH
Otherworldly
Destinations
Spots to visit here on
Earth if you dream of
traveling to space
R
ichard Branson’s Virgin Galactic has launched a vessel that
reached the edge of space. Elon Musk’s rocket company,
SpaceX, wants to ferry people to Mars by the hundreds,
with an ambitious goal of landing the first humans on the red
planet around 2025. With July 20 of this year marking the 50th
anniversary of the Apollo 11 moonwalk, all eyes are focused on the
skies. National Geographic, too, has been celebrating the cosmos
over the past year; see nationalgeographic.com/starstruck. It’s enough
to give Earthlings a serious case of interplanetary wanderlust, but
you can’t book your tickets just yet. For aspiring space tourists eager
for a celestial experience, we offer some terrestrial places with a
distinctively off-planet flavor. —Brad ScriberNATGEOTRAVEL.COM