Getting to space is fast. Honestly, it’s faster than your morning commute if you live in a major city like Los Angeles or London. If you could drive your car straight up at highway speeds, you’d hit the edge of the atmosphere in about an hour. But since we haven't mastered flying Corollas into the thermosphere yet, we rely on rockets, and they do it much quicker.
The short answer is about eight and a half minutes. That’s the magic number.
That is how long it takes to get to space when you’re strapped into a Falcon 9 or the old Space Shuttle. In less time than it takes to soft-boil an egg and toast some bread, you go from standing still on a humid Florida launchpad to floating in the silent, terrifying vacuum of Low Earth Orbit (LEO). But "getting to space" and "getting somewhere useful" are two very different things.
Most people confuse reaching the Kármán line—the invisible boundary 100 kilometers up—with actually arriving at a destination like the International Space Station (ISS). One takes minutes. The other can take days.
The Brutal Physics of the First Nine Minutes
You aren't just traveling up. You’re traveling sideways. Very, very fast.
To stay in space, you have to hit orbital velocity. If you just go straight up and stop, gravity wins. You fall back down like a stone. To stay there, you need to be moving at roughly 17,500 miles per hour. That’s about 5 miles every single second.
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The first stage of a rocket does the heavy lifting. It’s the brute force phase. For a SpaceX Crew Dragon mission, the first stage burns for about two and a half minutes before it’s spent. At that point, you’re already roughly 65 kilometers high. You’re not technically in space by most international standards, but the sky is getting awfully dark.
Then the second stage kicks in. This is the precision work. For the next six minutes, the engine pushes the craft into a trajectory that matches the curve of the Earth. When the engine finally cuts off—Main Engine Cutoff or MECO—the silence is supposedly deafening. You’re in space. You’re weightless.
But you’re also basically in a high-speed chase with a metal football field (the ISS) that’s already orbiting the planet.
Why the Trip to the ISS Takes Way Longer
So, you’ve reached space in 500 seconds. Great. Now comes the boring part.
Even though you’re "in space," you aren't at the International Space Station yet. Depending on the orbital mechanics and where the station was when you launched, it can take anywhere from three hours to three days to actually dock.
NASA and Roscosmos used to take the "slow road" frequently. It was safer. It gave the crew time to get used to being "space sick"—which is a real thing called Space Adaptation Syndrome. Imagine the worst car sickness of your life, but you can’t open a window and your vomit floats. It’s not fun. Experts like Dr. Peggy Whitson have talked about the physical toll of these early hours.
In recent years, the "fast track" rendezvous has become the norm. The Russian Soyuz started doing four-orbit trips that took about six hours. Then they pushed it to a two-orbit trip taking just over three hours.
- Fast Trip: ~3 hours (Soyuz MS-17 set a record at 3 hours and 3 minutes).
- Standard Trip: ~19 to 24 hours (Common for SpaceX Crew Dragon).
- Slow Trip: 2 to 3 days (Used for cargo or specific orbital alignments).
The variability exists because the ISS isn't sitting still. It’s moving. If you launch at the wrong microsecond, you have to spend extra orbits catching up. It’s like trying to jump onto a moving merry-go-round while wearing a blindfold.
Suborbital Hops: The Tourist Version
If you’re a billionaire or a lucky contest winner on a Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic flight, your timeline is even shorter.
Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket is a vertical "up and down" trip. You launch, you hit 100 kilometers, you spend about four minutes in zero-G looking at the curve of the Earth, and you fall back down. The whole experience, from smoke on the pad to dust on the desert floor, is about 10 to 11 minutes.
It’s the "express lane" version of how long it takes to get to space. You aren't going fast enough to stay in orbit, so you’re basically a very expensive human cannonball.
Virgin Galactic takes longer, but only because the "launch" starts from an airplane. The VSS Unity is carried to 45,000 feet by a mother ship. That part takes about an hour of wandering through the sky. But once the rocket motor ignites? You’re in space in about 60 seconds.
The Moon and Mars: The Long Haul
If we’re talking about "space" as a destination further than Earth's backyard, the numbers get depressing.
To get to the Moon, you’re looking at about three days. Apollo 11 took 75 hours and 56 minutes to enter lunar orbit. We haven't really sped that up much because physics is still physics. You need a certain amount of fuel to slow down once you get there, so going faster on the way actually makes the "stopping" part harder.
Mars is a whole different beast.
With current chemical rockets, you’re looking at seven to nine months. That’s a long time to live in a tin can. NASA’s Perseverance rover took about 203 days. It’s not just about distance; it’s about waiting for the planets to align so you aren't chasing Mars across the solar system. This happens every 26 months. If you miss your window, you’re stuck on Earth for another two years.
Common Misconceptions About the Journey
People think the "G-force" is the reason it takes so long. It’s not.
Actually, we could get to space faster if we wanted to. We could build a rocket that accelerates at 10G and gets you there in a couple of minutes. The problem? The human body turns into a pancake at those speeds. Most rockets are throttled to stay around 3G to 4G to keep the astronauts conscious and the hardware from snapping.
Another weird myth is that you’re "away" from gravity once you’re in space. You aren't. At the height of the ISS, Earth’s gravity is still about 90% as strong as it is on the ground. You only feel weightless because you’re in a constant state of freefall. You’re falling toward Earth, but moving sideways so fast that you keep missing it.
What to Watch Next Time There's a Launch
Next time you see a SpaceX or NASA livestream, look at the "T-plus" clock on the bottom of the screen.
- T+ 0:00: Liftoff.
- T+ 1:12: Max-Q. This is where the aerodynamic stress is highest. The rocket is literally fighting the atmosphere.
- T+ 2:30: First stage separation. You’re high, but you’re still "slow."
- T+ 8:50: Orbital insertion. This is the moment.
If you see the crew start tossing a stuffed animal around the cabin (their "zero-G indicator"), you know they’ve officially arrived.
Actionable Insights for Space Enthusiasts
If you want to track these timelines in real-time or understand the logistics better, don't just wait for news headlines.
- Download a Tracker: Use an app like Next Spaceflight or Space Launch Now. They provide the exact flight profiles and expected "time to orbit" for every specific vehicle, from the heavy-lift SLS to the smaller Electron rockets.
- Watch the "Burn" Times: Pay attention to the second stage burn duration. That is the actual measurement of how long it takes to reach the required velocity for space.
- Follow the Telemetry: During live launches, companies now display speed (km/h) and altitude (km). Watch the altitude hit 100km—that’s your "I’m in space" benchmark—but wait for the speed to hit roughly 27,000 km/h before you celebrate. That’s when they’re actually staying there.
Getting to space is a feat of accelerating human beings to unimaginable speeds without breaking them. It’s a violent, noisy, eight-minute sprint followed by a very long, very quiet wait to get where you’re going.