A spaceship is a vehicle designed to travel through the vast emptiness of outer space, beyond Earth's atmosphere where there's no air to breathe and much less gravity to hold you down. Unlike airplanes, which need air to fly, spaceships carry everything they need with them: fuel, oxygen, food, and water.

The first spaceships were small capsules that could barely hold a few astronauts, like the one that carried Yuri Gagarin into orbit in 1961 or the Apollo spacecraft that took Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the Moon in 1969. Modern spaceships include capsules and spaceplanes that ferry astronauts and supplies to orbit, and space stations like the International Space Station, where astronauts live and work for months at a time.

Spaceships must be built incredibly strong to survive the violent shaking of launch and the extreme temperatures of space (from blazing hot in sunlight to hundreds of degrees below zero in shadow). They need special shields to protect against radiation and tiny meteoroids that zip through space at thousands of miles per hour.

In science fiction, spaceships often travel between stars at impossible speeds, but real spaceships move much more slowly. Even our fastest spacecraft would take tens of thousands of years to reach the nearest star. Still, spaceships have carried humans to the Moon and robotic explorers to every planet in our solar system, transforming space from an unreachable dream into a place we can actually visit and study.