Space isn't far away. If your car could drive straight up, you'd be there in about an hour. The tricky part isn't getting to space — it's what the sky does on the way.
An hour's drive, straight up
Most people picture space as impossibly distant, but the official border — called the Kármán line — is only 100 kilometers up. That's about the distance of a one-hour highway drive, pointed at the sky. The air doesn't stop there like a wall, though. It just gets thinner and thinner as you climb, like a smoothie running out: half of all the air on Earth is squashed into the bottom 5 kilometers, which is why mountain climbers on Everest need oxygen tanks before they're even 9 kilometers up.
Where the sky turns black
The sky is blue because sunlight bounces around in the air above you — blue light bounces the most, so the whole sky glows blue. Climb higher and there's less air to bounce the light, so the blue fades: pilots of the highest planes see a deep dark violet, and astronauts see the Sun blazing in a completely black sky, with stars beside it, in the middle of the day. Black sky in daytime is how you know you've truly left the atmosphere behind.
So why is it so hard to get there?
Here's the puzzle: if space is only an hour's drive up, why do we need giant roaring rockets? Because just reaching space isn't the goal — you'd fall right back down, like a ball thrown high. The real challenge is staying there, and that means going sideways at 8 kilometers per second so you fall around the Earth instead of back onto it. Getting up takes minutes; getting fast takes almost all the fuel. When you're older readers of this site say 'orbit is about speed, not height' — now you're one of the people who knows.