A researcher dressed in a space suit walks through Hanksville, Utah—home of the Mars Desert Research Station. The location was chosen by scientists to test techniques and equipment because of its similarity to the landscape of Mars.
Elon Musk's rocket company, SpaceX, wants to ferry people to Mars by the hundreds, with the first humans landing on the red planet around 2025. President Barack Obama published an op-ed in October 2016 recommitting to his goal to send humans to Mars by the 2030s.
It’s enough to give Earthlings a bad case of interplanetary wanderlust, but you can’t book your tickets just yet. For budding space tourists eager for a celestial-body experience, here are some terrestrial destinations with distinctively off-planet flavor.
Picture of Rainbow Bridge National Monument in Arizona
Rainbow Bridge, one of the world's largest known natural bridges, arcs over a tributary of Lake Powell in Utah.