When I Fly

Always, but especially when I fly, I look up and remember that outer space doesn't "begin" at the plane's cruising altitude (10km), or where Felix Baumgartner jumped from (40km), or at the Kármán line (100km) where the atmosphere can no longer hold up aircraft — it's everywhere. Outer space is everywhere. Even when we're crawling along the bottom of that ocean of air we call the atmosphere, or swimming just above it, at the atmosphere's floor, we're still moving through outer space. We're just blinded by the short-sightedness of daily routine, and by sunlight. We only look up during the day and see just the sun, instead of looking up at night to see the rest of the universe — and remember that we live on a rock tumbling through space.