How high do rockets go?

The answer depends on the type of rocket. Sounding rockets, which NASA and other agencies use for brief experiments, climb in a parabola and fall back: they reach anywhere from about 50 km to over 1,000 km, offering between five and twenty minutes of microgravity. Suborbital tourist vehicles, such as Blue Origin's New Shepard, aim to pass 100 km, the Kármán line, the conventional boundary of space, and return to the ground within about ten minutes. Orbital launchers, by contrast, aren't chasing altitude but speed: their goal is to reach roughly 7.8 km/s horizontally so the payload doesn't fall back down.

Almost everything launched today goes to low Earth orbit, between 200 and 2,000 km. The International Space Station orbits at around 400 km, and internet constellations sit between 500 and 600 km. Navigation satellites like GPS or Galileo occupy medium orbits, around 20,000-23,000 km. Geostationary TV and weather satellites sit at 35,786 km above the equator, where their period matches Earth's rotation and they appear motionless from the ground. To get there, the rocket's upper stage or the satellite itself performs additional burns after a parking orbit.

When the destination is the Moon, Mars, or deep space, altitude stops being meaningful and the relevant figure becomes escape velocity, about 11.2 km/s. The rocket places the probe on a trajectory that takes it away from Earth for good; in that case, the upper stage can end up orbiting the Sun alongside the payload. The distance record belongs to the Voyager probes, both now over 20 billion kilometers away (as of January 2025), though on that journey the rocket only provided the first few minutes of thrust.