How far are we from the day when you go to a travel website and buy a ticket to space? Not as far as you might think – space travel is close at hand.

Multiple private companies are working on making space travel a reality. They want to sell tickets to the public and allow them to live out their dreams of visiting space.

The most notable among these ventures (for our purposes) is SpaceX. It was founded by Elon Musk, the entrepreneur behind Tesla cars and PayPal. They have already developed a couple of launch vehicles with the goal of reducing the cost of space travel and enabling the colonization of Mars.

Sound crazy? It’s not. They’re close to making this a reality.

In 2008, SpaceX launched the first-ever privately funded rocket to reach orbit. In 2010 they became the first private company to launch a rocket into orbit and recover it.

Since these accomplishments, they’ve continue to push forward, launching a rocket into geosynchronous orbit and one beyond Earth’s orbit. They’ve also accomplished vertical landing of rockets on ocean platforms.

They’ve been so successful with their space travel program that they’ve received contracts from NASA to help provide systems to resupply space stations and they’re currently developing a way to bring people to the space station.

So, a ticket into space is on the horizon. It’s currently pretty expensive with tickets on Virgin Galactic, another venture looking to run public flights to space, selling for as much as $250,000.

Virgin Galactic hasn’t flown yet, but they’ve started a community of “future astronauts” who are reserving seats on a future flight to space for up to a quarter of a million dollars – each.

This venture comes from the familiar Virgin brand and is a fully commercial venture, unlike Musk’s SpaceX, which is commercial, but also has other aspirations.

One of SpaceX’s aspirations that jumps off the page is their goal of colonizing Mars. That’s much farther down the road than a simple trip to space, but SpaceX is committed to it. If they are successful, you may have the ability to buy a space travel ticket that takes you out of Earth’s orbit and visit Mars.

It’s all within reach and we aren’t far from commercial flights being a real thing. It’s a wild change from the days when your only hope of ever getting into space was years and years of training, a hope of getting a job with NASA and then hoping that there will be a space mission that you can be a part of.

For the casual space enthusiast, these developments could be significant. And we can hope that Musk’s goals of making space travel affordable mean that they aren’t just a little cheaper than Virgin Galactic’s $250,000 tickets, but that they’re genuinely affordable.

Until you stop by Travelocity and have to decide between London or the Moon for your next trip, check out these Instagram accounts focused on space to keep you excited for a future where space travel is commonplace.

If this gets you excited, you should dig into other amazing things people are doing in space.