It’s the ultimate adventure and the final frontier, a place that has fascinated humankind ever since early man craned his head up at the night sky and wondered what was out there.

But while the exploits of Yuri Gagarin, the Soviet cosmonaut who in 1961 became the first man in space, gave us a first glimpse of space exploration, the thrill of bursting through the Earth’s atmosphere has still only been experienced by a handful of pioneers. Aside from them, we’ve left it to science fiction films to fill in the blanks with giant black holes, acid-blooded aliens and Princess Leia in a revealing golden two-piece.

Space travel for mega-rich tourists is supposedly on the way but fortunately you don’t have to pay Richard Branson £100,000 to discover more about the cosmos. Online you can find virtual tours of the planets, including Mars taken by Mars Explorer, watch live footage from the International Space Station (ISS) and look through the Hubble space telescope at distant galaxies.

WATCH IT

The first moon landing in 1969 was a global television event (watch it at tinyurl.com/2znnoa), and space missions are now routinely filmed, bringing us tantalisingly close to the action. Start by visiting Nasa’s website for the ISS at tinyurl.com/9q9q3, where you can catch a live glimpse of life on this furthest flung outpost of humanity as it orbits Earth.

Like a kind of intergalactic Brady Bunch, the crew always seems supremely glossy, relaxed and happy – no mean feat considering the recent serious computer problems that threatened to play havoc with the orbiting and life support systems.

One recent American crew member, Suni Williams, who returned to Earth aboard the space shuttle Atlantis last month, broke the record for the longest space flight by a woman with a total of 194 days.

The punchy Spaceflight Now (www.spaceflightnow.com) is a cosmic news agency with a sub-channel dedicated to webcasting audio and video footage, such as wing-tip camera feeds from the Atlantis mission. Monthly subscription cost £4.95, with a year’s worth of footage almost half the price at £31.95.

Compared with the might of Nasa, the European Space Agency could do with a Saturn V-like boost, especially since the disappointment of the Beagle 2 mission to Mars. Nonetheless, its collection of video footage at tinyurl.com/3aymcq is well worth logging into.

ASTRO BLOGS

The best space blog to date is from our most recent space tourist, Charles Simonyi, a US-Hungarian software developer who went on a 14-day visit to the ISS in April. His www.charlesinspace.com offers meticulous, jargon-free descriptions of the reentry process and other revealing minutiae of life aboard the ISS. For example, he must be one of the few tourists required to check out of his hotel carrying not only his own waste but that of his fellow guests too.

Living in Alaska must often feel like being on another planet, so it’s little wonder www.akastronaut.org/blog, the work of Alaskan native and shuttle pilot Bill Oefelein, shows an appetite to get the hell off Earth: “As we stepped out of the van, you could see the shuttle venting. You could hear it creaking and moaning. It was as if it was alive and longing to leave the bounds of the launch pad.”

The frank diary of Maryam (q80girl.blogspot.com), a 25-year-old woman studying aerospace engineering in St Petersburg, armed only with a crush on cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev and a fierce determination to become the first Kuwaiti in space, captures perfectly the excitement of interstellar dreams. The remarkable journey she has already taken, in the face of overwhelming odds, language problems and fear of racist attacks in Russia, is both moving and inspiring.

PLANET HOPPING

To commemorate the moon landings, the clever bods at Google created a map of the Sea of Tranquillity – the area of the moon where the six Apollo moon landings occurred between 1969 and 1972 (moon.google.com). This pales in comparison with the scope of what’s on offer at worldwind.arc.nasa.gov, which has swooping 3-D vistas of Earth, the moon, Mars, Venus and Jupiter (including the moons of Io, Ganymede, Europa and Callisto) and imagery of stars and galaxies. At 180MB, the download is monstrous, but a small price to pay for stunning views of far-flung corners of the solar system.

The long-held fascination for the Red Planet has spiked since the discovery of sub-surface water ice there in 2002, which has increased the possibility of finding life. The excellent www.exploremarsnow.org offers a detailed 3-D walkthrough of what a Martian outpost for space explorers may look like in the future, kitted out with everything from equipment for the analysis of rock samples to roll-up laptops.

For anyone keen to reach out to the other eight planets of the solar system, www.solarviews.com is home to a collection of images and the odd movie. The collection also includes images of asteroids, comets and moons.

DEEP SPACE

For many of us, concepts of time and space as taught to us in school physics lessons, applied only to the race to the lunch queue once the bell rang. A shame, because a site such as www.space.com/php/video brings astrophysics thrillingly to life with sound and vision – provided you are happy to sit through the lengthy advert that precedes each clip.

The frantic gallop out of the Milky Way and into deep space hints at the unfathomable expanse of the universe, while the explanation of pulsars asks you to imagine a star 12 miles across that weighs more than the sun, rotating at the speed of a kitchen blender.

The BBC’s definitions of wormholes and dark matter at www.bbc.co.uk/science/space/deepspace are crystal clear but feel a bit dour and Soviet considering the media-rich offerings in the rest of the Beeb’s Science and Nature basket.

When it comes to bells and whistles in cyberspace, the online home of the Hubble telescope (hubblesite.org) is a samba orchestra, and the monthly video download, called Tonight’s Sky, is an illuminating guide to the heavens of the northern hemisphere. “A clear night sky is always a celestial showcase,” says the narration – perfect motivation to leave the computer and pick up the binoculars or telescope.