Several space missions of planetary exploration are currently underway, including Venus Express and Mars Express to our planetary neighbours and Cassini-Huygens to Saturn. In this talk, we will look at some of the results from these missions. Remarkably, these distant bodies can also tell us more about our own planet. Will the greenhouse effect run away here as it has at Venus, or might severe climate change happen as at Mars? Does Titan really show us what prebiotic Earth was like? We will also look at possible future space missions to these bodies.