In mathematics, a metric space aimed at its subspace is a categorical construction that has a direct geometric meaning. It is also a useful step toward the construction of the metric envelope, or tight span, which are basic (injective) objects of the category of metric spaces. Following , a notion of a metric space Y aimed at its subspace X is defined. Informal introduction Informally, imagine terrain Y, and its part X, such that wherever in Y you place a sharpshooter, and an apple at another place in Y, and then let the sharpshooter fire, the bullet will go through the apple and will always hit a point of X, or at least it will fly arbitrarily close to points of X – then we say that Y is aimed at X. A priori, it may seem plausible that for a given X the superspaces Y that aim at X can be arbitrarily large or at least huge. We will see that this is not the case. Among the spaces which aim at a subspace isometric to X, there is a unique (up to isometry) universal one, Aim(X), which in a sense of canonical isometric embeddings contains any other space aimed at (an isometric image of) X. And in the special case of an arbitrary compact metric space X every bounded subspace of an arbitrary metric space Y aimed at X is totally bounded (i.e. its metric completion is compact). Definitions Let be a metric space. Let be a subset of , so that (the set with the metric from restricted to ) is a metric subspace of . Then Definition. Space aims at if and only if, for all points of , and for every real , there exists a point of such that Let be the space of all real valued metric maps (non-contractive) of . Define Then for every is a metric on . Furthermore, , where , is an isometric embedding of into ; this is essentially a generalisation of the Kuratowski-Wojdysławski embedding of bounded metric spaces into , where we here consider arbitrary metric spaces (bounded or unbounded). It is clear that the space is aimed at . Properties Let be an isometric embedding. Then there exists a natural metric map such that : for every and . Theorem The space Y above is aimed at subspace X if and only if the natural mapping