Edit: The consensus is that Virgin Galactic is trying to move the goal posts and claim 80 km is space because Spaceship Two can’t reach 100km.
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Gotta be at least 100 miles up to call it space. Below that, it’s just really thin atmosphere.
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fuck yeah blast em all into space every last tech bro enjoy mars buckos
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Man at the rate we are going we will be on Mars in no time! Screw you al gore, we will get a spanking new planet! This is gonna be great!
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Roger that! Over and out!
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I was there to witness SpaceShipOne’s first flight past 100km, back in 2004. Quite a day. Somehow I managed to get in to the press area along with @Brainspore and a photographer friend, so we got a good view of the events. At the time I never would have guessed that it would take more than 14 years for their next ship to fly up to space (and a lower altitude at that) but as this company learned the hard way (multiple fatal accidents) space is hard.
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Glad to see Im not the only one rolling my eyes at this one.
What’s special about “space tourism”? Even if we’re talking about spending gigabucks to spend a long weekend at the space station, its not as if this represents some kind of treasured human goal.
Ive talked to true believers who earnestly claim they would feel enormously fulfilled being a janitor on a moon base, if such jobs existed. Really? If and when such jobs exist, its going to be pretty similar to working on an earthbound oil platform or freighter, plus some crazy hazards and some low gee effects. I seriously doubt that once its available, the true believers of today would give it a second thought.
The thing that keeps humans out of the space game is not our fragile bodies, rather its our short attention spans. There have been so many American presidents who try to sound like Kennedy in declaring for Mars, its become a cliche. Its no more sincere a promise than Drumpf with his border wall.
Once you account for -and discard- the ‘manifest destiny’ argument, it seems like most would-be Mars colonists belive that negotiating for resources on Mars will somehow be more sensible and less crazy-making than it is here and now on Earth.
And its such a comfortably distant goal, its logically impossibly to prove them wrong.
The debate that actually seems to shine some light on these issues, has to do with sending humans into space instead of robots. For all the wonderful engineering we get with “spam in a can”, we get many times the science benefit for sending robot probes. But the budget isn’t bottomless, so robot missions have to tighten their belt in order to put humans in orbit 200 miles away from the safety of the home planet. Because politicians like to pretend there is something new to be discovered there.
If we could have a national conversation about the benefits of space exploration, I’d be very interested to know if citizens somehow are more responsive to the word of a human astronaut than pictures and sounds and data from a robot probe. At least the robot probe doesn’t have to listen to flat earthers tell them that they’re liars.
But I suppose when the national conversation is actually about whether or not brown people are really people, its a bit much to expect anything more than space tourism. I should be grateful for these scraps of secondhand thrills I am allowed. But Im not.
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I mean hey, what’s the worst thing that could happen?
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Is this space? But it’s all blue and shit.
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cnn are already trying to kill it
What if you go straight to escape velocity?
What about those poor Soviet Sofanauts who fell off the sofa, but never hit the floor?
@MaiqTheLiar “I’m quite sure that my couch outright attacked me once or twice.” It steals your small change too! Life with a sofa is like life with a homicidal kleptomaniac.
@anon47741163 Certainly Mars seems like a bit of a red-herring. If you can get to Mars, you might as well go prospecting in the Asteroid Belt instead.
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Meanwhile, the rest of the world found it difficult to take seriously people who couldn’t figure out the metric system.
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When the rest of the world starts flying astronauts in their own reusable spaceplanes, maybe we’ll care what they think. (-:
The USAF has been awarding astronaut wings for suborbital 50+ mi, flights since 1962.
You must be fun at parties.
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The Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FIA) has considered 100 km the “edge of space” for “world record” purposes, but I’m not sure that counts as a “consensus.”
Different figures have been used by different agencies at different times.
Theodore von Kármán himself initially calculated his line at 83 km, but suggested 100 km as “memorable round number.”
Harvard astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell lays out the case for 80 km as a reasonable boundary in his recent paper The edge of space: Revisiting the Karman Line .
This is not some new idea invented by Virgin Galactic just to “move the goal posts”. McDowell (among others) has been making this argument for some time: see, f’rex, his article about the history of the X-15 in the Spring 1994 issue of Quest Magazine.
As McDowell notes, satellites capable of multiple orbits may have elliptical orbits with perigees that dip as low as 80 km. So once you’re above 80 km, you need to be concerned about not colliding with orbiting satellites.
Sounds like “outer space” to me. (-:
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I’ll have you know I am flying an astronaut in my own reusable spaceplane right now. Are you?
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I’ve been accused of that before. (-:
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you know Melz2 its pssble our great grnchldrn will someday include this couch scenario as a futuristic metaphor of human expression in describing the simplicity once associated with what was once considered a fantastically difficult journey for some meaningless purpose that most believed to be irrelevant. (this could be a skit!)
