We like round numbers.Īnd so that number has stuck. That means he decided to round it up to 100 kilometres.

In his original research, he actually decided it was actually closer to 80 kilometres. Von Kármán was a researcher who decided to look into where the orbital mechanics of things orbiting Earth - you know, the speed at which they orbit in the gravitational pull of the Earth. Can you explain a little bit about that, about where this boundary came from and whether whether that one holds up? But but there's been a lot of talk about this Kármán line as the official boundary line of space. Fallon/AFP/Getty Images)Īs it's defined in the United States. The Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo space plane Unity and mother ship separate as they fly way above Spaceport America, near Truth or Consequences, N.M., on Sunday. And that is space as it's defined in the United States. They reached something like 83 kilometres. company - space is defined as about 50 miles, or approximately 80 kilometres, and that is where they were yesterday. definition - and Virgin Galactic is a U.S. Although, one can say that Earth itself is in space. But the way we define it is that it is outside of Earth's atmosphere. Now, that is a very simplified way of describing it, because there are a lot of things in space. Space, in the way we define it, is an area of vacuum that has very little or nothing in it. I know this is kind of a profound question, but what is space anyway? So who's right? According to space analyst Laura Forczyk, it's all semantics.įorczyk, who runs the company Astralytical, spoke to As It Happens guest host Duncan McCue. The Amazon CEO will take flight on Blue Origin's rocket July 20. It boasted on Twitter that its ship is designed to travel 100 kilometres above our home planet, hitting space barrier defined by Hungarian-American engineer Theodore von Kármán.

institutions recognize as the boundary of space, and far enough to experience four minutes of weightlessness and see the curvature of the Earthīut Blue Origin, the space company founded by Bezos, takes umbrage with Branson's claim. Billionaire Richard Branson says he beat billionaire Jeffrey Bezos to space when he blasted off in his own rocket ship on Sunday, though not everyone agrees.īranson's Virgin Galactic rocket hurtled him 80 kilometres above Earth, which is the altitude several major U.S.

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