AGING FOR NO REASON: Did Richard Branson Really Fly in Space? | Lost Coast Outpost

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British billionaire Richard Branson flew into space last Sunday. Says it here on the CNN website: “Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson successfully launches rockets into space. Branson, along with three Virgin Galactic employees and two pilots, climbed to about 55 miles altitude in the “SpaceShipTwo” rocket-propelled winged plane. It actually flew at about 45,000 feet after breaking away from the mothership “WhiteKnightTwo”. After shutting down the engine, the passengers broke loose and floated in free fall for four magical minutes.

So why the CEO Bob Smith of his rival Blue Origin, the sub-orbital rocket company of Jeff Bezos, he tweeted, two days before the historic Branson flight, “… none of our astronauts? [will] have an asterisk next to their name. For 96% of the world’s population, space begins at 100 km [about 62 miles] to the internationally recognized Kármán line ”? Did he say that Branson and company don’t really go to space ?

Oh yes. Nothing subtle about it. Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket goes into space – real space – while Virgin Galactic misses the seven mile mark, according to Smith. True to the decade-old rivalry between the two companies, the tweet inspired Virgin Galactic test pilot Nicola Pecile to reply: “This pissing contest on the Karman line is so childish it gets really embarrassing. to watch.”

The debate dates back to 1957, when Hungarian-American aeronautical engineer Theodore von Kármán attempted to define the limit of space. Earth’s atmosphere does not end, of course, abruptly – one minute there is air, the next minute the vacuum of space – but rather the air becomes thinner and thinner as you go up. . At the top of Everest (five miles above sea level) you can still breathe – just – but at eight miles, about as high as planes fly, you’ll soon pass out. Kármán wanted to define the height at which “aeronautics” ends and “astronautics” begins, for the purposes of international jurisdiction: aircraft fall under a different set of laws than spacecraft. He established the 100 kilometer “line”, later named after him, as an arbitrary and easy to remember number, justifying it by showing that it is more or less the altitude at which an orbiting satellite can survive. long before slowing down, going down and burning. up.

Theodore von Kármán (1881-1963) at JPL in 1950. Photo: NASA.

Kármán’s hope that 100 km would rule out arguments of international jurisdiction did not come true. True, in 1961 the United States and the former USSR agreed to determine where national airspace ends and where outer space begins (free for all). But this has never been universally accepted, and indeed NASA and the USAF define space as starting 12 miles below, 50 miles above the Earth’s surface. Meanwhile, the world’s governing body for aeronautical and astronautical records, the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI), along with most other bodies outside the United States, opts for the Kármán Line, 62 miles above. But whether it is “internationally recognized”, as Blue Origin claims, is questionable.

So: Has Branson reached space? Depends. He’s a Brit, so you could say he’s bound by European rules, i.e. the FAI. Sorry Sir Richard, no cigar, you haven’t crossed the Kármán line. But Virgin Galactic is an American company, so congratulations, you are officially an astronaut. Chris Hadfield, retired Canadian astronaut (and Commander of the International Space Station and troubadour) apparently agree, pinning astronaut wings on Branson when he landed.

The saga will continue, with the planned launch this Tuesday, July 20, of Blue Origin’s New Shepard, the 16th flight and the first to be crewed, including Bezos himself. No ambiguity with this: the planned altitude is 105 km. It’s five kilometers – three miles – above the Kármán Line. You know, space.



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