How to watch Branson’s robbery, which Jeff Bezos is still crazy about

Virgin Galactic continues final preparations for historic VSS flight Unit vehicle Sunday morning, carrying company founder Richard Branson and three other employees. To that end, on Friday the company announced it will host a live broadcast, hosted by Stephen Colbert and featuring a new song by Khalid, to publicize space flight.

But wait, is this really space? Amazon founder Jeff Bezos says Virgin Galactic flights over 80 km are do not space.

In a pair of salty tweets Bezos’ space company Blue Origin took photos of Virgin Galactic and its rocket-powered space plane on Friday. “From the start, New Shepard was designed to fly over the Kármán Line, so none of our astronauts have an asterisk next to their name,” the company tweeted. “For 96% of the world’s population, space begins 100 km from the internationally recognized Kármán Line.”

From the start, New Shepard was designed to fly over the Kármán Line, so none of our astronauts have an asterisk next to their name. For 96% of the world’s population, space begins 100 km from the internationally recognized Kármán Line. pic.twitter.com/QRoufBIrUJ

– Blue origin (@blueorigin) July 9, 2021

The 96 percent implies that the rest of the world, other than the United States, recognizes 100 km as a space limit. The US Air Force, which assigned astronaut wings to X-15 pilots who flew above 80 km, and the United States Federal Aviation Administration have said 80 km is space.

Meanwhile, the World Air Sports Federation, or FAI, is using 100 km to demarcate the space boundary in an attempt to set world records. However, the organization says it plans to lower that limit from 100 km to 80 km, due to “recently published analyzes. [that] present convincing scientific arguments for reducing this altitude. This reassessment is based in part on a scholarship from Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics scientist Jonathan McDowell.

These two tweets from Blue Origin on Friday, which to be clear must have come from Bezos’ office, seem petty to us. Of course, Blue Origin’s launch system goes higher. But Virgin Galactic has already sent humans to space three times. And some customers will enjoy the experience of a space plane more than launching a rocket.

This tone is surprisingly sufficient for a rocket company that has yet to launch anyone into space, or even put a gram of payload into orbit after more than 20 years. At least Branson’s other space company, Virgin Orbit, has already successfully reached orbit twice, and is expected to start doing so frequently soon. And what kind of image is Bezos looking for here, anyway? While he is building a $ 500 million super yacht, his main competitor in the space race, Elon Musk, lives in a $ 50,000 house in South Texas so he can be near his. engineering and technical teams working on its Starship project.

Most likely, Bezos just remains annoyed that he was eclipsed by Branson, who advanced his flight on the VSS. Unit spacecraft after Bezos announced it was flying into space on July 20 aboard its New Shepard suborbital system. So Bezos asked his communications team to create this graphic and tweet it less than two days before Branson’s flight. In the end, the tweets tell us more about Bezos than about its rocket – which is excellent – or about Virgin Galactic.

Either way, you should totally watch the Virgin Galactic livestream, which starts at 7:00 a.m. MT, or 1:00 p.m. UTC on Sunday mornings. Ars will be present to enjoy the show.