The Branson and Bezos Adventure

Sat, 11 Jun 2022 07:04:55 +0000

It's a bird!...No, it's a plane!...No, it's Bezos and Branson in their game of one-upmanship of who would become the world's first bonafide private astronaut (sounds a lot like private pilots). And, guess what? It is still not clear even after their respective successful flights. A lot of the controversy depends on definitions and technicalities and who's defining them. One of the technical terms that are doing the rounds after their flights is "Karman Line". Named after Hungarian-American engineer Theodore von Karman, it is defined as the boundary between atmosphere and space. The Fédération Aéronautique Internationale sets it at roughly 100 kilometres above mean sea level. Now, some aeronautical agencies often do not recognize the Karman Line as the valid definition for 'edge of space' and many have their own respective boundaries set for defining the edge of space. NASA, for example, sets it at 50 miles (80 kilometres) above mean sea level. Any flight above 80 kilometres is considered by NASA to be a spaceflight. However, even within NASA, this metric has often stayed inconsistent and sometimes its definition was motivated by Soviet and American achievements during the space race in the early 1960s. But, most of the world followed (and still follows) the Karman Line as the defined boundary between space and atmosphere.