The Final Frontier: Where’s the boundary?
Space tourism hard to promo without a definition
As soon as Thursday, Virgin Galactic plans to fire the rocket motor of its spacecraft and fly to an altitude of more than 50 miles. If it succeeds, it would proclaim it has reached the edge of space and that its pilots are the first astronauts to launch from United States soil since the last space shuttle mission in 2011.
But the test flight would also crystallize a long-simmering debate over where space begins. The Air Force and Federal Aviation Administration have awarded astronaut wings for pilots who have made it to 50 miles or above. But, to many, the edge of space begins at 62 miles, or 100 km, at the so-called Karman line, named for Theodore von Karman, one of the founders of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
As Virgin Galactic — the company founded by billionaire Richard Branson with a goal of taking tourists on suborbital trips — prepares to eventually fly its first customers, the question remains: Where does space begin?
“There isn’t any agreed upon international definition,” said Bill Barry, NASA’s chief historian.
The Karman line was the measuring stick in the $10 million Ansari X Prize competition in 2004 — the first spacecraft to pass that altitude twice in two weeks won. As a result, it became widely accepted as the boundary of space.
Blue Origin, the space company founded by Jeff Bezos, also plans to fly its customers 62 miles or more. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Alan Shepard, the first American to reach space, reached 116 miles during his 15-minute suborbital flight in 1961.
The recent flight by NASA astronaut Nick Hague shows how tricky the issue is. In October, his flight to the International Space Station was aborted due to a rocket failure. Initially, NASA said in a statement to The Post that he is still considered to have made it to space because “he scraped the edge of (62 miles), which is the theoretical boundary of space.”
But then it backtracked, saying that Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin actually were just short of the Karman line at approximately 93 km, or about 58 miles. It added that it considers him to be “a flown astronaut because he launched and landed in a spacecraft; he was fully trained and prepared for the launch and mission to the International Space Station.”
There is no precise definition of where space officially begins in international law.
Many countries prefer that ambiguity, allowing them to fly spacecraft, such as intelligence satellites, over a foreign country without crossing into another nation’s airspace.
If 50 miles was good enough for the Air Force, it is good enough for the company, George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic’s chief executive said. “Virgin Galactic has always respected this recognition and will follow the same,” he said.
Ultimately, the company’s goal is to ferry many more people to 50 miles, or higher. More than 600 people have signed up for the trips on SpaceShipTwo, its spaceplane, which now cost $250,000.
The long-term goal is to make it routine. “You can easily imagine a future in which … we’re operating multiple times a week … and enabling tens of thousands of people to experience space.”