Kármán Line: Blue Origin's Famous Crew Will Travel Past A Long-debated Marker For The Edge Of Spac...

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Blue Origin is taking a star-studded crew of six female passengers to the edge of space on Monday in one of the most closely watched suborbital space tourism missions in years.

The flight will last about 10 minutes — carrying the group more than 100 kilometers (62 miles) into the sky and offering a few minutes of weightlessness before they descend.

But at what point during the flight will singer Katy Perry, journalist Gayle King and their fellow passengers reach "space"?

Is it when they look outside their window and the blue glow of the sky fades to black? Is it when they reach an altitude at which satellites can orbit? Or is it when the atmosphere grows so thin that it no longer plays a defining role in the flight physics?

Space can be defined in several ways, and the usefulness of the criteria for determining where it starts can depend on the scenario. That's why various organizations around the world use different altitudes to mark that invisible threshold for recordkeeping purposes.

Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, for example, have been known to spar publicly over the matter — mostly because of one, specific means of defining space: the Kármán line.

Perhaps the most well-known and controversial demarcation of space, the Kármán line lies at 100 kilometers (62 miles) above sea level.

But the company's chief competitor, Virgin Galactic, does not. Its flights so far have reached up to about 88.5 kilometers (55 miles), which is still beyond the 81-kilometer (50-mile) mark that the US government has long used to define space.

Still, Blue Origin has pointed to the Kármán line to assert its rides as a more legitimate path to earning "astronaut" status, saying in one 2021 social media post that "none of our astronauts have an asterisk next to their name" — a subtle dig at Virgin Galactic.

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