Virgin Galactic Successfully Reaches Space (bbc.com)

The latest test flight by Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic successfully rocketed to space and back. From a report: The firm's SpaceShipTwo passenger rocket ship reached a height of 82.7km, beyond the altitude at which space is said to begin. It marked the plane's fourth test flight and followed earlier setbacks in the firm's space programme. Sir Richard is in a race with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos to send the first fee-paying passengers into space. He founded the commercial spaceflight company in 2004, shortly after Mr Musk started SpaceX and Jeff Bezos established Blue Origin. In 2008, Virgin Galactic first promised sub-orbital spaceflight trips for tourists would be taking place "within 18 months". It has since regularly made similar promises to have space flights airborne in the near future.

Comments

not quite space

[dmoen]

Virgin Galactic's marketing department defines space as 80km. Most of the rest of us define it as the Karman line, which is 100km. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:not quite space

[Rei]

The Kármán line isn't just an arbitrary altitude, either. It's the point at which the atmosphere relatively abruptly starts transitioning from "well mixed, with a composition like at the surface" to "increasingly dominated by light and ionized species"

Of course, Kármán defined it as the rough point at which lift ceases being relevant for an aircraft moving at orbital velocities (which is also a meaningful definition).

Re:not quite space

[spire3661]

Its a pointless distinction. Orbital or sub-orbital are the only relevant terms. Sub-orbital point-to-point transport is super-interesting. Shooting tourists on a ballistic flight to some arbitrary zenith between the ground and 'space' is not.

Re:not quite space

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Which is not the same as "altitude at which space is said to begin".

Re:not quite space

[hackertourist]

Karman did some calculations on where lift becomes irrelevant (this depends on design parameters for the wing, so a different altitude for each design), arrived at an altitude of 85 km and rounded up to 100 km.

Branson has some precedent: the USAF defined 80 km as the boundary of space, in order to be able to call their X-15 pilots astronauts.

Weasel words

[arth1]

The firm's SpaceShipTwo passenger rocket ship reached a height of 82.7km, beyond the altitude at which space is said to begin.

"Is said to" depends on who says it. The mesosphere extends to around 85 km.
The FAI considers anything below 100 km (the Karman line) to be aeronautics, not astronautics.

Am I the only one to find this very unexciting?

[Ecuador]

Am I the only one to find this quite unexciting? And I am not just talking about a 20km difference. I mean, we are essentially talking about something that an aircraft from 1959 could do (nobody called it a spacecraft), without even having to be released from a significant height - and it's been in development for over a decade. And we can't even compare it to other private "space" ventures because as we know the hard part about getting into earth orbit which is what the others are doing is not the height, but the speed (required for the orbit), which is at least a magnitude higher than this Virgin craft does, hence so much harder.
I could see how an "edge of space" ride could be interesting tech, but it would have been "inspiring" if it had been delivered in the 00's. A 60 second powered flight in 2018 somehow seems "meh" to me. The "80km space" thing is just adding some insult ;)