Where Does Space Begin?

Star Trek sonorously announces before each episode: “Space…the final frontier.” But where exactly does that frontier lie?

Well, according to the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, the world governing body for this sort of thing, outer space begins 100 kilometers (roughly 62 miles) above sea level. This barrier is called the Kármán Line. Above that, the air is too thin for a vehicle to maintain altitude. So…once you’ve crossed Kármán, you’ve been to space.

Ah, but now the USAF weighs in. By military standards, Space starts 12 miles sooner, or 50 miles above sea level. For Americans, crossing that threshold makes a pilot an astronaut.

All of which gave NASA a bit of a headache. During the 1960s, 8 American test pilots flew the experimental X-15 above the 50-mile mark, but only 5 of them passed Kármán. Astronauts all by American military definition, but to the FAI, 3 hadn’t even been to space.

For nearly 40 years, NASA waffled on whether to recognize these X-15 pilots as astronauts. Then in 2005 the agency relented, finally awarding astronaut wings to the remaining three.

This info, including the illustration, was shamelessly copped from the March/April 2021 issue of Mental_Floss.

Say WHAT? (Pretty far out…but do-able)

  Since I’m in Future Mode at the moment, I think I’ll share some of the other stuff I pulled up while researching the last couple of posts.  These mind-boggling concepts are so far out, so beyond sci-fi, it makes me think of Carmen. Carmen was the beleaguered secretary that held the IT Dept. of United Space Alliance together through Y2K, John Glenn’s second up, and Newt Gingrich. I’d storm up to her desk waving the latest directorial memo demanding, “Whoa! Just how are we supposed to do THIS?”

And Carmen, bless her heart, would resignedly set down her coffee, grit her teeth, and utter her perfected mantra: “I know it’s ridiculous. I know it’s gratuitously complicated. But it’s do-able. So, like, DO it!” And I would, of course. Sometimes without overtime.

Now you’re going to see what I mean. Folks, I give you The Space Elevator. As NASA gets out of the manned spaceflight business, new and cheaper ways of getting into space – without rockets – have been developed by private companies. Running on a strand of woven fiber carbon nanotubes, a space “elevator” will whisk you 22,000 miles above earth to an inflated kevlar-and-fiberglas space station. According to www.absolutely-unbelievable.com, the iSpace Corporation is holding a drawing to win a two-week vacation on the moon. iSpace is already negotiating for land to build this thing. Enter today!

Are you ready for the ultimate cruise? I actually saw this on Discovery, or The History Channel or PBS or somewhere. Freedom Ship, a floating city of thousands, is an idea that has been tossed around for a while. Now the Freedom Ship Company has a new set of designs for the floating urban space, which looks sort of like a giant mall parking lot, and sort of like a really giant Love Boat. According to the company’s site, http://www.freedomship.com/, it’s not a cruise ship per se. It’s a place to live, work, and retire. A place that just happens to be continuously traveling around the world.

While casting about online for images, I found this on www.scans_daily.com, a sort of comic book site. The caption reads: “This is the Libertania. It's a huge ship designed as a floating nation. The president of the US is visiting, and tension is brewing between the upper & lower decks. Now watch everything go to Hell.”

So…I suppose it’s not so much a question of is it do-able, but what will happen if we do?

Fantasy Then; Reality Now

On my morning walk today I was startled by a sound overhead...like a Very Large, very ecstatic, bumble bee. Adjusting my visor and sunglasses, I finally picked it out of the overcast. What the heck was that thing? It was soaring and circling and dipping and rising at quite a rate of speed. Suddenly I remembered a scene from an icky 1975 cult sci-fi satire, Death Race 2000, in which the racers were strafed by just such an aircraft.

It took some Googling, but I found it: a Rutan Long-EZ,G-WILY. Yes. And it wasn’t such a new-fangled thing after all. The design, according to Wikipedia, was first offered to home aircraft builders in 1976. Obviously it was at least on the drawing boards before director Paul Bartel hollered, “It’s a wrap!” No doubt the writers and producers expected WILYs to be in every garage by 2000.

But it did make me think about what futurists imagined way back when, and what has actually transpired by now. I mean, how much does the Apollo rocket resemble that ship of Flash Gordon’s? Nevertheless, it did happen, which in turn made me think about folks who don’t imagine anything of the sort.

Take that time back in my NASA days. I was helping a Boeing engineer set up his new office space when said PhD ambled out and plunked an open tome on my desk. “We need a new dictionary,” he muttered, and returned to his boxes.

I looked at the entry marked by a slash of yellow highlighter. “Rocket ship,” it read: “An imaginary airplane.”