Surprise: Billionaire Jeff Bezos hasn’t really flown to the edge of the universe, just stopped at a place where no one cares?

While tech billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson celebrate their successful spaceflight, unleashing a new aviation business, experts debate whether they’ve really reached the edge of space. extraterrestrial.

This controversy is quite understandable because so far there has been no clear international standard about the edge of the universe. Even in the recent space race, Bezos’ Blue Origin joked Branson’s Virgin Atlantic that it flew higher and became a real “cosmonaut” rather than the competition.

Business tricks

On Twitter, Blue Origin compared its flight to Virgin Atlantic’s, decrying that the competitor did not fly as high and was not up to the edge of space standards, launched by aeroplanes rather than unmanned rockets, capable The windows are too small like those of an airplane, there is no escape compartment and too much greenhouse gas is released into the environment.

Blue Origin teases Virgin Galactic about the quality of space flight services

Not to mention the competition between companies in the new market, the definition of the edge of space is also something quite new to even space experts.

Theoretically, the edge of the universe is defined as the space between the universe and the earth’s atmosphere. Currently, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the US military and the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) have all agreed that the 80km distance from the ground is the edge of space, and the billionaire Branson’s flight has been completed. pass this mark.

However, the International Air Sports Association (FAI) defines a distance of 100km from the surface of the earth as the edge of space and Bezos’ flight has reached this milestone.

According to The Atlantic, the definition of FAI is more commonly known and known as the Karman curve, but this is not a universally agreed standard.

To this day, the edge of the universe is still a controversial area because space projects often pay little attention to this area. Rockets, spacecraft or satellites fly over this region very quickly to do their job, and no one has the time to linger on the edge of space.

However, entrepreneurs like billionaire Bezos, Branson or even Elon Musk are quite interested in them because this area can become a lucrative piece of cake for space tourism.

Blue Origin’s mockery of Virgin Galactic about its edge-of-space standard isn’t technically true from a scientific standpoint, but it’s a good marketing ploy. Nobody wants to pay millions of dollars for an unapproved space flight.

No one cares

” In the more than 60 years of aerospace history, almost no spacecraft or rocket has stayed in this area for too long, ” said astronomer Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. .

Almost no one cares about the edge of space standards because they have never been a landmark or boundary for spaceflight. This is just a region of zero gravity that rockets or spacecraft have to go through to get into space.

Going back to the Karman line, the name is named after the Hungarian-American aerodynamicist Theodore von Karman, who is said to have been the first expert to define the edge of space in the late 1950s.

However, according to expert Thomas Gangale, Karman initially calculated the standard edge of space to be 84km, not 100km. Even this aerodynamicist did not intentionally emphasize the standard of the edge of space, but simply named the space to fly in the sky.

Then more and more people raised this standard to 100km and in the 1960s, FAI officially set a standard of 100km for the edge of space and named it the Karman line.

Astronomer McDowell thinks that maybe people took the number 100km to round or maybe experts found the earth’s atmosphere to be quite volatile so the standard shift is reasonable. No one knows why it is 100km and there is no scientific proof of the edge standard. Even the experts don’t care where the standard actually lies.

According to McDowell, the 80km standard seems more accurate because anything flying below this mark will be pulled down by Earth’s gravity. However, if this threshold is exceeded, spacecraft or satellites can fly around the earth’s orbit because the atmosphere is too thin and the gravitational force is slightly reduced.

In 2018, the FAI had intended to change the space edge standard to 80km but has not done so to this day. The reason is that governments do not care about this when defining standards will entail many international political and legal problems.

But for big men like Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson or Elon Musk, this standard is too important for the airline business. Although they cannot send customers to orbit around, they can help people experience the view of the earth from above, and at the same time carry the name “space travel”.