Sunday 11 July 2021

Virgin Astronauts, Or Are They?

After 17 years of planning and half a billion pounds spent, at 1pm today Richard Branson is launching his Virgin Galactic into Space beating his rival Jeff Bozo's who plans to launch his own spacecraft Blue Origin next week and the stats on the Virgin Galactic website are impressive.  
Galactic’s VSS Unity spacecraft will hit speeds of about Mach 3, or three times the speed of sound and will rise to about 300,000 feet, or 57 miles and future space tourism flights will cost around £200,00 a seat and will make around 36, 90 minute flights a year.
As Space tourism is about to literally take off, the interesting part is the 57 miles above the Earth the Virgin flight will reach which is below the Kármán line, which is what scientists use to define the start of outer space and that line is 62 miles up.
Jeff Bezzo's Blue Origin plans to take its passengers past the Kármán  line on its flights so we may need to look up the definition of Astronaut because if they are not actually going into 'Outer Space', are Branson's passengers just paying an obscene amount to fly really, really high and are not actually 'Astronauts'?
The Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) Sporting Code for astronautics recognises only humans who that exceed the Kármán line, at an altitude of 62 miles where 'the atmosphere becomes so thin that centrifugal force, rather than aerodynamic force, carries a significant portion of the weight
of the flight object' so according to them its a non.
In the United States though the bar is literally set a little lower because they hand out astronaut wings to   
anyone who travel above an altitude of 50 miles so in the US of A, the Virgin passengers will come back to Earth as Astronauts.
According to the USA there have been 558 people who have reached space, to the rest of the World there has been 552 people but as the Virgin launch is in New Mexico, and therefore under American Astronaut rules, they can legitimately call themselves Astronauts but they had better not come here and give it the biggie by calling themselves it because you may be Spacemen over there but over here you will just be people who paid £200,000 for a glorified plane trip. 

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