Virgin Galactic sends oldest-ever Brit and first mother-daughter duo into space-ish Virgin Galactic successfully launched its first-ever private commercial spaceflight on Thursday, flying three space tourists to altitudes high enough to experience zero-gravity conditions for a few minutes. The flight, dubbed Galactic '02, was boarded by Jon Goodwin, a former Olympian and slalom canoeist, who reportedly …
... those are not astronauts, and that's not a space ship.
Those are tourists riding what is in essence a Vomit Comet taken to it's illogical conclusion.
In my opinion, we should change the "been into space" meaning from "poked nose above Kármán Line" (which this group didn't quite manage) to something more along the lines of "entered stable orbit requiring engine firing to return to Earth".
The "astronaut" handle should be reserved for professionals, not tourists.
I could have predicted the gatekeeping and snobbery on here, from a bunch of people I'm farily confident have absolutely zero likelihood of ever reaching space (by any of the availbale measures).
That it's taken years for Virgin Galactic to reach this stage speaks to the technical achievement and challenge of getting up there - good for them, and what a unique experience.
It hurts absolutely no-one to call them astronauts, and only the most thin skinned, insecure person would think that the experience they have gone through detracts in the slightest from the training that other astronauts (of various flavours) have undertaken.
Should civilization survive long enough to routinely send people up to orbit and beyond without years of training, the word astronaut will become meaningless. In the period before that, why not celebrate anyone who gets further than their armchair?
It's absurd to call Beardie's self-loading freight astronauts. They didn't go into space or orbit. Real astronauts undergo months, if not years, of training and testing. They generally get work to do too. And sometimes they have to fix stuff. The passengers on this Beardie flight didn't. All they got to do was look out the window and take sefies. Their operational role in this "flight" was about the same as a passenger getting on an airliner.
Calling them astronauts is ridiculous. It does a great disservice to the people who actually are/were astronauts - Armstrong, Lovell, Shepherd, Leonov, Gagarin, etc - and fully understood the risks. [For the pedants, I know the Russians were called cosmonauts.]
I celebrate Beardie's customers for going further than their armchair and getting safely home again. That was brave. But look beyond Beardie's inevitable PR hype and bullshit. They were just passengers. In every sense of that word.
Would it be snobbery and gatekeeping if I poo-pooed you for going to the hardware store, purchasing a hammer and triumphantly proclaiming yourself a carpenter?
"That it's taken years for Virgin Galactic to reach this stage speaks to the technical achievement and challenge of getting up there - good for them, and what a unique experience."
They still haven't passed the Kármán Line with this particular bird, and neither have their passengers. It's not a spaceship, not by any stretch.
"It hurts absolutely no-one to call them astronauts"
Except actual Astronauts, many of whom have been training for a lifetime for that title. But maybe you're right ... riding an amusement park ride SHOULD allow you to call yourself whatever profession that ride is emulating. Everybody who has been on Space Mountain at Disneyland is now an astronaut!
"Should civilization survive long enough to routinely send people up to orbit and beyond without years of training, the word astronaut will become meaningless."
I categorically reject this concept. Or are you suggesting that everybody who has ever been on a flight on a 747 should be called a pilot?
"why not celebrate anyone who gets further than their armchair?"
Because going to your fridge to get another beer isn't cause for celebration[0]. Do you REALLY want a participation trophy for going to the grocery store?
[0] I hear you. Tthere ARE some people for whom that IS a cause for celebration. For the vast majority of us? Not so much.
"If I used that hammer to help create a door frame would you deny that I was doing carpentry?"
If you used that hammer just to help create one door frame, would you claim to be a carpenter?
What percentage of the work (frame design, material choice, rough opening prep, cutting raw stock to size, square and plumb, shimming, nailing, etc.) did you help with?
"Are you seriously suggesting that the only way someone can tell the difference between these people and Neil Amstrong is if we give them an approved title?"
Dude/tte, I'm not the one in favo(u)r of passing out un-earned titles. You are.
"I presume you call all women "Madam" before you're formally introduced"
I use the term "ma'am" fairly regularly for adult women who I don't know. Less of a mine-field than miss or mrs., while still being respectful. I call adult dudes "sir" for the same reason. This lingo is fairly generic around these parts, with no underlying implications. So-called "formal introductions" were put to death by the Flappers about a hundred years ago. Thankfully.
"and stand to salute the King..."
I wouldn't salute my own fucking president, much less your king. I'd shake their hand, though, while looking them right in the eye. "All men are created equal" and all that.
"So you're going to scrap the "into space" label from most of the historically famous earliest astronauts."
Sure. Why not?. An astronaut is a professional, trained to do a job. He or she is an astronaut, even if he or she never makes it into space.
"Into space is 50 or 60 miles up - "
There is still a lot of atmosphere above you at 50 or 60 miles ... You can see this for yourself; Look up "airglow".
"you don't need to be going sideways to be in space - though it helps alot if you want to stay there."
Try going sideways fast enough to stay up from speed alone, no control surfaces at 60 miles altitude above the Earth. The "orbital" speed required would be somewhere around Mach 23 (17,500mph, 28,200 kph or 0.26% of the maximum velocity of a sheep in a vacuum). If we lived in a vacuum, you could manage this. We don't live in a vacuum, though, so you'll burn up from atmospheric friction long before you make one orbit. That rather suggests you're still in the atmosphere, not in space, no?
Sea level pressure is about 100kPa
at 30km you're down to 1% of the atmosphere above you (1kPa)
at 60km you're at 2 Pa, which is ~1% of the pressure at 30Km (or 0.01% of "normal")
at 90km you take another 1%...
The US use 80km (50 miles), others 100km (60 miles).
Those are either side of 1% of 1% of 1% of "normal" pressure...
Since pressure is approximately an exponential decay the cut off is entirely arbitrary.
Karman suggested the altitude at which sufficient lift could only be achieved at orbital velocity - which makes a few of assumptions about lift efficiency - but is somewhere in the region being discussed.
If your objection is that things which experience atmospheric drag "aren't in space" then...
The ISS is at 400km, and requires regular reboosting.
The lowest orbit by an earth observation sat stands at 167.4km
Or do we look at the exosphere, which is at about half the distance to the moon, and therefore declare that only 24 people have "been to space"?
Do at least a little research before attempting a xenophobic put-down. Is it too much to ask?
1) The "50 miles up and you get your Astronaut Wings" was born of the 1950s. The "wings" were just a PR thing at a time when the US and Soviets were engaged in one-upping each other during the period known as The Cold War. That 50 mile mark stopped being important in the early 1970s or thereabouts, and virtually ignored starting before the 1980s. It was dropped completely a couple years ago (even for PR purposes and canvassing Congress, but I digress ...).
2) The internationally recognized line between atmosphere and space is set at 100km above sea level (wherever that is), and is called "the Kármán line". Like any other point on a map, this is pretty much a mixture of being arbitrary, convenient to remember, and historical. Above this point, by convention, is a "no combat zone" where all Earth-bound hostilities are ignored. In theory. Hopefully it'll stay that way.
3) However, the US Space Program thinks that is too low. Atmospheric drag is still quite high 100km up. Starting with the beginning of the Shuttle Program, they set "the edge of space" at 400,000 feet, (just about 80 miles or 120km). This is the point where control surfaces became more important than thrusters. Which actually makes some sense, when you think about it.
That's half a dozen brain cells you'll never get back. Have a beer in compensation :-)
There is no internationally recognised line between the atmosphere and space.
The Kármán line is ~84km which Kármán calculated as the altitude at which in order to generate enough lift for level flight you would need to be traveling at orbital speeds, most space organisations round to it 80km, the FAI who are an aviation sports body are the ones who round to 100km.
"The Kármán line is ~84km which Kármán calculated as the altitude at which in order to generate enough lift for level flight you would need to be traveling at orbital speeds"
Incorrect. That particular mark is actually the point that Kármán theorized was the maximum altitude for airplane flight. He didn't name what we now call " The Kármán Line", rather it was named after him and had little to do with the mark he was proposing. I rather think that if asked, he would find all this babbling nonsense quite amusing, in a perplexing sort of way.
"Egyptian-American astrophysicist Sarafina El-Badry Nance’s debut memoir, Starstruck, offers a window on what it is like growing up to be a scientist today as a woman of colour. "
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