Blue Origin is taking a star-studded crew of six female passengers to the edge of space on Monday in one of the most closely watched suborbital space tourism missions in years.
The flight will last about 10 minutes — carrying the group more than 100 kilometers (62 miles) into the sky and offering a few minutes of weightlessness before they descend.
But at what point during the flight will singer Katy Perry, journalist Gayle King and their fellow passengers reach “space”?
Is it when they look outside their window and the blue glow of the sky fades to black? Is it when they reach an altitude at which satellites can orbit? Or is it when the atmosphere grows so thin that it no longer plays a defining role in the flight physics?
In the spaceflight community, there is no hard-and-fast definition.
Space can be defined in several ways, and the usefulness of the criteria for determining where it starts can depend on the scenario. That’s why various organizations around the world use different altitudes to mark that invisible threshold for recordkeeping purposes.
And for suborbital space tourism, quibbling over definitions can take on a life of its own.
Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, for example, have been known to spar publicly over the matter — mostly because of one, specific means of defining space: the Kármán line.
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/04/13/science/blue-origin-karman-line-space-mission/index.html?iid=cnn_buildContentRecirc_end_recirc