The Kármán Line defines “space”, you know, everything outside of Earth’s atmosphere. The line is at 100 km, or 62 miles above Mean Sea Level. The very lowest satellite is hanging out in orbit at 104 miles. The International Space Station maintains a low orbit altitude of approximately 250 miles. The moon is an average of 238,900 miles away from the surface of the Earth.
Earlier this week, Blue Origin sent Gayle King, Katy Perry, and four other women on an 11 minute ride in one of their tourist capsules to the Kármán Line. During this 11 minute ride they were weightless for approximately four minutes. The weightlessness was not because they had escaped Earth’s gravity, far from it, but rather because of the trajectory and velocity of the Blue Origin capsule.
The same weightlessness could have easily been achieved in the “Vomit Comet”, an aircraft which performs the same trajectories between 24,000 and 32,000 feet for a lot less money.
I was going to write this Blue Origin flight as just another rabid publicity stunt in this age idiotic publicity stunts, but the news keeps covering it because there’s been such a backlash about the stunt. I did not watch the event, I mean, why would I want to, but apparently Katy Perry kissed the ground like she was just returned to the Yanks after being a POW since Vietnam, and everyone on board took selfies for most of the trip. Gayle King has been defending the trip, asking the camera, “Have you been to space?”
OK Gayle, let’s calm down. You barely touched space at the upper reaches of the atmosphere, you didn’t do a damn thing but sit in or float above a seat, and honestly, what you did was absolutely no different than piling into a Waymo and taking a ride to the edge of Phoenix to go to Safeway. In fact, the Waymo ride would have been longer.
Hell, I’ve stood in line for Space Mountain longer than that gluttenous flight.
The flight this week costs millions of dollars, money that could have been used to do some great things right here on Earth. I find it incredibly insulting that everyone is now claiming these six passengers are “astronauts”*, and that it was an “all female crew”.
They weren’t a crew. They didn’t push any buttons, spin any knobs, didn’t navigate, nothing. They were cargo at best.
Claiming this idiotic flight was an all female crew is insulting to the incredible female astronauts NASA is firing from its rosters and scrubbing from its websites under the direction of the current administration.
This week’s Blue Origin flight was an example of the gluttonous tendencies of the rich, the idiocy of influencers, and the dichotomy of the American public.
You’re insulted, Gayle? I’m insulted that the news wasted space on this circus, orchestrated so Katy Perry could show off her next tour’s set list. Trying getting grounded, Gayle.
Now that I have that off my chest, I was going to link to the Wikipedia page listing all the women astronauts, however, it includes the six passengers from this Blue Origin spectacle earlier this week. While I guess they are astronauts because they ‘touched’ the Kármán Line, I find it insulting that they’re included in this list since they were simply passengers.
One woman that I will always consider an astronaut, even though she didn’t make the technicality, is teacher Christa McAuliffe, who died in the Challenger explosion in 1986. She trained for the flight, was going to conduct experiments, teach classes, and was going to be a functional member of the crew as part of the “Teacher in Space Project”.
Her participation in that fateful Space Shuttle flight was the stuff that dreams were made of during my senior year of high school. I was genuinely excited to see what Christa was going to achieve in space and incredibly saddened by the turn of events.
(image from Wikipedia)
It’s the science, not the spectacle that advances humanity to the stars. What Blue Origin did this week, under the guise of “feminism”, was nothing more than a spectacle.
*I have since learned that the term “astronaut” was modified in 2021 to include a “non-NASA vehicle as a crewmember and demonstrates activities during flight that are essential to public safety, or contribute to human space flight safety”. This is a commercial astronaut. Not the same thing, and I would hardly call the folks that flew on Blue Origin earlier this week as crewmembers. I still maintain they were cargo.
