Don't Forget Your Sunday Viewing

As a friendly reminder, Sunday morning at 6:00 AM PDT, Sir Richard Branson is planning to attempt his first suborbital flight in his VSS Unity 2, aircraft-launched vehicle.  I'm going to assume everyone knows how to convert that, but that's 7AM Mountain, 8AM Central and 9AM Eastern.  Today, the company announced that it will have a livestream, hosted by Stephen Colbert and featuring a new song by Khalid, to publicize the flight into space.

I'll link to the livestream here, but if this isn't working, try the current YouTube link.

As many of us expected, Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin appear really miffed that Sir Richard moved a test flight forward in an attempt to grab some headlines that BO thinks should rightfully be theirs.  Our coverage of the story is first here and then here.

In a pair of salty tweets on Friday, Bezos' space company, Blue Origin, took potshots at Virgin Galactic and its rocket-powered space plane. "From the beginning, New Shepard was designed to fly above the Kármán line so none of our astronauts have an asterisk next to their name," the company tweeted. "For 96% of the world’s population, space begins 100 km up at the internationally recognized Kármán line."

They tweeted this graphic. 

It's almost funny, in my admittedly eccentric view of this, that they included an ozone layer impact line in this graphic.  The impact of the two vehicles' exhaust only matters, if it matters at all, when you're talking lots of flights by both vehicles.  One flight means nothing.  

As you can see, their first argument is that Branson won't really be going into space at all.  They argue the vast majority of the world recognizes 100 km as the Kármán line, while the US had historically recognized 80 km as the entry to space.  The US Air Force awarded astronaut wings to X-15 pilots who flew above 80 km and the US FAA have said that 80 km represents space.  If anything, that distinction may be becoming less clear. 

Meanwhile the World Air Sports Federation, or FAI, uses 100 km to delineate the boundary of space for the purposes of establishing world records. However, the organization says it is looking at lowering this boundary from 100 km to 80 km, due to "recently published analyses [that] present a compelling scientific case for reduction in this altitude." This reevaluation is based partly on the scholarship of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics scientist Jonathan McDowell.

Ars Technica's space correspondent, Eric Berger, put a couple of nice summaries together.  The first is about the companies themselves: Blue Origin vs. Virgin Galactic.

This tone is strikingly smug for a rocket company that has yet to launch any people into space, nor put even a gram of payload into orbit after more than 20 years. At least Branson's other space company, Virgin Orbit, has already successfully reached orbit twice, and should soon begin to do so frequently. And just what sort of image is Bezos going for here, anyway? While he is building a $500 million super yacht, his main competitor in the space race, Elon Musk, is living in a $50,000 house in South Texas so he can be near his engineering and technical teams working on his Starship project.

Ooh, that must sting.  But I think the next line is going to sting even more. 

In the end, the tweets tell us more about Bezos than they do about his rocket—which is excellent—or of Virgin Galactic.