resistanceRichard Branson will Jeff Bezos hit. Not on the list of billionaires. The gentleman of Virgin Group can no longer do that. With a meager wealth of US$5.7 billion, Branson is currently ranked 512th on the Forbes Global Rich List. Bezos, founder of digital company Amazon, is at the top of the list, with a net worth of more than US$200 billion. But Branson hopes to be the first person to enter space with his own space travel company. If all goes well, the “VSS Unity” taking off from the carrier aircraft will send him into the darkness of space this Sunday. Bezos will not board his “New Shepard” rocket until July 20. Both are suborbital flights, and passengers will only stay in space for a few minutes. But the premiere of a completely private tourist space flight will still be recorded in history. However, the question is whether Bezos will admit it if Branson strikes first.
VSS Unity reached 89.2 kilometers in the last test flight in May, but New Shepard reached 106.3 kilometers in April.This means that only Bezos’ rockets can cross the so-called 100-kilometer Carmen Line, which is regarded by many as the boundary between the Earth’s atmosphere and space, and was first launched in June 1944. Werner von Brauns Reached V2. The Hungarian-American engineer Theodore von Kármán (1881 to 1963) later proposed 100 kilometers, because at about this altitude, the air became so thin that the plane had to be like a satellite The same flight can generate lift and the altitude will rotate. But is this a meaningful universal restriction? Is it too dependent on details such as the high atmospheric density that fluctuates with solar activity?
